Nocturnal Realms, part 2

More reading for erebophiles and other appreciators of the dark

Intro

Part two, at last. Since I posted part one, we’ve adopted two cats. An older female named Rayka (pronounced “HIGH-ka”) and male kitten Milo. I’d forgotten what a handful a kitten is. Trying to proof our apartment against him has been fun. Our cabinets are crammed with all the more fragile knockable and food-ish things he might eat, so it’s a bit of a challenge to, say, extract a plate to eat from, to say nothing of defending it from him as you try to put your food on it — or as you eat it, finding it simpler to just stand while doing so instead of risking theft by sitting. Post with pics forthcoming.

Anyhow and without further ado, here are the other three darkness books, plus an honorable mention. Enjoy!

Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash.

More Literature after Dark

The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey

The mind inflates with a shapeless unease, he says. I find myself going over that phrase again, the loveliness of it, the aptness, the fact that shapeless is a word that occurs to me often lately: the shapeless dark, a shapeless fog of thought, the shapelessness of loneliness as opposed to that human shape in the doorway, the shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.

Several years ago, I decided I wanted to learn about mental illness from the inside, as it were. Ostensibly because I wanted to be able to write mentally ill characters reasonably well. Nevertheless, me being me, there was more than a touch of curiosity going on as well. So, I lined up a bunch of memoirs by people who’d gone through various mental illnesses, and the one I read about insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, became my favorite.

Booker-prize-winner Samantha Harvey spent about a year with severe insomnia. Like many things, insomnia runs a gamut from not sleeping enough, difficulty falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the night for an hour or two, and so on to being barely able to sleep, including going 40 hours or more without. This causes all sorts of things from irritability, anxiety, and inability to focus to, in more severe cases, hallucinations, physical weakness, and increased risk for all sorts of terrible stuff from heart problems to cancer.

The exhausted mind can wander into strange realms. The dark becomes amorphous and menacing. I’ve never had profound insomnia, but the ‘shapeless unease’ feels all too apt. The writing acumen that earned her the 2024 Booker prize elevate this phrase from a descriptive metaphor of the dark and isolating experience of insomnia to a discomforting and seductive immersion in the shadowy realms of the sleep-starved mind.

In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (translated by Thomas J. Harper & Edward G. Seidensticker)

As best I can tell, this books title is a literal translation of its Japanese title, 陰翳礼讃 (Romanji: inei rei san), and that title suits it well. Celebrated Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), who lived through Japan’s transition to a so-called Great Power when it came increasingly into contact and conflict with the West, explore this friction and the resulting cultural upheaval in his fiction as well as in this short monograph.

In In Praise of Shadows, he explains and explores the Japanese appreciation of shade and shadow as opposed to the Western tendency toward brightness and well-lightedness, a trend that was increasing catching on in Japan.

This engagement with the dark is found in art and architecture, techniques and traditions, at least in 1933 when Praise was published. Certainly this seems far less true when you see modern Tokyo and other great Japanese cities, whether in reality or as they’re portrayed in movies and series. (I would guess the less urban areas have bucked this trend to some extent, but that’s just a hunch on my part.)

Having Crohn’s Disease, I spent more time in and hence attention to bathrooms than average, and so his description of the traditional Japanese commode quite delighted me. My situation also made me appreciate the mere inclusion: how often have you read or watched a story where the need to relieve oneself never comes up? Inquiring bowel syndrome sufferers want to know the strategies and tactics for taking a dump in Mordor and pitching loaves in high-g.

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. Nō words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Sōseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, “a physiological delight” he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves.

Even if you aren’t a bathroom and bowel movement aficionado, there’s much to recommend in Praise. It touches on many aspects of Japanese culture, and any Nipponophile owes it to themselves to set aside some time to read this lovely work.

Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

If you’ve heard of Jeff VanderMeer, it’s most likely for his 2014 book-cum-movie Annihilation, which has its share of night and underground scenes. For me though, his first novel, published in 2003, Veniss Underground delves further and farther into the shadows of the city of Veniss and its inhabitants’ souls.

VanderMeer is one of the leading authors of the New Weird literary movement. And, like Annihilation, Veniss presents us with a world full of things whose very weirdness, inexplicability, and/or incomprehensibility makes them horrific.

As long-time readers may remember, I’m a sucker for even a decent Orpheus & Eurydice retelling, and, lo and behold, Veniss is a phantasmagoric adaptation of that ancient tale infused with a generous dollop of Dante’s Inferno and updated for our age with some mucking about with genes and the mingling man and machine.

As with Tales from the Flat Earth, this was one of those books that was so unlike anything else I’d read up to then it blew more than a little and has stuck with me ever since.

Though I’m sure I encountered it before reading this book, I remember VanderMeer’s use of the second person in part of it stroking and discomforting me. Being told about myself in the surreal, phantasmagorical underscape of Veniss absorbed me into it in way I’d never experienced.

Uneasy narrative experience notwithstanding, I fell in love with the story. I simultaneously feared and desperately wanted to explore Veniss’s caverns and grotesqueries and help or even become the ersatz Orpheus find his Eurydice.

VanderMeer has a real knack for portraying vivid characters in surreal and unsettling circumstances. If you’re not up for taking on the now five-book trilogy that Annihilation starts, but still want the vibe, give Veniss Underground a try.

Honorable Mention

But just one, since I decided the others were too tangentially related instead of directly.

Rather than write a new blurb of Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age by Clark Strand here, please read what I wrote about it in my 2025 reading round-up.