Speculative Fiction Junkie

John Connolly

I picked up John Connolly's Nocturnes, a collection of two novellas and thirteen short stories, at the suggestion of Colin over at Highlander's Book Reviews, one my favorite review sites.

Mr. Connolly is best known as a writer of crime fiction but the stories that make up Nocturnes can uniformly be classified as horror or supernatural mystery pieces. In fact, they occupy the same category that Bill Hussey's Through A Glass, Darkly (review here) does and are wonderful for similar reasons. This brand of horror opts for traditional staples like demons, subtle movements in nighttime forests, rural towns with dark pasts, old dusty mansions, and the like. The result is that a sense of dread is slowly elicited from the interplay between the story and the reader's own imagination. I've always found this style to be much more terrifying and appealing than those horror stories that attempt to scare one by overwhelming the reader's senses with gore.

The specific subject matter of the stories that comprise Nocturnes is too varied to go into here, but here are a few examples: In "The Cancer Cowboy Rides," a stranger passes through a rural town spreading death by fast-growing cancer; in "Mr. Pettinger's Daemon," a minister is sent to a distant church and hears digging underneath it; in "The Wakeford Abyss," two ex-soldiers go spelunking in a cave that the nearby villagers avoid at all costs. All of the stories in the collection are good, but my least favorites would probably be "The Inkpot Monkey" and "Nocturne."

My only complaint about the book is that some of the works are too short. It seems that one of the necessary prerequisites to writing good supernatural horror fiction is having enough time and space to sufficiently create a sense of suspense. Some of the stories in Nocturnes are simply too short (in the ten page range) to allow for this.

Mr. Connolly's skills as a writer are truly breathtaking. In every way that a writer can excel, Mr. Connolly excels. In fact, I'm going to have to purchase a copy of his first novel, Every Dead Thing, and go from there.

Rating: 8/10

The True First

Nocturnes was first published in London in 2004 by Hodder & Stoughton.

[This review was not based on a review copy]