(artwork by the great Dave Felton)
Happy Birthday, you dear old website. You pre-date Google. You are now a whopping twenty-five years old, which is ancient for the Web.
In early 1998, I created the first
TLO website, cobbled together using stolen HTML from a William Faulkner fan website, wasn’t far behind the newsgroup. Version 1 of
TLO from early 1998 is—sadly—lost to the cyber-void. Version 2 from the fall 1998 can be found
here (at least in part), and Version 3 existed for the next five years of so and
looked like this.
I’m proud of these difficult, initial efforts. In version 1 through 3, we published a number of Ligotti stories, some for the first time.
TLO—for instance—was the first publisher of the Ligotti and Brandon Trenz penned,
original X-Files¬ screenplay, Crampton, and was the original home for Ligotti’s masterful novella,
My Work Is Not Yet Done. It has also been—for twenty-five years now—the source for (more or less) updated Ligotti-related news, a place for Ligotti readers to chat and share thoughts and ideas with each other, and—notably—a place in which Ligotti-inspired work may be shared.
TLO published Matt Cardin’s remarkable short story, “Teeth,” for the first time anywhere (in 2020 everything came full circle as
I narrated "Teeth" for two PseudoPod episodes).
About five or six years into
TLO’s twenty-five year life to date, the website had fallen into quiescence—mainly due to my challenging job and active home life. Fortunately, back in 2004, Brian Poe (aka Dr. Bantham) contacted me with a plan to revive the site. For the next nineteen years,
TLO became a thriving, vigorous community of Ligotti readers, which is what I originally intended but didn't have the know-how or time to pull off. I can never repay Brian for what he’s accomplished. We've had our ups and downs over the past two decades and more, but
TLO remains an important source of analysis and discussion of weird fiction and more, well beyond its original Ligotti-centric intent. Back in 2005, in fact, Ligotti himself wrote of
TLO, “what I like the most about the site is the idea of people who appreciate my horror stories talking about stuff that has nothing to do with my horror stories and, as we used to say in the sixties, just doing their own thing.”
Notably, 2023 is going to see several significant Ligotti-related events: 1) The Penguin Edition audiobook of
SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER AND GRIMSCRIBE drops in just sixteen days (Linda Jones and I narrate); 2) The first new Ligotti book in over a decade,
PICTURES OF APOCALYPSE, drops this March from Chiroptera Press; 3) New printings of CRAMPTON (Foreword by me) and NOCTUARY & THE SPECTRAL LINK, also from Chiroptera Press, will drop later this year. And there’s more Ligotti goodness from Cadabra Records and Grimscribe Press that I can’t talk about yet. Indeed, 2023 is a very significant year for Ligottians.
So Happy Birthday once more,
TLO. Here's to twenty-five more years of weirdness, derangement and macabre goodness. And special thanks, of course, to all of you TLOers, who continue to make this site wonderful and odd and home.
02-07-2023
Thomas Ligotti Online – 25th YEAR ANNIVERSARY!
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