Dancing with a Rotting Corpse

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bendk

Grimscribe
Thread Title
Dancing with a Rotting Corpse
Ligotti Criticism


I was doing a book purge from my storage unit and I came upon this older volume, Short Story Criticism Volume 16 published by Gale Research. I remember buying this ex-library book from Abebooks for about $5. I just wanted to read the criticism compiled on Ligotti. I ended up reading some of the M.R. James and Beckett stuff too. I typed up the Table of Contents just to show how the book is structured. Many of the essays reproduced on TL later appeared in The Ligotti Reader. I also typed up the review that got me to buy Songs of a Dead Dreamer at Borders back in the early 90s with the blurb "Put this volume on the shelf right between H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs." I suspected it was hyperbole. It wasn't.


Short Story Criticism Volume 16
Davis Segal, Editor
Gale Research Inc. 1994
ISBN 0-8103-8931-2


Contents

Isaac Babel 1894-1941 ................................. 1

Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 ........................... 62

T. Coraghessan Boyle 1948 - ......................... 139

Guy Davenport 1927 - ..................................... 159

Stephen Dixon 1936 - ..................................... 202

M.R. James 1862 - 1936 ................................. 220

Thomas Ligotti 1953 - ..................................... 260

Leonard Michaels 1933 - ................................. 300

Jayne Anne Phillips 1952 - ................................ 324

Nathanael West 1903 - 1940 ........................... 341





Michael Swanick (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: "Retribution and Redemption," in Book World - The Washington Post, September 30, 1990 p. 10.

[ Swanick is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and critic. In the following review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer. he commends Ligotti's elaborate narrative style. ]

Midway through Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer is a story that comes close to summarizing his art. A hypnotist with impossible "labyrinthine" eyes entertains a houseful of partygoers with illusions of surpassing beauty and strangeness. All they want, he knows, are cheap tricks, patently fraudulent death and make-believe pain. Determined to enlighten them, the hypnotist sets the revelers to dancing and flirting with his seemingly beauteous assistant, a woman only he can see is actually a resurrected and rotting corpse. The story ends at the instant he breaks the illusion and the unity of the dreadful and the sublime stands revealed.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is full of such inexplicable and alarming delights. Nothing is rationalized. More often than not the horrors are only suggested. Everything is subordinate to the main task of evoking a wondering sense of supernatural dread. It is as if each individual work were but one facet of a single darkly transcendent vision of the world.

Rubbed free of specifics of time and place, Ligotti's creations seem to float within their own private universe. The feel and language of "Masquerade of a Dead Sword," in which a Renaissance bravo is persecuted by the dark soul of the world, are not greatly different from those of "Dr. Locrian's Asylum," wherein a town must live with the legacy of authority abused. Even when Ligotti takes on the gleefully mad person of "The Chymist," the voice is unmistakably and uniquely his own.

The unique, occasionally purple prose carries a heavy load of artifice - narrative frames, stories within stories, diary entries and quotes from imaginary works. At one point in "Eye of the Lynx" experience is rendered as pages in a nonexistent book. Given this self-conscious focus, it is no surprise that several works have a writer for protagonist. "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story" is a bravura example of this, a horror story disguising itself (at first) as an essay on the craft of writing. It's a star turn, and one that ought not to work, but in Ligotti's hands it does, gracefully and effortlessly.

These stories appeared first in small press magazines with names like Nyctalops and Crypt of Cthulhu, and as a result Ligotti's strange talent has grown and blossomed far from public view. He comes before us fully developed and in peak form, the most startling and unexpected literary discovery since Clive Barker.

If there is a justification of the genre, it lies here. For this book is the pure quill, corestuff, a shot straight from the heart of horror. It is difficult to imagine someone who doesn't love the genre properly enjoying Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Put this volume on the shelf right between H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.




When I finished SOADD I felt the sincerity of "a darkly transcendent vision of the world" that ran through the stories that few books have. I agree with Michael Swanick that the image of dancing with a rotting corpse is the perfect metaphor for Ligotti's work. Ligotti is tapping us on the shoulder to awaken us to the horrible spectacle of it all.
 
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This next critique is notable for the person giving it and the early date of the review.


