Because it's out-of-print (although a new edition, combined with Grimscribe: His Lives and Works , is due out in October), I paid $75 to own a copy of this-- the most I've ever spent for a book. Was it worth it? Hell yes. Did the price deter me from marking it up? Hell no; I've dog-eared and underlined like a maniac. My copy must have spent time incarcerated in a library, as it's laminated, stamped and tagged, making it look like I stole it. I like that. Now, to begin my long review of the twenty relentlessly bleak stories contained within: I'm not going to merely cite favorites or tediously attempt to argue which are better or worse than the others. I will pull a single more-or-less representative sentence out, and offer a capsule review for each of them. Right this way...-- "Less fathomable are his memories of a moonlit corridor where mirrors scream and laugh, dark peaks of some kind that won't remain still, a stairway that's 'broken' in a very strange way..."The collection starts off, appropriately, with an aggressively unsettling story about a prison psychiatrist and a singular 'patient' of his. It is straightforward and exploits one of humanity's most ancient and powerful fears. Its position, and its potency, made me think of someone who starts a fight by punching you in the throat.-- "Some stars, coloured from the most spectral part of the spectrum, blossom in the high darkness."The first in which the horror is off-stage, more implied than shown, and for that reason all the more horrifying. It's a story in diary form, with a very dark artist/sculptor narrating a romantic misadventure, with a certain fellowship of murderers playing a supporting role.-- "Since when does reading a story constitute an incantation calling up its imagery before the body's eyes and not the mind's?"The gloom thickens. This one features an aging, alcoholic children's author, haunted by visions seemingly culled from her own works. Introduces a favorite theme of Ligotti's, that of false and/or fractured identities, masks in the mirror.-- "Love and terror are the true realities, whatever the unknowable mechanics are that turn their wheels, and our own."Now we're getting more of that cosmic, metaphysical horror, dreams-within-dreams which then corrupt or poison waking life. It has another psychiatrist character seemingly being pranked by his spouse, all to prove her own exotic pet theories. As you might surmise from the title, a lot of the horror element in this one hinges on the blank, uncanny expressions of dolls or mannikins. Ever see a doll's face twitch in the dark?-- "It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it."This, to me, is the first truly terrifying story in the collection. I don't want to give anything away that might ruin the pay-off for someone else, so let's just say that at least the harmful drugs we all know about are simply destructive instead of nightmarishly-- "Death is the consummation of mortality and-- to let out a big secret-- only heightens mortal susceptibilities."Lyrical, chilling, the story of a freakishly talented hypnotist and his assistant, giving the crowd what it wants: "...thrill the daylights out of them."-- "I can take you places where the stories of tortuous romance and the storms never end."Another one that slowly builds steam for a pay-off at the climax. For a while this little S/m-themed tale might seem like just a tableau of the weird, something Chuck Palahniuk might write, if he were even more twisted, but it nevertheless turns into something with quietly uncanny horror in its heart.-- "Come home to a pain so great that it is bliss itself."I love this story, truly. It was the first Ligotti I was exposed to, when I listened to Poe's Children: The New Horror , and it was by far the best of that collection. Whether you have ambitions of writing supernatural fiction or just enjoy reading it, this is absolutely essential. In the first part he telegraphs what he's doing, misdirects you with an analysis and examples of three different styles employed by horror writers, then... well, read it yourself.-- "The colors bled into the fog and were sopped up as if by a horrible gauze which drank the blood of rainbows."Alright, so in "Alice's Last Adventure" we had Halloween make an appearance, while this one seems to be a legitimate (and successful) attempt to write a scary Christmas story. As if Christmas weren't stressful enough. It's a ghost story, too, nothing like Dickens' but a lot like... well, a lot like Ligotti. It seems to center on a ghost that can absorb memories, absorb. Need I say more?-- "I felt as if there were a chasm of infinite depth within me, a great abyss which needed to be filled-- flooded with oceans of blood."I read Dracula , read a lot of Anne Rice's stuff, listened to The Passage and its sequel, and attempted to read (DNF) Salem's Lot , but this instantly became my favorite vampire story. Calling it that immediately destroys any chance I have of describing it as "original," but believe me, it is: what happens when a vampire's pregnant, and she gives birth soon after being destroyed? What happens to the half-breed child, the child between worlds? Here's one bleak answer.-- "The dark-paned windows along either wall confused all time, bending dawns into twilights, suspending minutes in eternity."Oh, man. Getting a little more Lovecrafty now. This reads, probably intentionally, like folklore, like the dark factual heart of myths and legends. Let's just say the good doctor cures someone of insomnia, just not in the way he expected to be cured.