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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.0873808
EAN num: 9780843950984
ISBN number: 0843950986
Label: Leisure Books
Manufacturer: Leisure Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 326
Printing Date: 2002-10
Publishing house: Leisure Books
Sale Popularity Level: 1152744
Studio: Leisure Books
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Rated by buyers 
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this book arrived in the properpackaging for protection and was in excellent condition, yes i would recommend this company and buy from them again.
Rated by buyers 
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I love the concept of four different novellas by four prominent authors. As a fairly new reader of the horror genre, I appreciated the chance to read four stories in one volume. The very first story by Little was all right. It really feels like three short stories, however, not a novella. The very first and second parts are told in third person, while the third part is told in very first person. I found this to be jarring. Golden's story did nothing for me. I grew bored waiting for some action as his characters wallowed in soap opera drama. I found myself hoping the Viking ghosts would anniliate everyone. Piccirilli has become one of my favorite authors. Yes, he goes over the top with descriptions and details at times, but that's what I like about him. Pic seems to be fascinated with tragic heroes, flawed characters and general freakiness. David Lynch would be a good pick to bring Piccirilli's work to the big screen. Pretty gruesome near the end of the story though. That's what really made it a "horror" story for me. Lastly, the Clegg tale. I was completely drawn in by the outcast protagonists. The back story about books written by someone else years ago (the books Dash reads and becomes enthralled by) seemed so real that I caught myself assuming they were. This story created a powerful and dark ambiance that I did not necessarily enjoy, but there's no denying that it had a lasting effect. Lovecraft never fails to creep me out immensely. Clegg made me feel the same way. Overall, I liked the Clegg and Piccirilli the best and will seek out more novels by both of them.
Rated by buyers 
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As a forum to showcase the talents of four (4) horror authors, "Four Dark Nights" does nothing to encourage the reader to seek out additional works from these authors.
The book contains four novellas:
The Circle - A suburban nightmare
Pyre - Death and resurrection
Jonah Arose - The effects of sin
The Words - Monsters in the dark
Each story does have moments, but I hope these stories are not a true indication of the authors talents. Bentley Little's "The Circle" is nothing more than a very first draft writing exercise and Tom Piccirilli's "Jonah Arose" does not deliver on an interesting setting and theme (although he should get credit for being to most adventurous out of all the authors).
I did enjoy Douglas Clegg's "The Words". The story was certainly creepy and his views on the "fluidity" of darkness had me believing anything could happen once the lights had gone out.
Special mention should go to Christopher Golden who possesses the best writing in the book. "The Pyre" was a well formatted story and enjoyable to read, but he offered nothing new to the theme of resurrection.
I may try a Dougless Clegg book in the future, but as for the other authors, they just didn't do it for me.
Rated by buyers -
As you might expect from a book containing four different stories from four pretty different authors, the results are, as a whole, varied and uneven. The uniting theme that presumably links the stories is a weak and tenuous one, but as it seemed unnecessary to begin with, this does not detract from the book at all.
The very first story is "The Circle" by Bentley Little. This story is divided into three somewhat interconnected stories. I say somewhat because the very first story appears to have no relation to the second, and is only made reference to in the briefest of observations in the third story. All of the stories take place on the same average block (the titular "Circle") and the last two stories concern themselves with the same events told from different perspectives. What makes this block more or less than average is a bizarre shrine of indeterminate religious origin in the backyard of a college professor. The very first story in "The Circle" seemed like it was born out of a "Hey, wouldn't that be weird?" idea but didn't have the substance to be its own story. In any event, I thought it was pretty good despite the aforementioned lack of development... I got the feeling with some more work on the concept it maybe could've been stretched into a longer and more satisfying short story but I think it worked on its own merits as it was as well.
The second story in "The Circle" concerns itself with some of the mysteries of adulthood as viewed by a young boy and his friends, the secrets of a forbidding shrine, of getting what you want and the price you may have to pay, and of that greatest mystery of all for boys... girls. In a chilling sort of way it speaks to the fearful "alienness," anxieties, and sense of mystery many pre-adolescent males feel toward girls and the female body. Working on these fears, anxieties, and sense of mystery it features an inventive and disturbing death given the characters involved, one that Freud would likely have a field day with, but the idea sticks with you after the story is done, and reminded me of a similar death early in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods."
The concluding story of "The Circle" is a little less fantastical and more straightforward "neighborhood under siege" that reminded me somewhat of Richard Laymon's "One Rainy Night" or other works by Little himself. It's good in its own right, but has less of the twisted and the fantastic that makes the other two stories better.
All in all, "The Circle" was a good story, but the uneven way it is connected and the lack of closure to it make it seem like it was written in a hurry, and it could've been more satisfying. It's still quite good though. 7/10.
I wish I could say the same for Christopher Golden's "The Pyre." I did not like this story at all. It was all over the place, with a flashback sequence that felt shoehorned into the main text, and worse yet, totally unbelievable actions and motivations by the two main characters. Even in horror novels where characters don't act as you think they should, in a world with the supernatural, this story struck me as positively ridiculous. A young woman goes to her Dad's funeral. She's angry at him because he never treated her right (oh my, we've been this road once or twice in horror, haven't we?). She sees an old friend of hers and remembers a summer her and her friends spent together in which she saw magic and weird specters on an island. So she convinces her old friend who she hasn't seen in years to help her dig up her father's corpse and drive it a long way to the shore, then float it to the island. Why? Well, that isn't made perfectly clear. Because supernatural things happen there, maybe. And because she needs closure. If you know what ancient red-haired witches have to do with the story, and a sense of where Viking warrior ghosts fit in with bringing the father to the island, then you're already five steps ahead of the author. 3/10.
