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12-08-2016 | #1 | |||||||||||
Town Manager
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,590
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Your First Ligotti Collection
This is a well loved book. Here's the story that goes along with it: I'd love to read your first Ligotti collection anecdotes. | |||||||||||
"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.”
—Terrence Rafferty, New York Times Book Review
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12-08-2016 | #2 | |||||||||||
Grimscribe
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,561
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
My first collection was a copy of the same paperback also in the early 1990s. Before getting this book, the first stories I'd read were Dream of a Manikin (Tales by Moonlight II) and Masquerade for a Dead Sword (in Heroic Visions II) .
I almost read SoaDD in one sitting. What a revelation! That year I bought copies for my sister and my best friend. Later, when I did my Peace Corps service in Kenya, I brought another copy (as well as paperback copies of Grimscribe and Noctuary). When I left Kenya, I left my copies behind with the hope that my (not as strictly religious) teacher friends would read them. I've lost track of how many times I've reread this book. | |||||||||||
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12-08-2016 | #3 | |||||||||||
Mystic
Join Date: Jan 2016
Posts: 190
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
While walking around The World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto in the early 90s I came upon a copy of the same paperback edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer as in your post, Dr. Locrian. I had never heard of Ligotti and wasn't all that interested in Weird Fiction, but the name of the collection was really striking to me and I spent a good half hour mulling over whether or not I'd buy it in spite of knowing absolutely nothing about it. In the end, I chose not to buy it, and when I looked for it again the next time I went to the bookstore it was gone.
A few years later I saw a copy of The Shadow at the Bottom of the World in the University of Toronto bookstore and actually bought it. I loved it. From there it was on to Teatro Grotesco and Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Now that I've become interested in working my way through all the writings of all the great Weird Fiction writers, I'm expecting very shortly to have finished reading the Ligotti stories that I still haven't gotten to. I always feel ambivalent, though, about reading a favorite author's complete works. I always like to a keep something unread by a favorite author so that there will be always be one or two last works that I can enjoy the thrill of reading for the first time at some point in the future. Euripides is one of my all-time favorite authors and I've read every play of his but one several times. I've it a point to never read his play Ion, because I always want there to be one last great Greek tragedy there for me to look forward to experiencing as something fresh and new. | |||||||||||
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12-08-2016 | #4 | |||||||||||
Grimscribe
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 647
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
Teatro Grottesco. Though technically my first encounter with Ligotti was in the way of the Nightmare Factory comics. I was looking for horror comics and had not heard of Ligotti at all. This was back in 2010-ish, and I'm a bit ashamed to say my impression of his work then was mostly "well, this isn't particularly frightening" but there was somethign alluring about his stories". However, I did not pursue it further at the time.
Then in 2012 at another forum I was pointed in the direction of Matt Cardin as an example of superb horror fiction. Cardin led me to discover Mark Samuels, and didn't take me long to see they both acknowledged Ligotti as an important influence and a must-read author. I remembered the name from the comics but figured I should try one of his actual books on the understanding that the adaptations surely left a lot of important stuff out. So I got Teatro Grottesco. Reading "Purity" that not-particularly-frightening feeling kicked in again. Before pondering if maybe Ligotti simply wasn't for me I decided to skip ahead and read "Sideshow, and other stories" on the basis that the title alone sounded intriguing. It was late at night and for some ineffable reason the climax of "the malignant matrix" really, and I mean really freaked me out. It made me stand up and turn the lights on (I was reading on the bed with only a small tablelamp on). I finished the cycle of stories that night, and made my way through the rest of book at a pace of one story per night. I realized Ligotti wasn't writing the kind of frightening horror I wanted in fiction, but rather the kind of existential dread that's a lot harder to express and to which not everyone will relate. I was hooked. | |||||||||||
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12-08-2016 | #5 | |||||||||||
Acolyte
Join Date: Jun 2016
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
I first read Teatro Grottesco and My Work is Not Yet Done when I was fifteen or so. As a youthful depressive, I found his work very enlightening. I was a fan of Lovecraft, Poe, and Kafka, and Ligotti seemed to combine their styles. He added, however, his own millitant, thorough-going pessimism. I remember reading "The Red Tower" for the first time and being stunned by its ontological perversity. Ligotti really peaked my interest in surreal and decadent literature.
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12-08-2016 | #6 | |||||||||||
Mystic
Join Date: Jan 2016
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
I was the same way with "The Red Tower". Of all of Ligotti's stories, it was the one that blew me away the most in my early reading of him. The story gave me shudders because it seemed to me -- and still seems to me --that it doesn't just rise to the level of the greatest stories of Poe and Lovecraft, but actually goes beyond them in terms of depth and literary quality and actually raises the bar for weird fiction, which is simply astonishing. I think the story needs a trigger warning or something to prepare you for the shock of its brilliance.
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12-08-2016 | #7 | |||||||||||
Acolyte
Join Date: Jun 2016
Posts: 89
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
Damn right. Ligotti's work is metaphysically poisonous. Even the Conspiracy Against the Human Race is horrifying (in fact, it may be more horrifying than any of his stories). The first time I read it, it gave me a severe panic attack.
Stories like "The Red Tower" are visionary; I would almost like to view Ligotti as a sort of mystic, some sort of secular seer aware of a horrible reality underlying our own. | |||||||||||
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12-08-2016 | #8 | |||||||||||
Grimscribe
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 2,150
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
I first discovered Ligotti through the The Nightmare Factory comics adaptation, but this one is the first collection by him I owned:
Sadly, I forgot the book back home when I last moved six months ago, so I am waiting until Christmas to get it back. | |||||||||||
Your fall should be like the fall of mountains. But I was before mountains. I was in the beginning, and shall be forever. The first and the last. The world come full circle. I am not the wheel. I am the hand that turns the wheel. I am Time, the Destroyer. I was the wind and the stars before this. Before planets. Before heaven and hell. And when all is done, I will be wind again, to blow this world as dust back into endless space. To me the coming and going of Man is as nothing.
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12-11-2016 | #9 | |||||||||||
Mystic
Join Date: Nov 2013
Posts: 135
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
Basically the same story with me, but also reading some Ligotti stories online on the computer and getting hooked | |||||||||||
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12-08-2016 | #10 | |||||||||||
Grimscribe
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 530
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Re: Your First Ligotti Collection
The English hardcover of 'Grimscribe.' I knew little of Ligotti; I pretty much bought the collection cold, taking a chance on a virtual unknown whose name seemed only vaguely familiar. I got the Lovecraft and Poe vibes right away; in fact, I felt TL was far more elegant and metaphysical than Lovecraft.
Curiously enough, I saw TL namechecked in Caitlin Kiernin's 'Silk,' as in 'Ligotti's,' the name of a gothy junk shop. I loved the novel (though I've never read anything else by her), and that served to further my interest as well. But it was 'Grimscribe,' 'Noctuary,' then all the rest. Many years later, I'm still compulsory about getting TL's publications. | |||||||||||
Put your faith in God; he won't expect you.
Put your faith in death, because it's free. If you believe in nothing, honey, it believes in you. -Robyn Hitchcock |
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