The New York Times Book Review of Ligotti's Penguin Classics Tome

[dr. locrian]

Stephen King’s ‘The Bazaar of Bad Dreams’ and More by Terrence Rafferty

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Sloane’s novels may or may not be, as King claims, “actual works of literature,” but they are at the very least uncommonly beautiful and distinctive pieces of (apologies) genre fiction. The horror stories of Thomas Ligotti, however, may be peculiar enough to qualify as “actual” literature: They clearly obey impulses that have little to do with entertainment, and sometimes feel indifferent even to story. A few years ago, Ligotti told an interviewer: “For my part, I don’t care for stories that are just stories. I feel there’s something missing from them. What’s missing for me is the presence of an author or, more precisely, an author’s consciousness.” The stories in his 1985 and 1991 collections SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER and GRIMSCRIBE, (Penguin, paper, $17), now ­reissued in a single volume, do not lack that authorial consciousness, and a frightening consciousness it is. The voices in his tales are, more often than not, those of men who expect very little of life: no spiritual meaning, certainly, no pleasure beyond the occasional sardonic chuckle, no beauty save in the grotesque and the anomalous, and no good end. They believe that “the most innocuous phenomena should eventually find their way from good dreams into bad, or from bad dreams into those that were wholly abysmal.” One character, in search of “a reality so saturated with its own presence that it had made a leap into the ­unreal,” finds in an old book “his long-sought abode of exquisite disfigurations.” He may be a madman, or he may not; Ligotti isn’t sure, so he leaves it up to us. There are powerful echoes of Lovecraft in Ligotti, both in his willing embrace of demented physical and mental landscapes and in his often ornate, ­archaic-sounding prose. Ligotti is a much more accomplished stylist, though; you can detect traces of a higher, more self-aware decadence in his manipulations of pulp hyperbole, a hint of Lautréamont in the Lovecraftian perfume. The closest thing to a conventional genre story in these collections is a creepy little item called “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” in which an academic social anthropologist — author of “The Clown Figure in American Media” — travels to the upper Midwest for an obscure local festival and stumbles onto something rather stranger than he’d anticipated, a cult of voluntary zombies. “Their ­ideal,” he writes, “was a melancholy half-existence consecrated to all the many shapes of death and dissolution.” Yes, that gives the story away, but with Ligotti that matters rather less than it would with, say, Stephen King. King, the great entertainer, needs the story as the comedian needs the joke, and when he can’t quite deliver it he dies (in the comedian’s sense). King is a master of horror, though. When inspiration fails, he has the technique to fake it. Thomas ­Ligotti is a master of a different order, practically a different species. He probably couldn’t fake it if he tried, and he never tries. He writes like horror incarnate.

[dr. locrian]

"He writes like horror incarnate" is my favorite phrase of the week.

What a review!

[matt cardin]

You keep beating me to posting these, Jon. I was literally headed over here to post a link to this one, and then a student came in and I had to do some advising for about 20 minutes. Then I got here and you had already posted.

I agree about the coolness of that line. And I just generally appreciate the reviewer's explicit comparison/contrast of King and Ligotti, which is a fruitful line of thought.

[dr. locrian]

This article is gorgeously, keenly written -- and, I believe, is the single most important and positive review of Ligotti's work yet written.

[Arthur Staaz]

It may not be in keeping with the spirit of Ligotti, but Amen!

That line about "horror incarnate" says a lot. Ligotti, actually lives the horror, with all the profound suffering that involves. He's an experienced guide to a place most people don't want to visit - even, at times, some of his biggest admirers. Because of this, for me, he has transformed literature of the horrific and absurd and left behind just about all of the writers who play in these fields.

[dr. locrian]

Another much smaller article, by Dana Jennings, which mentions Ligotti in The New York Times today:

Quote

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe By Thomas Ligotti Penguin Classics. $17. Like Poe, Kafka and Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti is at home in the abyss, in “the dank, windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar,” as he writes here in “The Frolic.” Mr. Ligotti, winner of three Bram Stoker Awards, is one of our finest writers of short horror, and this volume, reprinting his first two collections (1985, 1991), is an excellent introduction to the sustained storm of dread that is his universe. Even his titles elicit a shiver: “Drink to Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes,” “The Lost Art of Twilight,” “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World.” In the more than 30 stories here, Mr. Ligotti paints in prose as dense as a starless November night. And that’s good, because his tales aren’t so much about something, as they’re about the unsayable that lurks and writhes beneath the surface. He’s most concerned with “a double world of the fearsome, the fantastical and the inhuman,” and he wants the reader to indulge in “the lost luxury of shadows.” Together, these tales compose Mr. Ligotti’s seamless “University of Dreams,” where, as the narrator of “The Library of Byzantium” notes, “All around me invisible games had begun.”

Books of the Dead

"A version of this article appears in print on October 30, 2015, on page C35 of the New York edition with the headline: Books of the Dead and Events for the Living "

[dr. locrian]

Oh, and this is good info for those wanting to get the big Ligotti review in print this Sunday:

"A version of this review appears in print on November 1, 2015, on page BR22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Horror."

[Piranesi]

“He writes like horror incarnate” - that sentence will make for a good and true panegyric blurb on future Ligotti books now that the Penguin Classics edition of Songs and Grimscribe has made “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” obsolete.

[dr. locrian]

[teguififthzeal]

I've always wanted to hear what King thinks of Ligotti.