Ligotti Given Short Shrift on "The All-Time Greatest Horror Writers"?

[MandyBrigwell]

Quote Originally Posted by Fenris Technique

Well, he's number #39 now so at least he's sharing company with Fritz Leiber and Arthur Machen instead of sitting below Edward Lee(?) and Douglas Clegg (?). I'll rest easier knowing that at least one internet injustice has been mildly corrected today.

The appropriate XKCD is 386; thank you, I'm here all week.

This is nothing more than a 'Have you heard of this author?' list - pay it no heed. I'm very grateful to the person who brought me to Thomas' works, or at least I would be if it weren't a single story in an apposite anthology that sent me on this delightfully dismal wending.

Ligotti is there to be read for everybody: he's in many widely-available anthologies. It's only once you're hooked that the sky-high costs become clear. This kind of ad-hoc poll is interesting, but meaningless - it'll make no-one more likely to pick up a second-hand but near-priceless Crampton. The biggest barrier to reading Ligotti is the price.

An apology: I visited the link with the best of intentions, but had to click plus for Ramsey Campbell and Poppy Z. Brite. Couldn't bear to do the dirty on them after all these years of happy horrors.

[Druidic]

This is nothing more than a 'Have you heard of this author?' list - pay it no heed.--MandyBrigwell

Words of wisdom, indeed.
The list is a joke. Many of these writers are writers of mainstream thrillers with some soap opera corn thrown in. In the case of Laymon, we get some nasty sadism. King is a writer I respect (The Running Man is a damn good book), and he's, in general at least,a writer of beach reads you don't have to be ashamed of being seen with. His short stories are enjoyable but in all honesty I've never read one of them that could compare with, say, Howard's Pigeons From Hell or even David H. Keller's The Worm. I don't think his popularity will span the decades; his tales are too much of the moment. Yet he's one of the better writers on the list.

[qcrisp]

Yeah, well, to add a comment that is basically the same as previous comments, James Herbert is ranked in this list above Robert Louis Stevenson, Shirley Jackson, and, of course, Ligotti. As a slightly reformed subjectivist, I almost hate to say it, but this is what you get when people stop believing in objective standards. I.E. this is the internet.

[Druidic]

H-G, you've stumbled on a fool proof way to demonstrate the fall in literary quality of contemporary writers.
When I was a kid, starting at the age of 8, I would buy at my local Drug Store many books by writers I didn't know, just swayed by great covers.
Let's see. Lovecraft's Cry Horror, Beaumont's The Hunger, Durrenmatt's The Pledge, Endore's Werewolf of Paris, sarban's Ringstones, Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, Jean Ray's Ghouls in my Grave, Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human...many, many more, and, honestly, I don't recall a dog.
Writers I was unfamiliar with, just going by covers.

Try that today.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I think it's a bit different today in that the covers to a lot of the bestsellers are extremely vague, rarely even featuring monsters, skulls or anything like that. Like those two Koontz covers but possibly even less visual information.
I wouldn't say they had good covers anymore, generally. Although there has been some with nice looking photographs.

[Revenant]

Is it just me or the more popular an author becomes, the plainer their covers get. Its as if they save the snappier covers for less well known (less good?) authors they are trying to promote.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

When they achieve enough success their name is supposed to do all the work.
As boring as the those super vague covers look, I respect the reasons people might want to have them. Brilliant cover images are often misleading and likely to set lots of readers up for disappointment. For a lot writers, ideally there wouldn't be any cover art, they'd rather their text did all the work. This seems to be even more the case for mainstream serious writers.
But a lot of people who love cover art see it as a companion piece, especially for music. But there's maybe no getting away from cover art being an advert.

Same goes for film posters/dvd covers. Films for a long time have mostly used bland photos where the recognisable actors are doing all the work.
There's been a lot of brilliant cover art for horror dvds recently but like a lot of horror film posters from before the 90s, it's only going set people up for disappointment with most of the films.

Honestly, I was expecting a much worse list before I clicked on it. Poe and HPL being at the top mirrors my own rankings, and whilst there are a few populist potboiler writers, most of the established masters do fairly decently. It's a popularity contest, and Ligotti remains essentially unknown outside of weird fiction aficionado circles, so it's hard to be annoyed about this. I'd have to be surprised to be annoyed.

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

The list is a joke. Many of these writers are writers of mainstream thrillers with some soap opera corn thrown in. In the case of Laymon, we get some nasty sadism. King is a writer I respect (The Running Man is a damn good book), and he's, in general at least,a writer of beach reads you don't have to be ashamed of being seen with. His short stories are enjoyable but in all honesty I've never read one of them that could compare with, say, Howard's Pigeons From Hell or even David H. Keller's The Worm. I don't think his popularity will span the decades; his tales are too much of the moment.

I think King's influence on popular culture is too immense not to go the distance, and I think his legacy is more than assured. I suppose it does bother me slightly sometimes that he's so much more famous than writers I prefer, such as Ligotti or Campbell, but as far as mainstream yarn spinners go there are really much worse writers the public have taken to. King can at least write, and I still cherish his novel It as a modern classic of horror literature.

[matt cardin]

Quote Originally Posted by James Sucellus

I suppose it does bother me slightly sometimes that he's so much more famous than writers I prefer, such as Ligotti or Campbell, but as far as mainstream yarn spinners go there are really much worse writers the public have taken to. King can at least write, and I still cherish his novel It as a modern classic of horror literature.

This. Yes. Ditto.

[Druidic]

King's influence seems to be mainly visible in novels by his 'imitators': Lovecraft's influence, on the other hand, pops up in some mighty strange places. I think that will be true of Ligotti as well; we've already seen his influence on True Detective as well as in philosophical texts and books on antinatalism. I don't think this will be true of King but I may well be wrong. I've always said King was a good writer of mainstream suspense thrillers, often with horror elements, but for all practical purposes he works in a very different genre or subgenre than Machen, Blackwood or Lovecraft. Why compare him to Lovecraft? It's like comparing Borges to Henry James: it can be done but why bother?

Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt were wildly popular in their day, not so much now. I think that may be King's fate as well. It's possible a few of his books will remain popular and I suppose The Shining is his best bet. For me, I would hope for The Running Man, an SF work that deserves to survive.

I gave up reading King a long time ago because I find his verbosity unpleasant. That doesn't mean those books are worthless.