Book Review by Fritz Leiber
Locus #312 January 1987

Ligotti, Thomas SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER (Silver Scarab Press, $8.50, quality pb printed in Hell) 1985

SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER is at an opposite end of the creative spectrum. (Leiber is contrasting another review he did previously) Ligotti operates in a universe where the style of the horror tale is nature's law. Its special devices , ambiguities, transformations, and ironies are everywhere. What seems an essay about writing horror stories turns into an episode in psychoanalysis, then into a dream of the psychoanalyst - things like that. Endless refinements of such horror jokes as "Don't worry, he's not had an outburst of mania for six months" and "Now we're locked in for the night." A typical tale finds the narrator walking in the middle of the night, sensing he's in a strange bed in a huge chamber, and beginning to remember by patches. These stories held me.
 
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The following are some excerpts from Out-Lovecrafting Lovecraft by Peter Cannon, a review of The Nightmare Factory that appeared in Necrofile The Review of Horror Fiction Issue #23 Winter 1997.

Toward the end of his meditative essay, "Introduction: The Consolations of Horror", Ligotti points out that in Poe's masterpiece, "The Fall of the House of Usher", we the reader assume a godlike perspective and thus "are supremely removed from the maddeningly tragic viewpoint of the human". This is one of horror's consolations, even as he goes on to say it is only a fleeting illusion. As Lovecraft does at the start of Supernatural Horror in Literature, Ligotti makes a case not only for horror as an art form but for his own peculiar brand of it. The forty-five tales that follow show how Ligotti can even out-Lovecraft Lovecraft in the Promethean effort to avoid the conventionally human.
The mind that concocted these tales might well be deemed "a nightmare factory", for the bulk of them mix dream and reality and symbol in ways complex and subtle to achieve the heights of visionary horror. Plot and characterization barely exist as such, or at any rate are subordinate to an atmosphere or mood typically grim, strange, and desolate. A surrealist painter in prose, Ligotti peoples many of his dreamscapes with mannikins, dolls, puppets, marionettes, and other travesties of the human form as unsettling as the smooth faceless figures of de Chirico.
Like the best writers in the genre, Ligotti is an exacting stylist, at times austere while verging into lushness where appropriate to his theme. He chooses his metaphors carefully.

[Mr.Cannon's is not unqualified praise, though, as he cites a few stories he felt were "too ambitious in their obscurity". But he also singles out others for high praise.]

"The Sect of the Idiot" whose whispering figures with their gruesome appendages are far more convincing than Lovecraft's lurid bat-winged monsters in "The Festival". Vastarian which may or may not take off from the first three Fungi From Yuggoth sonnets but in any event delivers one of the more chilling and original twists on the forbidden book theme. Likewise "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World" evokes cosmic alienation worthy of that in "The Colour out of Space", while "Mad Night of Atonement" with its apocalyptic showman compares favorably to the fragment "Nyarlathotep".

In its timelessness and dearth of topical references Ligotti's universe resembles Poe's more than Lovecraft's. Where towns are identified they often have odd "negative" names like Nolgate and Nortown and Norland. Many characters have terse, ethnically anonymous names like Dr. Thoss and Miss Plarr, Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech, Nolon and Grissul. The last pair, from "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo", would be quite at home in a Samuel Beckett play, and indeed their comic dialogue contains more than a hint of Waiting for Godot.

[Also ]

"Teatro Grottesco", "Gas Station Carnivals", "The Bungalow House", and "The Red Tower" where "In his infernal vision of the factory with the machinery that evaporates Ligotti has uttery banned the human".

[And his favorite story is "Alice's Last Adventure"]

Established fans of Thomas Ligotti should be pleased with his latest, but it seems unlikely The Nightmare Factory will make new converts. His stories are for the most part too demanding, too arcane to appeal to the sort of readers who have made Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite commercial successes. One suspects that this reclusive genius will scarcely mind, indeed will go writing on as he always has without concession to popular taste, content like his mentors Poe and Lovecraft to remain true to his art, and like them assured of an honorable place in the pantheon of the immortals.
 
The following are excerpts from Douglas Winter's review of Grimscribe. He was one of the first to include a Ligotti story in a mass market horror anthology, Prime Evil (published in 1988)






Douglas E. Winter (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: "Scream de la Scream," in Book World - The Washington Post, February, 16, 1992, p. 9.

[Winter is an American literary and film critic best known for his studies of Stephen King and Dario Argento.]

