No One Came For Me is a bleak, poetic, angsty, edgy, raw collection of short stories that the author describes as “weird and primal.” It's got six reviews on Goodreads, zero reviews on Amazon (till just today: mine), and you have to dig really, really hard to find an affordable copy of the paperback). This collection, despite its relative unknownness, is fantastic.
The author describes her work as Thomas Ligotti meets Melanie Klein (whom I’ve never read, let alone heard of—so now I want to read her works), but there are also traces of Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman. I’d have to agree—and put extra focus on the Ligotti comparison—because this definitely scratched my Ligotti itch . . . and I rarely, if ever, say that. Not about a collection, not about a novel. I’ve said it about Matt Cardin’s To Rouse Leviathan, Jon Padgett’s The Secret of Ventriloquism, and John Langan’s “Into the Darkness, Fearlessly”; and I’m also saying that about No One Came For Me . . .
. . . yet there is a bit more diversity in the style of writing and prose and genre. Not all the stories are Ligottian, like “The Door” (which is more like pulpy, 80s horror, with Lovecraftian undertones); but “The Slough Room,” which I believe is the standout story, very much so quenches my Ligottian thirst.
This doesn’t “feel” like an indie book; it “feels” like an underground book. Like those underground hip hop albums from the early 2000s: good, well-made, but raw.
Some stories are stronger than others (like all collections), and some of the dialogue in “The Door” did feel like low-hanging fruit, but I felt a consistent urge to keep on reading the next story, and the next and the next, which was always different enough from the one that came before.
It's a 5/5.
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