Grimscribe: His Lives and Works

The eponymous first-person narrator of this chilling collection assumes many different guises in spinning his eerie tales, but the voice in each of the 12 stories remains the same, a voice ``always speaking of terrible secrets.'' Witness, participant, victim, Grimscribe is, above all, our guide through a landscape at once relentlessly dark and luminously revealing, where a ``brood of dark forms'' push ``through the fog'' and ``dark bricks that bulge like tumors'' appear ``on the facades of houses.'' Prisoners of this bleak but fascinating world include a mild-mannered village schoolteacher sent in ``Flowers of the Abyss'' to discover the awful truth behind a house in which an entire family perished horribly; in ``The Cocoons'' we encounter a man trapped in a unique doctor/patient relationship who finds the treatment infinitely more agonizing than the disease; instead of the three Rs, the young boy in ``Miss Plarr'' receives from his tutor a few lessons in ``the sound of something that stings the air.'' Stylishly wrought in the best tradition of the American gothic and wonderfully reminiscent of Poe and Hawthorne, these scary stories transcend their genre. and command respect. Ligotti wrote Songs of a Dead Dreamer. (Dec.)