Ligotti's long-awaited second book, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, present 13 new stories in the guise of a novel. Its eponymous narrator, like Bradbury's Illustrated Man and Clive Barker's Books of Blood, is a living library of voices - the damned, the demonic, the dreamer, among others - all interwoven in a compelling celebration of the first-person. It is a hypnotic narration; each story a singular experience, yet each turns on the other, creating what Ligotti rightly calls a "wheel of terror." These are whirlpools of words, drawing the reader ever inward to that place "where the mysteries are always new and dreams never end" - a melding of Jorge Luis Borges and Tommaso Landolfi with the pulp sensibilities of the legendary Weird Tales magazine.

The opening story, "The Last Feast of Harlequin," is archetypal Ligotti. Its unnamed narrator, a dour and dead-pan academic, travels to a remote rural village to study its quaint winter festival. That these revels disguise a perverse, primeval ritual should come as no surprise. Upon entering the warped wonderlands of Thomas Ligotti, the reader realizes very quickly that this is not a fiction of escape, but of the search for a grim epiphany, the revelation of something so vital (and, more often than not, vile) that it should have been known, yet has escaped the narrator in his pride or hope or sloth.

The story is a reinvention of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Festival," and it is that much-mythologized (and maligned) writer of weird fiction with whom Ligotti inevitably must be compared. Like Lovecraft, Ligotti weaves an oppressive web of words, working his narrator, and his readers, toward the edge of an unknowable mystery - one of such ominous power that the mere hint of it is fatal" "This is only how it seems," Ligotti tells us, "and seeming is everything." Yet he avoids Lovecraft's excesses - the pseudo-science and adjectival addiction that marred even the Lovecraftian classics - and embraces a decadent undercurrent in a manner that would no doubt have caused the gentleman from Providence to blush.

The result is a rare kind of horror fiction, one that draws its power not from violence or shock, monsters or mayhem, but from the pursuit of a vague discomfort, a lingering doubt. Ligotti's prose is eerily genteel, written in utter defiance (or ignorance) of the filmic influences that have rendered most contemporary horror fiction into splatter-prose. Vital to his aesthetic is an insistently oneiric imagery - not simply a landscape, but a language, of nightmare. For once it is the telling, and not the showing, that is the key, the stories themselves forming baroque ruins of dread and decay:

They could show themselves anywhere, if always briefly. Upon a cellar wall there might appear an ill-formed visage among the damp and fractured stones, a hideous impersonation of a face infiltrating the dark corners of our homes. Other faces, leprous masks, would arise within the grain of paneled walls or wooden floors, spying for a moment before sinking back into the knotty shadows, withdrawing below the surface. And there were so many nameless patterns that might spread themselves across the boards of an old fence or the side of a shed, engravings all tangled and wizened like a subterranean craze of roots and tendrils, an underworld riot of branching convolutions, gnarled ornamentations.

At his best moments, Ligotti succeeds with morbid brilliance; at others, like Lovecraft, he simply over-whelms the reader with words. Reading Grimscribe is at times daunting, at others annoying, yet always a vindication of the literate tale of terror - a proposition that grows increasingly unthinkable in a decade that has come to think of "horror" as the realm of vampires and violence.
 
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Thomas Wiloch (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: Review of Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, by Thomas Ligotti, in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 12, No. 4 June, 1992, pp. 16-17.

Most horror writers are content to scare their readers with whatever cliché is close at hand: a possessed child, a haunted house, a sexy vampire. But Thomas Ligotti is different. He is a dark visionary sharing a private, surreal nightmare with his readers. His stories, featuring quirky characters and mysterious mayhem, take place in the deserted back streets of a netherland where it is always an autumn night, where the shadows are alive and trembling, and where enigmatic words are spoken by eccentric doctors of possessed mannequins. Ligotti is among the most compelling horror writers of today, his lush, hallucinatory work both lyrical and truly disturbing.
His second collection, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, contains thirteen stories, including "The Last Feast of Harlequin," a World Fantasy Award nominee. It is a long, Lovecraftian tale of a scholar investigating a deadly festival of clowns. Perhaps because of its strong debt to Lovecraft, it is more conventional than the usual Ligotti tale. More typical is "Flowers of the Abyss," which is narrated by a character whose whispered words, we are informed, are carried to the reader by the wind, while "The Cocoons" tells a madly comic tale of a crazed psychiatrist and his two patients, one of whom is breeding monsters in an abandoned house.

