This is the first in a (hopefully) monthly series of columns discussing Dark Literature, it should be as idiosyncratic as the rest of Sweet Despise and will generally be based around my current reading list as well as any particular current topic that catches my interest. I will also mention any current new releases that may be of interest, for the main these will be books I haven't read yet so I will be interested on any opinions on them.
I finally finished Thomas Ligotti's The Nightmare Factory this month and you can see my comments elsewhere, and I have little more to add to those, though will say that as a collection of short fiction it is an astounding achievement. If you haven't picked it up already then do so, for you are unlikely to find many bigger bargains in a hurry. I first came across Ligotti's work in a the Best New Horror 4 anthology edited by Stephen Jones (and I think, Ramsey Campbell). It was an atmospheric piece called The Glamour about a man's visit to a strange cinema. The only other Ligotti piece I had read prior to picking up the collection was Vastarien, yet another unique work. It appeared in The New Lovecraft Circle a book of Lovecraftian/Mythos tales edited by Robert M. Price and issued by Fedogan & Bremer. Both stories appear in The Nightmare Factory as does the majority of his short fiction.
Most of the rest of my reading this month have been "classic" works, the first was J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island a slightly claustrophic novel about a car accident that leaves a man trapped in an island between intersecting roads. It begins with the wounded may trying and failing to escape before he meets the islands other inhabitants and, at first reluctantly, becomes more and more involved in their lives. It is an interesting, though quite a cold book that often borders on cruelty. The timeframe is very short yet the novel moves slowly through it and has few moments of comfort.
Eric van Lustbader's The Sunset Warrior is an unusual science fiction from the seventies, written by the author most famous for his series of martial arts psychological thrillers. The story is interesting and Lustbader creates his society quite well, a feudal eastern culture that lives beneath the ice covered surface of the Earth, though the novel moves quite slowly and suffers from too obviously being the first part of a trilogy. It does manage to come to some sort of resolution at the end though.
At first Clark Ashton Smith's Other Dimensions was a bit of a disappointment, obviously culled from the leftover stories unpublished before then by Arkham House. Though the main problem seemed to be the placing of some flawed science fiction style serials, as well as a few disappointing science fiction stories at the start, after that things picked up quite a bit. I enjoyed the short juvenile tales, mainly stories with an eastern setting, as well as some of the other science fiction and horror tales with were a big improvement over the opening ones. With a slight change of order this collection could easily have been made a lot more welcoming.
As with Gene Wolfe's other novels Nightside of the Long Sun has a great deal of exposition and spends a lot of time developing the characters and introducing the society before allowing the plot to flow forward. It was an interesting novel though, especially when things began to pick up pace, and the combination of technology and an old world style existence works well, as it did in the novels making up the four New Urth novels. This is the first part of a series of novels, so hopefully after reading the others it will be placed more into context, but for an opening book in a series it worked well.
Some recent releases that may be of interest: