Anyone fuck with thomas ligotti?

No, there was only a small section worth reading on his dissection of supernatural horror as a genre.

The rest is full of outlandish conclusions from premesis that don't need to be justified because we all know they're true amirite.

Also he doesn't really give any compelling reason for the pessimest to not commit suicide, or at least a very confusing reason for the pessimest to stay alive. To be fair I read it about a year ago and my memory might be a little spotty, so somebody else might be able to inform you better on that section than I.

Who the fuck is this kid and why is he so tired

That's the most world-wearied 8-year-old I've ever seen.

I like how some of his stories barely cohere in any kind of plot sense, they're more like vague impressionistic images of dread. Interesting and strangely comfy Halloween-time reading

I like current 93 so I'm a roundabout way kinda

real life high elf

The bar is pretty low desu

Poe and Lovecraft are the only other short-story horrorists the plebs have heard of

Which collection of his should I read after OP's? Are they mostly similar in style, themes?

The man only has one theme my lad, edgy traditional "dude no hope lmao" nihilism

Teatro Grotesco

You clearly haven't read it, he has two whole sections dedicated to explaining why pessimists won't kill themselves (that suicide is a massively emotional, insane response or only prompted by insurmountable circumstances that ruin how you operate/conduct your life).

His work also comes from Schophaneur and Zappfe and Buddhism, all schools of thought that are well respected.

Conspiracy Against The Human Race is as much about WHY people react so negatively to pessimism and why it isn't more mainstream as much as its about pessimism as a school of thought.

No, not really.

Songs of a Dead Dream is very varied in style, voice and story structure. Stories are told through diary entires, third person, first person and, in one story, the character is having a conversation with the "reader" as it were. In total, it comes across as Aesop's Fairytales trying to convey the ideas that CATHR does.

Grimscribe is different in that while voice and story structure are now much less varied, the pieces he works with go much deeper into his actual thoughts and ideas. Threats become more abstract but also more horrifyingly dream like and all consuming; Nethescurial, The Mystics of Muelenberg and the Dreaming of Nortown are all stories that never would have appeared in SOADD. It's a shorter collection but arguably more focused in theme because of it. What is especially interesting with Grimscribe is the posthuman perspective taken in most pieces.

Noctuary is again, different to the other two. Once again, more traditional in style and even in places quite similar to more traditional horror/lovecraftian work. However, it by far has the most content and has the excellent Miss Rinadli's Angel and The Medusa in it. There are also 19 short vingettes, ranging from 2 pages to various pages. If you have read the OPs opening and liked it, I would spring for this next.

My Work Is Not Yet Done is interesting because it follows the take of "supernatural vengeance horror" using an onryo in an American corporate context. Very easy to get into and while the first story is extremely by the books, if imaginative in HOW things are done, the other two stories are utterly bizarre and some of his weirdest stuff. Fun and a good starting point as well if the OP pic doesn't interest you.

Next, there's Teatro Grotesco. It's very experimental in style, with not many if any real HORROR stories as it were in it. Lots of weird fiction, lots of horrible things but little actual horror. Has The Red Tower in it, one of his most widely liked works and also has The Bungalow House. Stories tend to have an artistic bent and there's a lot of examination about creativity, imagination and whether its good or bad - similar to Miss Rinaldi's Angel.

Finally, you've the three weirdos of the lot. Conspiracy Against The Human Race, The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales and lastly, The Spectral Link.

I won't bore you on CATHR. You can find out tons about that. Frankenstein is interesting if you like a. gothic horror b. weird reworks/darker versions of fairytales c. the vignettes in Noctuary. THe Spectral Link is 2 stories only. Not worth it but if you DO get them, they're pretty good. There's even a Williams S. Borroughs nod in there.

I finished the first book in the penguin exhibit a few days ago, working at it since April. It felt like it was building up to something neat, and then in the third section you get (except festival of masks) a lot of sub-par lovecraft fan fiction. For all the credit he gets, maybe he knew it and it was a commentary on the horror genre, as how most movie monsters are the most boring and uninspired parts of the movies. Ligotti also apparently has chronic gastrointestinal pain, and maybe he was trying to convey the experience in written word. I'm hoping Grimscribe and Teatro Grottesco are better.

As for his actual style. Ligotti tends to use a lot of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyming and word play.

If I had to critique him, I'd say that some of his work is very limp. It's not visceral, not energetic and can be very slow paced; the most exciting story he has is probably My Work Is Not Yet Done and even that has massive diatribes about wabisabi, art and is prone to digression; at least in the first third anyway.

I think The Dreaming of Nortown and The Mystics of Muleneberg are personally, very weak (for him). The stories are great examples of what I mean; the issue is abstract, they're just sedately following one character or a town's fall into madness, the degeneration of said town/character is overtly subtle/non-existent and the climax doesn't really matter a fuck because at this point you don't care and the idea of what's happening has been so poorly explained it doesn't even fucking matter.

Of course, a lot of this is due to how Ligotti sees horror as he elaborates in OP pic; horror, to him, is a single lonely scream in a dark night. A quiet conversation between you and a person who has gone mad, where they explain to you that all along blahblah existential crisis. He doesn't see it as violent and in your face, not really and that's the best way to describe a lot of his own work.

I thought Festival was pretty boring. I get the theme of false faces, impermanence and change, I just found the reveal at the end was quite lackluster even if the language itself was great.

Journal is meh as is Sect of the Idiot; the body horror in the latter is nice but it just seems like you could have ripped out the lovecraft azathoth element and the story wouldn't even change in the slightest, with a more interesting idea being opened quite possibly.

However, Locrian's Asylum and Vastarian are some of his best work and I'm surprised you didn't like them. I also liked Music of the Moon, if only because its fun, different and is actually a little of a creature feature. Plus, I love obsession in my horror.

Spectacular post. I love Grimscribe, the entire collection is fantastic. I'll have to check out My Work Is Not Yet Done.

I'd forgotten Locrian's Asylum was in there, i did like that one too. Vastarien had some great parts to it, but there was a vagueness to *Vastarien* that put me off, and overall it felt like a necronomicon story retold by Ligotti, not having enough originality to stand out.

Great post, you convinced me to give him a try.

so, what's the 'conspiracy' then?

I think theres enough there, between the streets, the craggy houses and the rotten roads. Maybe im biased because ive seen aeron alfreys artwork of it.

Forgive the bad punctuation, im using a phone.

The conspiracy is that humans are actively and intentionally deluding themselves. They not only try to obfuscate the truth of reality for themselves but they delegitmise, rationalise and label pessimist philosphers as nutjobs. This can be seen in the often used "so why dont you kill yourself" statement that both ignores any statements made about reality but also creates an absurd idea that speculating on human existence means you have to kill yourself to be right and that by doing so, you somehow make the world more or less as you have observed it to be.

To put it in plain english, the conspiracy is that humans not only dont want to consider pessimistic theories themselves, they dont want other people to consider or discuss them either.

There is some commentary/explanation of pessimism itself but Ligotti admits that all of his ideas are derivative; he merely wants to inform about said ideas and to discuss this, as he describes it, conspiracy.

This is more existentialist rather than pessimist, isn't it?

Not really. Zappfe supposes that human nature, consicousness, is the reason we angst over human exisrence and meaningml. Because we are always aware of death, time and are constantly aware of suffering and the many thousands of ways it can be inflicted on us, being conscious predisposes us to pain and suffering.

Ligotti draws on other ideas but The Last Messiah and its four distractions are central concepts to CATHR.

I suppose you could call it existential pessimism if you wanted but the key concept is that conscious life enjoys an inherently bad reality, of negative value that just leads to pain. Comparisons to gnosticism are also present in the book and it is, by its nature, more pessimistic and cynical than Schophaneur.

He's my favorite author

>picture of the author

I fucking hate this shit.

>le wizened but rebellious old man
>penguin classics
>still alive

Fucking hate vain self-promoters.

That is one thing i like about ligotti as well. Hes autistic to the degree where theres only like one picture of him.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is probably the weakest of Ligotti's collections I've read. But OP's collection also contains my favourite (Grimscribe).

I would agree that you should move on to Teatro Grotesco after this. Or even start with it.

Wasn't a fan of My Work Is Not Yet Done. Thought it was kind of bitter and silly.

Conspiracy was pretty good but profoundly depressing. Reading it is like voluntarily catching the flu.

Spectral Link is good but only two stories (as previously mentioned).