Devotees of horror fiction will find Ligotti a welcome and exotic addition to the field, while mainstream readers may well judge him to be an entertaining writer of dark, surrealistic power.
 
Darrell Schweitzer (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: A Review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, in Aboriginal Science Fiction, November - December 1990, p.29

[ Schweitzer is an American fantasy and horror writer, editor, and critic. In the following review, he briefly surveys Ligotti's career through 1990 and commends the dreamlike imagery of his fiction. ]

So far, Thomas Ligotti has had an extraordinary career. Virtually all of his short stories - there have been no novels - have been published in the little magazines - Nyctalops, Crypt of Cthulhu, Dagon, Dark Horizons, etc. Of the nineteen items in the [1990 edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer], only one is reprinted from a professional source (Jessica Salmonson's Heroic Visions II). Even "Alice's Last Adventure," acknowledged by Douglas Winter's Prime Evil, had its origins in the non-professional press. (Which is itself extraordinary. Prime Evil featured new work from Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, and other heavies, but only Ligotti was allowed in with a reprint.) Normally this strategy would be the route to complete obscurity, but before long Ligotti was a kind of a legend, a latter-day H.P. Lovecraft who completely ignored the commercial markets in order to write his own, very unique fiction, which he would then toss away, with gentlemanly-amateurish naïveté, to any small-time editor who asked.

Sounds like the self-justification of a failed writer, right? Not in this case. It so happens that Ligotti was good and he was unique, and before long he was being praised by top writers and editors. The present collection is an expanded edition of Ligotti's first book, also entitled Songs of a Dead Dreamer, published by Silver Scarab Press in 1986 in an edition of 300 copies and already one of the great rarities of our day. (It's been called "the Outsider of the '80s," referring to the seminal, and very collectable, Lovecraft omnibus of 1939.) Despite everything, Ligott's reputation continued to grow. It works out like this once in a generation, if that often.

Now that the general public can actually read Ligott's tales, they'll find a decidedly odd writer, very different from the typical straightforward and visceral horror novelist. Ligotti is closer to Robert Aickman or Walter de la Mare than to Clive Barker, and weirder than either. His stories are best described as J.K. Potter photo collages come to life. There is relatively little in the way of ordinary plot or sympathetic, reader-identifiable characters. The prose is straightforward enough - very precise, with a normal vocabulary - but Ligotti will be for most a difficult writer, simply because it's so hard to touch down to our own experience in his stories.

But his fiction has the flavor of disturbing dreams. The images are fresh and startling. Consider, for instance, the character who takes a prostitute (literally) to heart. No explanation. These things just happen in Ligotti stories:

...But watch out for escapees. Actually she made only a single attempt. It wasn't serious, though. A drunk I passed on the sidewalk saw an arm shoot out at him from underneath my shirt, projecting chest-high at a perfect right angle from the rest of me. He staggered over, shook the hand with jolly vigor, then proceeded on his way. And I proceeded on mine, once I'd got her safely back inside her fabulous prison, a happy captive of my heat.

( "Eye of the Lynx")
 
I found this early review of TL's first book in Fantasy Review No. 92 June 1986.

Delights of the Cosmic Macabre

Ligotti, Thomas, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Silver Scarab Press [502 Elm SE, Albuqueque,NM 87102], 1985, 166p. $8.50 paper (Limited Edition: 300 copies). No ISBN.

