Selections by Thomas Ligotti

CONTENT REMOVED BY REQUEST OF AUTHOR

On September 4, Thomas Wiloch collapsed at his home and died from a probable heart attack. Among other laudatory things that could be said of Tom is that he was a great artist of the prose poem. He was in fact one of the greatest the literary world has known, even if that world did not know it. Perhaps someday it will. Tom and I worked in different departments at the same publishing company in Detroit (and later elsewhere). We first met in 1980 at a Xerox machine where I was photocopying a collection of obscure ghost stories. Tom showed up with a book by Lord Dunsany that he wanted to copy. (Both of us prodigiously abused the facilities of the company where we worked.) On the spot we became friends. Not long after, we began exchanging...

From time to time during my childhood, the striking dreams that I nightly experienced would become brutally vivid, causing me to awake screaming. [tab]The shouting done, I sank back into my bed in a state of superenervation resulting from the bodiless adventures imposed upon my slumbering self. Yet my body was surely affected by this nocturnal regimen, exercised harshly by visions both crystalline and confused. This activity, however immaterial, only served to drain my reserves of strength and in a few moments stole from me the benefits of a full night's sleep. Nevertheless, while I was deprived of the privilege of a natural rest, there may also have been some profit gained: the awful opulence of the dream, a rich and swollen world...

The Idol and the Island [tab]I HAVE UNCOVERED A RATHER WONDERFUL MANUSCRIPT, the letter began. It was an entirely fortuitous find, made during my day?s dreary labors among some of the older and more decomposed remains entombed in the library archives. If I am any judge of antique documents, and of course I am, these brittle pages date back to the closing decades of the last century. (A more precise estimate of age will follow, along with a photocopy which I fear will not do justice to the delicate, crinkly script, nor to the greenish black discoloration the ink has taken on over the years.) Unfortunately there is no indication of authorship either within the manuscript itself or in the numerous and tedious papers whose company it has...