Thought Noctuary was... meh

Well there's no standard for Penguin Classics at this point (see the Morrissey autobiography), but Ligotti is one of the few contemporary horror authors pushing the envelope to any extent and Penguin has dipped their toes into horror in the past (Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, MR James, etc)

What didn't you like about Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Noctuary?

I think they're all pretty good. Even at his worst, Ligotti is better than 99% of writers I've read.

They don't stipulate being dead do they? Just culturally significant.

...

get on that Red Tower senpai

It was many years ago that i read them, but i seem to remember noctuary being quite slight? And SOADD being quite affected / camp. I guess he was finding his voice.

I do think grimscribe and teatro grotesco are wonderful, though.

Favourite story is probably The Town Manager. Very funny. I find a lot of his stuff funny, in fact

Noctuary is the biggest book he has, what are you talking about.

And I have no idea what you mean by affected/camp. It reminds me a lot of Lolita when I read it, due to the lyrical language and attention to imagery/motifs.

According to Amazon and goodreads, noctuary is shorter than soadd, teatro and grimscribe...

As i say, it was a long time ago i read it. Maybe ill revisit. Its definitely the major work of his im least familiar with.

As for soadd... i dont really know what i mean either... again, like my work is not yet done, it just seemed a bit... silly?

I repeat though - love grimscribe and teatro. Last Feast of the Harlequin, Shadow at the Bottom of the World, Bungalow House... all great, great stories.

What are your favourites? Why?

What version of Noctuary? There's the one with the 19 vingettes and there's the one without the 19 vingettes.

My favourite stories by Ligotti? The Frolic, Nethescurial, Les Fleurs, Miss Rinaldi's Angel. I could go on for ages because to be honest, I adore half his work but if you put me on the spot, it's these four.

The Frolic; I like this story so much because it's extremely ordinary. I read My Work Is Not Yet done first, just that one story and I knew it wasn't the standard so when I went into this, I expected something WEIRD. However, The Frolic is actually a very normal piece; it's about a prison psychiatrist and his wife, both at home and discussing his day at work and moving out of the town they're in, by the state penitentiary. The main character describes his work with a patient called John Doe. Now, what's so genius about this story is that it's at the very start of SOADD so it would have been the first Ligotti story you ever read. It's...Very tame compared to others, with only hints at his theme. The reader and characters move from an ordinary, normal world to an abstract mad one as time slowly passes in the piece and, due to the set up of the story and how events unfold, we feel how the narrator feels; disgust, interest, disgust, interest and then eventually dread and soul destroying horror. It features unusual, beautiful imagery and does a good job of capturing the posthuman from a narrow human lens. It has probably, one of the few moments in literature where I genuinely felt dread towards the end of its segement. "We leave this behind in your capable hands..." The story, which starts off normal, ends on an utterly soul crushing, nightmarish note after introducing some of Ligotti's thoughts and feelings; a perfect introduction to the rest of the collection and our glimpses of a posthuman mind are then redirected at a totally posthuman narrative, which is

Les Fleus: The voice in this story is very different to the last one. First of all, its in diary format and told in past tense. The start picks up straight from where The Frolic left off; we have an uneasy, tense opening as someone mentions buying flowers and leaving them at a grave to someone. The story told in this piece is unusual for two reasons; its boy meets girl in existential horror and the boy is in fact, the existential horror. We see their romance play out, we get hints of what the boy is really like; a statue, his art, the secret garden. None of it is made obvious but it's all THERE and his fascination with love and acceptance are novel and interesting. The ending is also very, tying back to the start and just making the whole story all the more nasty and horrifying.

Nethescurial is, to me, the best piece of horror fiction ever. It discusses strange concepts, such as egregores and pandemonism, it pays a little bit of homage to Call of Cthulhu, it has extremely memorable sequences and it finishes with an impression akin to taking a mining pick to the skull.