-- "Henceforth, all things will be in your eyes a distant play of shadows that fretfully strive to impersonate something real, ghosts that clamor to pass themselves as flesh, masks that desperately flit about to conceal the stillness of the void behind them-- henceforth, all things will be reduced in your eyes to their inconsequential essence."From Lovecraft to Poe. This had so many disturbing lines, I was conflicted over which to highlight there. Suffice to say, it's about a true, cosmic,madness. "There are eyes within our eyes," and for the sake of our own sanity we should all hope they are never opened.-- "Death is always the best thing, Mr. Veech, but who would have thought you could appreciate such a view?"Possibly the most surreal piece, and that's saying something. This one recalls that whole "uncanny valley" idea which we could just as easily apply to dolls and puppets as to androids. Cheev, aka Mr. Veech, approaches Dr. Voke for help with a romantic problem, and takes regrettably little issue with the form its solution takes. This one is suitably creepy, but also has touches of a black, gallows humor in it, too.-- "And, ultimately, we must admit it: horror is more real than we are."The second set of stories concludes with this treatise, to which I'd also previously been exposed, at least in part, by reading The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . It's hard to argue with "Professor Nobody," and there are few seminars out there more relevant than this little one. Other authors may be praised for their acumen in describing human beings, fleshing out characters, but no one can beat Ligotti when it comes to describing the human condition, the nature of this woeful so-called reality we find ourselves inhabiting.-- "The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as magnificent as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, possessing that abysmal absence of mind, that infinite vacuity, which is the essence of all that is immortal."Prompt: what if the director of a sanatorium, instead of trying to cure his patients, willfully attempted to drive them even more insane? To drive theminsanity? Another ghost story, featuring the ghosts of madmen, with their eyes reflecting the perfect tranquility of the abyss, this one can haunt you... It wants to...-- "Even the infinite nights above the great roofs of the town seemed merely the uppermost level of an earthbound estate, at most a musty old attic in which the stars were useless heirlooms and the moon a dusty trunk of dreams."Evidently this was meant as an elaboration on or an extension to Lovecraft's work, another "cautionary tale" about knowledge too horrible to share space with sanity in your mind. Quite an effective one, too, if you ask me.-- "Perhaps a similar need could explain why the buildings in this district exhibit so many pointless embellishments: doors which are elaborately decorated yet will not budge in their frames; massive shutters covering blank walls behind them; enticing balconies, well-railed and promising in their views, but without any means of entrance; stairways that enter dark niches... and a dead end."So if you've ever read House of Leaves (and if you haven't, what are you waiting for?!) you'll understand just how disturbingcan be. Our minds seek the rational; they crave it. While this story isn't exactly about that, it certainly exploits it. The story is more about slippery identity again, blank faces trying to grow features, but what stuck with me were these touches of "wrong" geometry, false notes, where reality doesn't come together neatly at the edges.-- "Soon there was no space remaining for silence, or perhaps music and silence became confused, indistinguishable from each other, as colors merge into whiteness."In chess, when the center of the board is locked up, you attack on the flanks. That's what this story seemed to be: an assault from a different direction. If the previous stories weren't doing it for you, this one might. It features unearthly music as a kind of toxin, something weaponized, something that can imprison you... permanently.-- "It was those stars, I knew that now: certain of them had been promised specific parts of my body; in the darkest hours of the night, when one is unusually sensitive to such things, I could-- and still can, though just barely-- feel the force of these stars tugging away at various points, eager for the moment of my death when each of them might carry off that part of me which is theirs by right."Great, gothic, diary-form ruminations and weirdness. Answers the call (put forth in the initial, "external" part of the story) for a writer profoundly detached from typical human experience. Why not spend some time in his head?-- "For he dreamed of strange volumes that turned away from all earthly light to become lost in their own nightmares, pages that preached a nocturnal salvation, a liturgy of shadows, catechism of phantoms."I don't think I'm wrong to call this one autobiographical, to an extent. It seems to reflect Ligotti's own desire for truly weird literature, something absolutely beyond convention, a book too horrifyingly strange to read without emerging insane. And that's essentially the story-- the main character discovers a book which at first mirrors his most vividly bizarre dreams, then spawns them, then finally confines him to them. Mad world...Whew! Well it's been quite a ride, my lovelies-- my rarest book has earned my longest review. I hope you can find this at your local library... or wait until October, Halloween season, and pick yourself up a copy of the new edition. I dare you.