Nocturnes is a collection of supernatural novellas and stories which echoes the work of some of the masters of the genre—M.R. James, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King—while never losing the distinctive voice of the stories' creator, John Connolly. Here are lost lovers and missing children, predatory demons and vengeful ghosts. In the novella 'The Cancer Cowboy Rides,' a New Hampshire town is infected by the arrival of a tormented stranger; in 'Some Children Wander by Mistake,' a sinister circus returns to reap the fruits of seeds sown many years before; in 'The New Daughter,' a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; and in 'The Underbury Witches,' a pair of London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk.

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Finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella, 'The Reflecting Eye.' The photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mail box of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer, forcing Parker to confront the possibility that the house of John Grady is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again...