Moth was published by Carroll & Graf in 1993, the second Lew Griffin novel and a book that pushes even further than its predecessor toward the dissolution of genre conventions. Griffin is searching for a woman named Alouette — but the search is less a detective investigation than a meditation on loss, on the impossibility of truly finding anyone, and on the way that searching for someone becomes a way of avoiding one’s own life.
Sallis’s prose is more compressed here than in The Long-Legged Fly — sentences are shorter, paragraphs briefer, the narrative more aggressively non-linear. The effect is of a consciousness under pressure: Griffin’s alcoholism, his failed relationships, and his awareness of his own mortality fragment his perception, and Sallis renders that fragmentation formally rather than merely describing it.
The New Orleans setting gains additional resonance: the city itself is a palimpsest, a place where past and present coexist physically (old buildings, jazz traditions, Creole culture persisting beneath modern commerce), and Griffin’s fragmented narrative mirrors the city’s layered temporality. Memory, in Sallis’s New Orleans, is not a faculty but an environment — something you live inside rather than something you possess.
Collecting Moth
First edition (Carroll & Graf, New York, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $8–$20