LA Review of Books: Oblivion Beckons: On Thomas Ligotti’s “Pictures of Apocalypse”

[dr. locrian]

Oblivion Beckons: On Thomas Ligotti's "Pictures of Apocalypse"�



A random snippet from this excellent review:

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His poetry in Pictures of Apocalypse is also filled with such sardonic wordplay and modernist bits of form found in his later fictions; more old-fashioned, starker ruminations, lyrical and bitter, sparser than in his early works; and severe imagery, espoused eloquently and with an unhappy beauty that is, for all its deftness, quite modest—it breathes with the elegiac ease of a final sigh, and it wastes no words. It is precise and unsmothered, at times hearking to Charles Baudelaire in the way he finds the beautiful in darkness, and many poems have the syntactical and structural nuance of microfiction, with the hint of story hovering in the fog of words. Some are mere insinuations. And some, like “Omega,” are imbued with the same succinct malaise as Don DeLillo’s paranoid work. This is some of Ligotti’s finest writing, and even if he doesn’t conjure anything that gets under your skin quite as deeply as “The Red Tower,” this work is imbued with and compelled by the same singular disquiet, the same obsessions, as his fiction.