"There is more than one way to write a horror story," notes the narrator of Thomas Ligotti's "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story." In his first collection Ligotti sets out to prove this point, ringing extravagant changes on the style and substance of the tale of terror. His purview embraces metafictional commentary ("Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror"), wry retellings of archetypal horror stories (The Excruciating Final Days of Dr. Jekyll, Englishman" ["...Hyde died days ago in an unfortunate accident of science. The man would drink anything he could get his hands on, and he was totally ignorant about chemistry!"]), enigmatic dark fables, ("The Greater Festival of Masks") and the (slightly) more traditional stories that comprise the rest of the book.
Like the elderly authoress who is subjected to a tenuous but terrifying haunting in "Alice's Last Adventure," Ligotti is "a conjurer of stylish nightmares." Working in the tradition of Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell, he eschews graphic scenes of mutilation and death for a subtler approach, writing in an experimental rather than jugular vein. Using modernist stylistic devices and an array of narrative forms, Ligotti strives to induce a sense of cosmic terror and awe rather than to horrify or revolt. Many of his stories are Lovecraftian in effect and structure, but his style is quite unlike Lovecraft's and his voice is wholly original. In some tales, such as "Les Fleurs," he fumbles, leading us not into a whirlpool of terrified awe but into a miasma of muddled quasi-mysticism. But more often than not he succeeds; stories such as "Dreams of a Mannikin, or the Third Person" or "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes" tickle our subconscious with intimations of "demonic powers lurking just beyond the threshold of sensory perception."
The wellspring of horror in Ligotti's most effective stories is the uncertainty of identity in the modern world. His tales are filled with images of frozen, shifting, or lost identity: the dolls, puppets, mannikins, and ventriloquists' dummies of "Dream of a Mannikin" and "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech"; the "missing faces" and masks of "The Greater Festival of Masks." This is an acutely relevant theme for the horror story of the eighties, and Ligotti's modernist style is perfectly suited to it. Equally appropriate are the bizarre film noir photo-illustrations by Harry O. Morris that complement this book. Ligotti is an ambitious, original, provocative writer, and his promising debut collection is well worth your attention.

-- Michael A. Morrison
 


Here are some excerpts from the article "The Ligotti Phenomenon" by Steven J. Mariconda that appeared in Necrofile Issue #4 Spring 1992.

Until recently Thomas Ligotti was the most elusive of weird fictionists. His first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, originally appeared in a 300-copy edition from Silver Scarab Press in 1986. Since then his reputation has flourished largely by word of mouth, spurred by feature issues of Crypt of Cthulhu, Dagon, and Weird Tales. It is with gratitude, and perhaps a sense of relief, that those of us who have attempted to keep up with the Ligotti phenomenon will greet these two volumes from Carroll & Graf. Having a significant amount of his work in one place is certainly better than trying to scout out appearances in small press magazines of varying obscurity. It also makes it much easier to assess Ligotti's achievement to date.

What separates Ligotti from Barker and King and puts him far ahead of most other horror writers, simply put, is his deeply felt sense of the unreal. This sense makes his stories compelling in a way that no amount of sentimentality, violence, and sex-those pillars of modern horror bestsellerism-can. His work speaks instead of an intimate familiarity with "a world that both surpasses and menaces this one", the knowledge of which evokes "a bizarre elation tainted with nausea" ("The Sect of the Idiot")

The question of Lovecraft's influence is worthy of comment. Katherine Ramsland, writing in the New York Times Book Review, disingenuously condemned Ligotti's "apparent attempt to emulate H.P. Lovecraft". This is comparable to saying that the early Lovecraft should be censured for having been influenced by Poe. Each author, however, follows his respective mentor only while adding his own unique perspective. Ramsland apparently has never read a Cthulhu Mythos pastiche, for if she had she could easily distinguish between emulation and influence. Somebody, please, send her a copy of The Watchers Out of Time...

Ligotti, Ramsland goes on, "fails to convey the threat of inescapable contamination that empowers Lovecraft's work." Again I must disagree with this assessment. In fact, I am not sure I even understand it. At his best Ligotti is resoundingly successful in convincing us that everywhere behind the common façade of life are other, sinister realms of entity more "real" than that through which we so blithely move.

What Lovecraft and Ligotti share most of all is a transcendent outlook. Ligotti reveres Lovecraft for his attempt "to convey with the greatest possible intensity a vision of the universe as a kind of enchanted nightmare." This vision is what the two writers have most in common, although, as Ramsey Campbell points out in his introduction to Songs of a Dead Dreamer, their respective terrors are of a quite different kind.

Vision alone, however, is not enough to create a fully realized weird tale. Skill in handling is critical. T.E.D. Kline, former editor of Twilight Zone Magazine, once noted that 90% of all submissions fell into only a dozen or so plot catagories. Given that the plot will be familiar, the approach will largely dictate a story's effectiveness. One false note and we become aware of the author's attempted manipulation.

