Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas, M. Wayne Miller (Illustrator)

Supernatural “Black Dogs,” UFOs, a vampire shark, parasite-infested children, and a foul-mouthed marionette from another dimension. These are just some of the dark delights to be found collection NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS by Jeffrey Thomas – the fertile imagination behind the Punktown and Letters From Hades series, and finalist for the Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell awards. Thomas demonstrates the wide range of his ability in these short stories, novellas and poems, which Godhead Dying Downwards, Thomas’ acclaimed novella, in which a 19th Century priest seeks to solve ghostly mysteries in the British countryside. The Night Swimmers, in which two brothers investigate UFO sightings in a New England forest. The Possessed, a “New Weird” style science fiction/horror novella in which three explorers utilize a strange method of traveling to a far world. Nocturnal Emissions, a novella (or collection of mini stories, if you’d rather) about imbalance, love, TV, a giant floating eye, and other enigmas – one chapter of which features pop star Walter Egan (Magnet and Steel) as its protagonist. Praise for the stories of Jeffrey "Thomas is one of the few authors who never seems to run out of new twists and turns." – Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass reviews "Jeffrey Thomas’ imagination is as twisted as it is relentless." – F. Paul Wilson, author of the Repairman Jack series "With brutal elegance and chilling subtlety, Thomas pulls his readers into his dark visions immediately from every opening line." – Paul Di Filippo, in Asimov’s "Jeffrey Thomas is a writer to watch. I just can’t put down his books once I start them." – Douglas Clegg, author of Isis "Thomas is a very good wordsmith with a fecund and detailed imagination." - Publisher’s Weekly

Genres: Horror

198 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed setting Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices from Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. Novels in that setting include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, Red Cells, and The New God. Thomas’s other short story collections include The Unnamed Country, Gods of a Nameless Country, The Endless Fall, Haunted Worlds, Worship the Night, Thirteen Specimens, Nocturnal Emissions, Doomsdays, Terror Incognita, Unholy Dimensions, AAAIIIEEE!!!, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, Carrion Men, Voices from Hades, The Return of Enoch Coffin, and Entering Gosston. His other novels include The American, Boneland, Subject 11, Letters From Hades, The Fall of Hades, The Exploded Soul, The Nought, Thought Forms, Beyond the Door, Lost in Darkness, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers.

His work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). At NecronomiCon 2024 Thomas received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to weird fiction.

Though he considers Viet Nam his second home, Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a few isolated short stories by Jeffrey Thomas before. Reading a whole collection, however, really shows up his strengths as a writer of the weird and horrific.

First of all, Thomas has range - from the traditional, old-world setting and mechanics of Godhead Dying Downwards and dystopia of Star Est Control to the weird alien world of The Possessed and the strange, nightmare world of the title story, so disconcertingly close to our own world, he evokes a series of disparate settings with telling detail.

Then there are the kinds of horror and terror he is able to draw on. Some of these stories hinge on science fictional concepts, others are supernatural; there's subtle horror, body horror and more.

But the two things that really made this collection for me were the emotional resonance and the deep vein of true weirdness.

These stories are not just empty exercises in genre; they are about people, or things that are not people but still have hopes, dreams and fears. Two of the most affecting stories here revolve around parenthood: The Host, in which a group of desperate mothers may just be arriving at a new symbiosis with the entities that have infected their children, and The Pool Of Tears, with its vivid images of the dreams of innocence being destroyed and a father's hopeless love for his estranged daughter. The Night Swimmers draws on the deep bond between two brothers, their shared experiences and the rapport they can still recreate; it is also about the sadness of adult life, of drifting into a kind of no-path of mediocrity, failure and lowered expectations; but then again it is also about a completely different perspective on alien abductions, a strangely empathetic one. Star Est Control and Nocturnal Emissions expand on this anomie of adult life, the grind of eking out a living, the bleakness of living with no emotional connection to another human being, the quiet desperation, and the way consumerism and popular media are pushed into our lives to fill those gaps.

And these stories are weird tales in a very specific manner that I consider to be the highest category of horror or dark fantasy. Like Aickman at his best, like Kiernan, Thomas knows he does not have to spell it all out for us, and that the logic of a tale that taps into the deep emotional currents and fundamental existential misgivings is a special kind of beast, one that does not need to look like logic at all. These stories are often meandering in a good way, conjuring up various minor scenes and ideas alongside what in a more normal story would be the main plot thread; they are not arrows pointed at a target as much as they are a series of probes into an inimical dimension. There are no clear-cut resolutions, and the stories deal in implication rather than revelation;and after all isn't the falling-into-place behaviour of too much fiction really a kind of confidence trick, a kind of dishonesty in the face of life's contingencies? And Thomas is too honest a writer to pretend that he can know all the answers, even in his own fictional worlds.

PS: One section of this book is a collection of poems. I enjoy poetry, and enjoyed much of these poems, but the formatting of this ebook edition was not optimal for verse, so I could not enjoy them to the fullest extent.

[GD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another crazy collection by the great Jeffrey Thomas. Jeffrey Thomas always makes me think of my favorite music. If he were Prince, this would be his Lovesexy. I think this might be the weirdest one I've read yet. This is a writer who really does defy categorization, something said about a lot of people but isn't really applicable. Off the top of my head, only Clive Barker comes close to being as hard to pin down, but JT is actually harder. There were some weird ones in here, and a chapter (a "channel") of poems. But even if you don't like poems don't worry, these rhyme and are really witty and funny.

There are nine chapters here: the poems make up one, and stories varying in length from the very short to the very long make up the rest. The main anchor here though is the final story, the title story, "Nocturnal Emissions." This is, bar none, the weirdest thing of his I've read. At first it seemed like a cross between Thomas Ligotti and cult writer Anderson Prunty, then seemed to shake off its wobbly beginning and go pure David Lynch. Even if I wanted to I don't think I could tell you what it was about and spoil it for you, but it has a suspicious medical factory that produces a weird anti-depressant that counteracts the negative effects of happening to see this giant disembodied eye that seems to appear around the world at random places and times. A foul fog comes out of the factory at nights, but the house where most of the story takes place has very high ceilings, so that the fog can come in and gather up there. There are cynical, sarcastic takes on television shows, Jeffrey Thomas-y loneliness, the hell of the corporate world, an Asian transgender, a freaky, recurring TV variety show, a weird music duo made up of a boorish tall thin guy and a super grumpy and aggressive wooden marionette that gets murdered by an offended gangsta rapper (Ice E Conditions, haaha), etc etc. I'm not making this up, it's reeeeeeeeally out there.

Unless you already know that you like Jeffery Thomas, I wouldn't recommend this book for you, it's super weird, it's like the Prince album Lovesexy. But if you DO like him, I highly recommend it, because like Prince with Lovesexy, you'll be amazed at how far his imagination runs.

[Occlith · Rating 3 out of 5]

With these tales (and poems) of the supernatural and the surreal, Jeffrey Thomas presents a book that will satisfy those who are looking for something different. As may be guessed by the title, some of the contents are adult in nature so I suggest this book for the mature reader with a sense of humor and an open mind.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love how Jefferey Thomas seems to be making me make up new shelves just to categorize his stuff in.

This isn't my favorite of his collections, but I starred it based on it's strength in the final story "Nocturnal Emissions" which I really loved and also found incredibly weird/disturbing in pretty much direct relation to each other.

[Mack Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

IT was pretty weird. I didnt really understand it.