NPR Books on Thomas Ligotti's Penguin Classics Tome

[dr. locrian]

Three Horror Classics Rise From The Grave For Halloween : NPR

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Just as television played a part in Beaumont's fame, Thomas Ligotti has seen a huge boost in notoriety lately thanks to a TV show — namely HBO's dark, brooding True Detective. The show's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, came under fire during True Detective's first season last year, which some critics claimed plagiarized Ligotti's work. Before being thrust into that spotlight, the reclusive Ligotti had been a cult figure for decades. His first two collections of short stories, 1985's Songs of a Dead Dreamer and 1991's Grimscribe, have been collected into a single volume, and it not only showcases Ligotti's formidable vision, it reveals exactly why he's been such half-hidden treasure for so long. His stories aren't for the faint of heart or the rigid of mind; he warps and layers reality and language into surreal, startling shapes. Drawing from the nightmarish traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, Ligotti infuses tales such as "Flowers of the Abyss" and "The Last Feast of the Harlequin" with strangely contorted architectures, both literal and metaphorical, as he examines the outskirts of madness like an archeologist of the grotesque and absurd. There's a playfulness and humor to his work, too — perverse though it may be — in the stories "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story" and "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror." But it's "The Greater Festival of Masks" that winds up being the book's consummate Halloween story. In it, a man named Noss wanders through an unnamed town whose location in geography and history are kept eerily vague; as he ventures deeper into the village's increasingly bizarre festival, he dons a mask of his own, only to find that there's more hiding beneath it than he could ever dream. Each of these three books comes with beautiful new covers and incisive forewords by some of speculative fiction's best: Laird Barron, Jeff VanderMeer, and the late Ray Bradbury, who was a close friend of Beaumont and delivers, in typical Bradbury fashion, a remembrance of the author and his work that's both sentimental and unnerving. Taken together, these are not lightweight Halloween reads. They force us to look at our own world, and ourselves, in radically skewed ways. Ghouls, ghosts, witches, werewolves, and things that go bump in the night are in short supply in The Case Against Satan, Perchance to Dream, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe; in their place is something far more familiar, and far more frightening.

[Kevin]

So awesome.