All the praise Michael Griffen and his collection The Lure of Devouring Light is well deserved. These is literary-quality stories and novellas of disquieting transformation and of mankind's insignificant role in the overall scheme of the world. He has a gift for writing living, breathing characters, and at putting them through hell. I've rarely read descriptions of drug-induced visions and deprivation-induced hallucinations that drew me so fully into them that I questioned my own sobriety like his do. This book is a highly polished gemstone of blackest onyx. I cannot recommend it enough to readers of horror and the weird. ( )