Out of the early Ligotti collections, I'd say this one is the strongest. (The other two I'm counting are Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Noctuary.) Among the stories in this collection, there is not one that fails to send a shiver up the spine. However, at the risk of sounding elitist, I'd say you really have to ask yourself, "Am I ready for Ligotti?"

He is easily one the most unique authors in horror of the last 20 years, but while more conventional horror works on the shock, on getting you to check the closet for bogeymen. Ligotti, on the other hand, is engaged on a wholesale assault on both reality and horror fiction itself. If Borges had a heart of utter darkness, this is the sort of fiction he would have written. This assault is so complete yet sophisticated, that you never become fully aware of it. And then one day, you open up a more conventional horror work and find Ligotti's words ringing in the back of your head: "Ah, it's just another abstract monster of metaphysics."

Because if you spend enough time in his works, you'll find his words will colonize your brain, making you conscious of the tropes you have read before yet also investing them with a new mystery you cannot quite get a hold of.

In this particular volume, for example, it all starts innocently enough with "The Last Feast of Harlequin," one of the first pieces of fiction Ligotti ever wrote. The scholar who travels to an isolated town to learn more about an obscure seasonal rite is a common Lovecraftian trope. And "Harlequin" is one of the most powerful Lovecraft pastiches ever commited to paper. But Ligotti's just getting started.

From there we progress to "The Spectacles in the Drawer" which suggests, in its own way, that the darkest, most evil grimoires are not ancient but are, in fact, yet to be written. We proceed down a series of nightmares, including the brilliant "Nethescurial." If "Harlequin" suggests a Lovecraft tale, "Nethescurial" is the Lovecraftian tale which devours itself, then not yet satiated, turns on the narrator and the reader. (Though that distinction is a tenuous one.)

It all ends in "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World," already a rarity in being a horror story successfully told in the first-person plural. In it, a rural community is beset by a strange season. Though most of the community will escape with their lives, a darker truth will be revealed to them.

So, a brilliant collection but not for everybody. ( )