Review - Nocturnes

Nocturnes by John Connolly

Nocturnes is a collection of John Connolly's short stories, featuring two novellas. The first, The Cancer Cowboy Rides, is a Stephen King style tale of the shit hitting the fan in a small American town, and actually was pretty good.

It's a shame that the book started on such a high then, because I found the short stories that followed it mostly disappointing. They follow a pattern of long protracted build-ups followed by climaxes that are over too soon given the amount of time you've spent learning each character's particular foibles. A lot of the time I found I just didn't care about what happened at the end. Of the thirteen shorts in the hardback version (I'm told the paperback has an additional two or three stories in it), The Furnace Room, The Shifting of the Sands, and Miss Froom, Vampire stand out as being the best.

The book ends with another novella, The Reflecting Eye. Unfamiliar with the novels from which the protagonist is taken, I still enjoyed this story. It's told with a good voice and it avoids the pitfalls of the shorts. The chance of my reading any of Connolly's novels hasn't completely disappeared.