The third story, by Tom Piccirilli, entitled "Jonah Arose" is the best of the stories in this book. Now, I'm not the biggest Piccirilli fan. I like some of what he writes ("The Night Class") and quite dislike some of his other works ("Hexes"). I've never been among his rather rabid hard-core fan base that thinks everything the man has set to paper is totally above reproach. Personally, I dislike how virtually every single narrator in anything he has ever wrote is essentially the same character, the same voice. That said, I think this story is pretty great. I am a big fan of Piccirilli's fantasy South, the way he portrays the American Deep South might've been in an alternate reality Great Depression era. He jacks up the sordidness, adds in picaresque characters, hopeless freaks, sex-addled, drug-addled losers and weirdoes, with a sort of wry, macabre "Twin Peaks" sense of humour and indulgence in the bizarre. I was a big fan of it in his work "A Choir Of Ill Children" and I'm a big fan ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
I guess we have to thank (or blame, as your preference lies) Stephen King for the popularization of the horror novella, legitimizing it as a publishable format with the appearance of his 1982 collection, Different Seasons (and following later with Four Past Midnight). Novellas have yet to achieve mainstream success, per se, but at least people no longer offer up vacant expressions at the mention of the word.
Among the smaller presses, however, the novella has really taken off. Yes, they're still often used simply as the springboard to a longer, more commercially viable work, but in some houses, novellas are just as likely to be published as novels or short story collections or anthologies.
But this lead-in has little or nothing to do with Four Dark Nights, an anthology containing four novellas from authors better known for releasing full-length novels: Bentley Little, Douglas Clegg, Christopher Golden, and Tom Piccirilli -- all popular in their own horror subgenres.
How they come across in their execution of this medium-sized format depends as much on your expectations as their skill. Little's entry, "The Circle," comes very first and immediately decides to not play fair -- it is really just three separate short stories tacked together, only two of which are related. Not an auspicious beginning, but then I've often found Little short fiction lacking (see Last Pentacle of the Sun). His combined tales of a feral boy who defecates precious gems, and the strange backyard goings-on of a small town just like your own simply did not hold my interest, though Little's unassuming writing style certainly made it an otherwise easy read.
Luckily, Christopher Golden's "Pyre" is a vast improvement, or I may have just stopped there and not finished Four Dark Nights at all (as you'll discover later, that would have been a pity). A girl, stoically attending the funeral of her mostly absent father, flashes to another time when she and a group of her friends came across an island reportedly formed from the burned remains of dead bodies. This memory launches an idea that will hit her with an uncomfortable truth and change her life forever, if she can only survive the night ahead.
The main problem with "Pyre" is the pacing. Once the central action is presented, Golden and his characters take entirely too long to get where they're headed. I found myself skipping entire paragraphs of description during what were essentially travel scenes (Robert Silverberg shows how to manage this properly in The Book of Skulls). Otherwise, Golden paints a fully developed, especially in the beginning scenes, but mildly implausible portrait of a teenager dealing with confusion and lost opportunity. His history of writing for younger readers is apparent in the obvious respect he has for his characters and their needs.
"Jonah Arose" will please fans of Tom Piccirilli's Southern gothic novels A Choir of Ill Children and November Mourns, and it was the very first written of that trilogy of sorts. Piccirilli enjoys focusing on odd characters -- freaks, if you will -- and here he goes right to the source with a look at a real freak show, carnival-style, as a former child preacher and carnival geek goes in search of his kidnapped son. Surrealism is the method here, and Piccirilli plays fast and loose with "reality." We are constantly finding out that things are not what we thought they were and the author never flinches from the most disgusting of images. I often find Piccirilli a difficult read, but always a rewarding one. I just hope I never end up in his world.
Ending the anthology with a bang, Douglas Clegg's "The Words" is a real stunner. In the space of just 85 pages, Clegg creates a mythology, ages it, and sets its destiny in motion via two teenage boys, Dash and Mark, and their perhaps poorly chosen selections of reading materials. Once Dash sets the awful events in motion, only Mark can stop them, but he can't for the life of him remember the words Dash begged him not to forget. Oh, he can remember the names that started it all, but those foreign-sounding words continue to escape him. Clegg creates real tension, even during the flashback scenes used to explain the history and lead up to the present. Using the novella form to its utmost, "The Words" could be told no other way.
Of the four novellas in Four Dark Nights, Little's is the only true dud, but his fans may enjoy his particular style of storytelling anyway. Golden's is surprising (my very first work from this author), Piccirilli's is disturbing, and Clegg's is thrilling, the only true page-turner. Horror fans of all stripes will enjoy at least one of the stories told in this anthology, and fans of novellas should especially seek it out, given how rare it is for that form to make it into mass-market paperback. Leisure is just about the only one doing it, often tacking one on to a shorter novel as ... Read More
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