A Mirror Darkly

By Stefan Isaksson

A Mirror Darkly
Corvis Nocturnum
Dark Moon Press
142 pages
ISBN: 9781411695597

Corvis Nocturnum is back with his second book A Mirror Darkly, and it’s unfortunately quite different from his first book Embracing the Darkness that was published in 2005. This latter book was an interesting and very readable expose of alternative ways of life; people who prefer being up at night while sleeping during the day, the goth and vampire societies, bdsm, cemeteries, white make-up, and satanism. Not so this time. This book is more a description of the author’s personal philosophy of life and thought about this world we’re living in.

That Nocturnum is a Satanist and member of Church of Satan is no secret. The book is dedicated to Anton LaVey, and this man is mentioned on several occasions throughout the book, in essays more or less exclusively about him, his organization, and his ideas. He is also quoted very often indeed. This isn’t very surprising though, because Satanism – at least the version put forward by LaVey – is the major theme of the book, and in essay after essay the reader is told the importance of standing up for one’s beliefs and remain an individual in an increasingly chaotic world.

These are ideas worth mentioning again and again, but it has all been said before, and thus Nocturnum doesn’t really say things that haven’t been said many times before. Much of his writings are simply good old common sense, and if you’ve read some of LaVey’s writings before you’ll definitely see his influence in more or less every passage in the book.

It’s true that Nocturnum is a talented writer, who on top of everything else also knows how to add both sweet sarcasm and clever humor. However, I still cannot help but feeling this book was written in haste and that it could have been so much better had he only spent some more time working on it. Several of the essays, or at least parts of them, are taken from his first book, and on more than one occasion he doesn’t hesitate to use quite lengthy quotes. And already on page 102 the essay-section ends, and instead the reader is presented with a short description of the author, links to interesting websites, inspirational movies in the spirit of the book, and so on.

Of course a service such as this is something positive, since it helps the reader to further explore the topics dealt with by Nocturnum. But the entire book is not more than 142 pages long, and using as much as 40 pages, almost one third of the book, for this service feels a little too much. And using Wikipedia for the section called “Noted Individuals” is probably not a very good idea, since time and again Wikipedia has been known to contain incorrect information.

Corvis Nocturnum is a very nice and sympathetic man with whom I’d very much like to spend hours discussing things, and as he proved with Embracing the Darkness, he sure knows how to write. Still, A Mirror Darkly was a bit of a disappointment, simply because I know it could have been so much better. When talking about the absurdities of the Bible and the story about Noah’s Ark, Nocturnum writes that: “The pen is truly mightier than the sword, for it dictates who will swing the sword and in what direction.” If only the rest had been as elegantly written as this… That would have made the book a lot more interesting. Still, Nocturnum is an ambitious man, and so I cannot wait to read his next book.