Ligotti Interviews

Vital Realities: A Conversation with Thomas Ligotti Conducted by Jon Padgett, July 2014 JP: Your two new stories are—in differing ways—both highly personal in nature. What was the genesis of “Metaphysica Morum” and “The Small People”? TL: In the flap copy for The Spectral Link, I wrote in the third person that after having two surgeries in 2012, I became “revitalized” and wrote some new stories. That’s true in a shorthand way. The intent, of course, was to provide the stories with an intriguing background and suggest that they represented a tale of minor triumph. The full details behind “The Making of The Spectral Link” are less inspiring but perhaps more intriguing with respect to the origin of the book from the same anecdotal...

PRISMO: First, could you please introduce The Conspiracy Against the Human Race to the Italian readers? Do you still think of it as a kind of “self-help” book or has your idea of it changed over the years? Thomas Ligotti: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race could be described as a nonfiction book with an almost fictional narrative that focuses on three primary themes: fear, suffering, and strangeness. Its plot, so to speak, concerns how real human beings deal with these phenomena, just as characters in horror stories must deal with them in their fictitious lives. In the manner of such characters, we begin with the fundamental assumption that the world and we ourselves are natural. At some point, however, there is the realization of...

"Human beings are the most retarded organisms on the planet" or The Incomplete Nihilist The Ligotti Outtakes - From Correspondence 06/2004 - 09/2004 By: Neddal Ayad & Thomas Ligotti [On evolution] A mistake or a fluke? A mistake would imply that there was some sort of force directing nature or evolution. Fluke is more accurate but mistake is more deprecatory, which is why I prefer it. It's also how the term is translated from the Zapffe essay. And Lovecraft attributes the existence of the human race to a "mistake or a joke" on the part of the Old Ones. Schopenhauer talks about human consciousness as the result of human beings "abusing" their brains and the Buddhists simply want to eliminate it. As for Cioran, he condemned the whole...

Thomas Ligotti as won the award for best author of horror/weird fiction from Small Press Writers and Artists Organization (SPWAO), 1982, for story "The Chymist"; Rhysling Award nomination from Science Fiction Poetry Association, 1986, for "One Thousand Painful Variations Performed Upon Divers Creatures Undergoing the Treatment of Dr. Moreau, Humanist"; World Fantasy Award nomination, 1990, for "The Last Feast of Harlequin," and 1992, for Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. World Fantasy Award Nomination, 1997, for The Nightmare Factory; Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement, novella, for "The Red Tower," 1997; Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement, story collection, for The Nightmare Factory, 1997; British Fantasy Award for best...

The version of The Conspiracy against the Human Race that was published at Thomas Ligotti Online in 2006 is going to be published in 2010 in a greatly expanded version. What prompted this expansion and revision of the original text? The more I contemplated The Conspiracy against the Human Race, the more potential it seemed to have beyond what began as more or less a series of disconnected meditations. Now it’s an integrated work that requires the reader to read from beginning to end in order to get the overarching point of the book as a vehicle for both discussing horror in life and literature and to a degree instilling a sense of horror. Hence the subtitle: “A Contrivance of Horror.” The term “conspiracy” seems to imply that there...

Ed_Bryant Hello, Ellen, hello, Thomas Ligotti; welcome all the rest of you to Flashpoint. Sorry about my delay. The usual techie weirdness (actually my own ignorance). Ligotti Good evening, Ed. Ed_Bryant So. Since we're late, I'll just say it's a genuine honor and pleasure to welcome Thomas Ligotti to Flashpoint. I doubt there's anyone present who isn't to some degree -- and maybe to a very large degree -- familiar with his work, beginning with the stories and their first compilation more than a decade ago in Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Ligotti Hey, Ed, I could ramble on about something moderately spooky that I saw today. Ed_Bryant Feel free to ramble . . . Ligotti Will do. Well, I was driving to work and had to stop for a train at a...

Part 1, March 2003: TW: Some things in your life have changed since our last interview. You've quit your job at Gale Group after two decades and you moved from Detroit to Florida. We guess you are not too fond of drastic changes in your private life, so these must have been quite big steps... How do you feel when looking back to these changes? Did things change to the better for you? TL: Human life moves in only one direction-toward disease, damage, and death. The best you can hope for is to remain stagnant or, in certain cases, return to a previous condition when things weren't as bad as they've become for you. For instance, I now work on a freelance basis for my former employer, except the sort of work that I do outside of the...

JBF: Welcome, Mr Ligotti. It's quite dark and cold in here. In fact I've a feeling that we've just stepped into the darkest area of cyberspace that anyone could ever hope to find. It's quite an eerie feeling when you think this meeting of intelligences is going to be frozen here indefinitely, that people will be viewing this interaction of our minds long after we've moved on to focus on other affairs. I suppose it's analogical of leaving footsteps in the sand, though in this case it might be more fitting to say on the dark side of the moon. One thing I've experienced for quite a few years now is a deep-rooted fear of death, and so it fascinates me that your fiction often indicates that you actually crave annihilation. It's as though an...

Literature Is Entertainment Or It it Nothing: An Interview With Thomas Ligotti By: Neddal Ayad nayad@nf.sympatico.ca (Originally appeared at Fantastic Metropolis, Oct. 31, 2004 - http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/ligotti/) Thomas Ligotti is North America’s pre-eminent writer of weird horror fiction. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies. In 1997, his collection The Nightmare Factory won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection. “The Red Tower,” a story in The Nightmare Factory, won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction. His novella “My Work Is Not Yet Done” won the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction and the 2002 International Horror Guild Award, Long Form category. His most recent...

Since the early 80s, Thomas Ligotti's brilliant, innovative fiction has been appearing prolifically in zines, story collections and anthologies. He has managed to establish a career on writing short fiction, a near impossibility these days. His work has been widely praised by writers as diverse as Poppy Z. Brite and Ramsey Campbell, and has won a number of awards including a Stoker for The Nightmare Factory. His other books include Songs of A Dead Dreamer, Noctuary, and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. The accolades are all the more impressive if you consider the eccentric, surreal nature of Ligotti's writing. His work takes places in nightmare landscapes which unsettle the reader without the use of gore, violence or traditional...

Thomas Wagner and E.M. Angerhuber Mr. Ligotti, how are you? Thomas Ligotti A simple question, but for some reason it triggers something I once read in Kafka's letters. Kafka remarked to a correspondent that his emotional state was so unstable that, as he stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs, he had no idea how he would feel when he had reached to the top of the stairs. Anyway, in answer to your question, I'm not feeling too bad at the moment. Thomas Wagner Even if you may have heard this questions several times before: what was your motive to begin writing? What was it that evoked your fascination for the horror genre - what caused you to write such stories? Thomas Ligotti Since I was a child I've had a morbid and melodramatic...

What are you currently working on, and when can we expect it in the stores? Is it more horror fiction, and short stories, or something different? I don?t have a next book. I?ve never had a next book, since I?m not a professional writer and have only written horror stories out of the usual impulses for self expression, ego gratification, escapism, and what have you. You can?t support yourself writing short horror stories, and that?s probably just as well. Horror stories were the first form of writing that I took an interest in. Writers like Lovecraft, Poe, Machen, James and Blackwood made a big impression on me in the early 1970s, so much so that when I think about writing anything I only think about it in terms of writing horror...