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Thomas Ligotti - Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
A curious and compelling marriage of the best of Lovecraft and Poe (with maybe a dash of Philip K. Dick's weirdness tossed in for good measure), Thomas Ligotti is an obscure horror writer whom I'd heard about for years, but never had occasion to read. Wow! This guy's stuff is amazing, but not for everyone.
Goodreads review:
A curious and compelling marriage of the best of Lovecraft and Poe (with maybe a dash of Philip K. Dick's weirdness tossed in for good measure), Thomas Ligotti is an obscure horror writer whom I'd heard about for years, but never had occasion to read. Wow! This guy's stuff is amazing, but not for everyone.
Thomas Ligotti (born July 9, 1953) is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure.[1] His writings have been noted as rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have overall been described by critics such as S.T. Joshi as works of "philosophical horror", often written as short stories and novellas and with similarities to gothic fiction.[1] The worldview espoused by Ligotti in both his fiction and non-fiction has been described as profoundly pessimistic and nihilistic.[1][2] The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."[3]
Goodreads review:
Ligotti's second collection of short tales is a considerable advance on his first. I won't deny that Songs for a Dead Dreamer contains a number of effective stories, but the collection as a whole is uneven, and many of its most powerful effects occur in stories that are not in themselves successful. This is due primarily to an immaturity of style. Ligotti was not yet capable of fashioning a world that could contain his most characteristic phantasms, and many of his personal horrors appear to be outcasts within his own creations, just as likely to shatter a story's unity as to complete it.
By Grimscribe however, Ligotti has perfected his style. He combines evocative detail with disturbing abstraction, odd lacunae with abrupt transition, making us doubt the narrator at the very moment his voice thoroughly enmeshes us in Ligotti's world.
One of the rewarding aspects of these stories is that, although they are clear tributes to the acknowledged masters of the horror genre, they are also distinctly original in the artfulness of their narratives and the bleakness of their terror.
For example, let's take the four stories contained in the first of the collection's five divisions, “The Voice of the Dreamer.” “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” dedicated to Lovecraft, not only features a distinctly Lovecraftian narrator (obsessed with clowns and suffering from an intense case of Seasonal Affective Disorder) but concludes with a subterranean climax of true cosmic horror. Its village carnival evokes Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries," and the narrator's pursuit of someone through the streets echos Poe's “The Man of the Crowd.” Yet the hopelessness of the conclusion--the sense of preordained damnation--is distinctively Ligotti. “The Spectacles in the Drawer” is a comic Poe tale that suddenly turns arbitrarily vicious, “The Flowers of the Abyss” is a dark Hawthorne romance that does not stop at individual spiritual corruption, but hints at a rankness at the very foundation of the the world, and “Nethescurial” is a Cthulhu island fantasy that does not end with creatures of cosmic horror, but pushes on until it suggests an even more terrifying menace: an essential vileness flooding forth from the interstices of our world.
Of course, some stories here are better than others. (My favorites are “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” “Nethescurial,” “In the Shadow of Another World,” “The Cocoons,” “The Night School” and “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World.”) But each story here—and, even more powerfully, the collection as a whole—although it begins in the familiar conventions of psychological horror or cosmic terror, pushes those convention to their limits until the narratives become deeply unsettling, filling us with profound metaphysical unease, a suspicion of the very nature of being, a distrust of existence itself.
Ligotti terrifies us because he makes us fear we are next to nothing. . . nothing but puppets contrived of vagrant atoms whirling in a malevolent void.
By Grimscribe however, Ligotti has perfected his style. He combines evocative detail with disturbing abstraction, odd lacunae with abrupt transition, making us doubt the narrator at the very moment his voice thoroughly enmeshes us in Ligotti's world.
One of the rewarding aspects of these stories is that, although they are clear tributes to the acknowledged masters of the horror genre, they are also distinctly original in the artfulness of their narratives and the bleakness of their terror.
For example, let's take the four stories contained in the first of the collection's five divisions, “The Voice of the Dreamer.” “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” dedicated to Lovecraft, not only features a distinctly Lovecraftian narrator (obsessed with clowns and suffering from an intense case of Seasonal Affective Disorder) but concludes with a subterranean climax of true cosmic horror. Its village carnival evokes Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries," and the narrator's pursuit of someone through the streets echos Poe's “The Man of the Crowd.” Yet the hopelessness of the conclusion--the sense of preordained damnation--is distinctively Ligotti. “The Spectacles in the Drawer” is a comic Poe tale that suddenly turns arbitrarily vicious, “The Flowers of the Abyss” is a dark Hawthorne romance that does not stop at individual spiritual corruption, but hints at a rankness at the very foundation of the the world, and “Nethescurial” is a Cthulhu island fantasy that does not end with creatures of cosmic horror, but pushes on until it suggests an even more terrifying menace: an essential vileness flooding forth from the interstices of our world.
Of course, some stories here are better than others. (My favorites are “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” “Nethescurial,” “In the Shadow of Another World,” “The Cocoons,” “The Night School” and “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World.”) But each story here—and, even more powerfully, the collection as a whole—although it begins in the familiar conventions of psychological horror or cosmic terror, pushes those convention to their limits until the narratives become deeply unsettling, filling us with profound metaphysical unease, a suspicion of the very nature of being, a distrust of existence itself.
Ligotti terrifies us because he makes us fear we are next to nothing. . . nothing but puppets contrived of vagrant atoms whirling in a malevolent void.
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