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A review by tobin_elliott
Noctuary & the Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
I've come to the conclusion that, as much as I love Ligotti—and I truly do love Ligotti's work—I'll always be chasing, but never finding, that high I experienced with the first encounter with his weird fiction.
The works here are good, and very often great. All the hallmarks are here...the ambiguous narrators, the strange towns and the stranger goings-on in the towns, the plot elements broken up by bizarre soliloquies or monologues or observations, and a pervasive undercurrent of unease, both from the characters in the stories, and myself as the reader.
To read Ligotti is to feel like you kind of know what's going on, but you're aware of a vast amount of malevolent machinery operating just out of sight. And that, should your attention waver for even a moment, you're going to get caught in that machinery and no one will ever know what happened to you, that you simply disappeared into the malevolence.
The works here are good, and very often great. All the hallmarks are here...the ambiguous narrators, the strange towns and the stranger goings-on in the towns, the plot elements broken up by bizarre soliloquies or monologues or observations, and a pervasive undercurrent of unease, both from the characters in the stories, and myself as the reader.
To read Ligotti is to feel like you kind of know what's going on, but you're aware of a vast amount of malevolent machinery operating just out of sight. And that, should your attention waver for even a moment, you're going to get caught in that machinery and no one will ever know what happened to you, that you simply disappeared into the malevolence.