Nocturnal by Scott Sigler

Generally, I’m a big fan of anything that Scott Sigler releases. His novels and short stories are top notch, but I have mixed feelings about Nocturnal. I thought the concept of the story was pretty neat—subterranean beings existing in the tunnels of San Francisco, while the police know about them and sanction the vigilante killing of them. The action sequences in the novel definitely carried it and were well done. The novel has sufficient tension and built to a nice finish, but there were areas that it was lacking.

One of the problem areas was characterization, or the lack of likeable characters. I could never quite get behind Bryan Clauser, the San Francisco detective whose life is upended by ultra vivid dreams and newfound powers as he is investigating the murders committed by these underground monsters. His partner, Pookie Chang was a weak character, who was more of a caricature than anything resembling a person, certainly unlike anyone I have ever encountered. The dialogue, especially any of Pookie’s dialogue was definitely not a strong point of the novel. The monsters in the novel were also generally poor characters with weak dialogue and often times hard to take seriously.

All in all, it was an entertaining novel, but some of the shortcomings mentioned above made it hard for me to get into it.