>He really does have a unique styling but I don't know why he's always associated with Lovecraft.
Some of his more florid stories borrow a lot of Lovecraft's diction, and his narratives frequently follow Lovecraftian tropes e.g. academically-inclined man stumbles onto esoteric and horrifying knowledge about the state of the world and is consumed by horror, nameless narrator explores a disturbing and hostile town, body transformations and implied rather than depicted violence

The start of it is fairly, and intentionally, generic. A man goes to an island, pursuing an item after an invitation from a friend. It's a holy relic of some sort. He meets a man, ancient cult, blahblah. If it had been just this, Nethescurial would have started shit but the story is actually a manuscript, being reviewed by a horror fan who's writing a letter to a friend. He notes the cliches, rewards the smart ideas, openly mocks both characters and, if moved by the piece, ultimately finds it too generic. He eventually has a nightmare and then, well, I'd go on but that would deny some of the punch of the piece. It's brilliantly written, especially in contrast to Lovecraft; for Lovecraft, characters take many books and long periods of time to go crazy or uneasy. The protagonist in this reads one manuscript, sleeps one night and then he's utterly ruined and going insane. The ending is visceral, terrifying and nasty as fuck. It also addresses very Ligottiesque themes throughout and does something that Liggoti does a lot that I love; it has a colour motif.

Both Miss Rinadli's Angel and Nethescurial use dark green to identify nightmares/evil/suffering and both deal with the idea of nightmares, intrinsic suffering and isolation. However, Miss Rinaldi's Angel also uses ideas from santeria and, in contrast to most Ligotti stories, shows that being consciousless is not exactly a good thing because you get no enjoyment from life.

It, like the two before it, also has an odd set up and story. A young boy, suffering from awful, constant night terrors goes to a spiritual healer to fix him. She promises to fix him but instructs that he never feed the Mogwali after midnight OR ELSE. Eventually, like all of these, he feeds the Mogwali but only because now, he can't enjoy the repulsively attractive, attractively repulsive nightmares and thoughts he used to have. What I really like about it is both the colour motif and his self destruction; I'm a sucker for that in horror.

I could have chosen a lot of others, for various reasons; The Chymist and Drink To Me Only are both choices I was tempted to go for, as was Shadow. I however in the end, didn't because I'd have been here all day otherwise.

Anyway. Those are my "favourites". The Chymist and Drink To Me Only are great as well and I could explain why I think Essays On Supernatural Horror is also crazy good but we'd be here all night.

Do you think a lot of writers like this struggled with what might be derealization disorders? I find that skeptical/idealistic/nihilistic philosophies basically start denying absolute elements of life, leaving people more and more vague as what's going on. Taken as that, it's sometimes quite an interesting snapshot. I certainly write in an abstract way, and it's I suppose it's interesting because I see life in a very abstract manner thanks, mainly, to Soren Kierkegaard.

He has his moments.

Anyone else think he is a tad too wordy?

have any of you ligotti fans read matthew bartlett (e.g. gateways to abomination or creeping waves)? in some ways he differs quite a bit from ligotti but he is one of the only other horror authors i've read who creates that distinctive atmosphere of surreal dread that you often get in ligotti. i'm curious if anyone else sees the similarities

I think the thing is, Ligotti isn't trying to write realistically at all so it can't really be a derealization disorder; it's intentionally like that. The desired effect is to create intellectual or nightmare horror; that is, a horror sequence reminiscent of a nightmare, where the main goal is not to make the reader FEEL scared but to implant ideas that they will contemplate and think on for some time. Deeply unsettling ideas.

It's why I used the example of Aesop's Fables or fairytales earlier. Ligotti's work has the same kind of dreamy, ridiculous logic but it instead focuses on imparting his ideas, not life lessons. You can see this in story's like The Festival of Masks, Aunt Elise's Last Christmas, The Nightmare Network, I Have A Special Plan For This World and The Red Tower.

No but i will check him out. Ive had a go at a few other acclaimed contemporary horror authors (Simon Strantzas, Laird Barron, Mark Samuels) and havent thought any were on a par with ligotti. Maybe this guy will buck the trend

Thank your for the very knowledgeable post.

I bought that during the summer, never got around to it. Perhaps I'll burn through it over the winter break.

I don't understand how anyone can enjoy his stories. He's certainly talented, but he keeps falling into these little cliches he's made for himself, and literally every single one of his stories unravel towards the end - as if he loses interest after having almost finished what he's working on. Other than that, he doesn't seem to reflect enough on his ideas. His non-fiction is trash, but that's hardly his fault. Emil Cioran is trash, and anyone who rips him off will be trash, too.

thanks for the recommendation. it seems like horror authors go unmentioned here outside of Lovecraft, Ligotti, and shitposting about King.

I just want some anons to read Robert Aickman :(