Because the creation of atmosphere is key to the weird tale's success, the genre is largely a phenomenon of language. The objective is not to relate a series of causal events - to get from point A to point B - but to create a mood. Lovecraft enumerated some alternatives in his Commonplace Book: "intense, clutching, delirious horror; delicate dreamlike fantasy; realistic, scientific horror; very subtle adumbration."

Ligotti takes what might be considered the purest approach to the weird tale. It is also the riskiest. Realistic description is minimally important, and the style almost wholly carries the burden of drawing in the reader and creating atmosphere. The latter is largely a function of rhythm and imagery, which makes Ligotti's brand of weird fiction closely akin to the prose poem. This approach requires far more finesse than that needed to create a background of a workaday verisimilitude, such as we might find in King's thousand-page litanies of brand names.

The psychotic of "The Frolic", we are told, has a "poetic geography to his interior dreamland" as determined by "his repeated mentioning of "the jolly river of refuse" and "the jagged heaps in shadows"...[of] a moonlit corridor where mirrors scream and laugh, dark peaks of some kind that won't remain still, [and] a stairway that's 'broken' in a very strange way." Thus Ligotti begins to cultivate his own poetic geography, the bizarre imagery that threads through his entire body of work.

In his recent study, The Weird Tale, S.T. Joshi argues that the work of the exceptional weird writer must be pervaded by a distinctive world view. This criterion Ligotti easily meets: his outlook is consistently manifest in these stories. They reflect a belief (as expressed in "Vastarian") that "the only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world" There is an order of existence which is entirely strange to human beings, he writes in "The Journal of J.P. Drapeau": the strict order of the world is only a semblance."

Ligotti's "hallucinatory view of creation" puts his work as much in the tradition of Gogol, Kafka, and Borges as in that of Machen, Blackwood, and Klein. His stories hardly seem set in any historical time period, and he is blatantly uninterested in creating a suspension of disbelief. We are welcomed into his fictional domain only upon tacit agreement that "things are not what they seem... we are forever reminded of this...[and] enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing." ("The Mystics of Muelenburg").
 
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz is an acknowledged authority on macabre fiction. He is also an editor and anthologist of many books of horror stories. An early admirer of Ligotti's work, he wrote the essay "Nothing is What It Seems to Be" that was originally published in Dagon No. 22/23 Thomas Ligotti Special Double Issue in 1988, and later reprinted in The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations in 2003.
He is the person that S.T. Joshi largely credits with encouraging him to reexamine Ligotti's work that he initially dismissed as Lovecraftian fan fiction.

Some excerpts from an article that appeared in Tekeli-Li No. 4 1992.

Anecdotes of Some Obscure Hell: An Appreciation of Thomas Ligotti
by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

In a genre driven for the past two decades by the novel-length story, Ligotti has elected to write only short fiction, and staunchly defends the short weird tale as the best representative of a literature "which traffics in characters and incidents of an extravagant type which properly should only turn up in poetry, a genre whose stylistic and structural artificiality best accommodates the artificial, unreal subjects of the supernatural"
Heedless of conventional storytelling strategy, he avoids the embedding of weird events in otherwise naturalistic narratives that defines so much contemporary horror, and the creation of sympathetic characters and a recognizable world that such narrative strategies entail. Where most modern horror fiction seeks to manifest contemporary fears and concerns through metaphoric use of the supernatural, Ligotti deliberately avoids writing fiction that reflects the time or culture in which it was produced. The aim of his fiction is much broader: to try and capture those moments at which characters are forcibly divested of their belief in an ordered pattern of reality and the security of their position within that reality. This might be called the essence of the weird tale, the casting of doubt on the validity of our interpretation of what is considered "natural," the better to confuse our understanding of what is "supernatural." In Ligotti's fiction, distinctions between natural and supernatural are revealed as meaningless and ultimately futile. Ligotti offers a vision of existence in which characters discover their myopic perspectives have prevented them from apprehending truths which would have drastically altered their world view. The consequences of such shortsightedness are, invariably, madness and even worse fates left undescribed.
Unlike H.P. Lovecraft whose influence upon his fiction is evident but not overwhelming, Ligotti has not had to contrive a pantheon of inhuman entities to seve as disruptive counterpoint to perceived reality. Rather, he uses basic tools of storytelling craft - character, setting, mood - to dismantle the certainties of the world of his stories from within, even as he appears to be laying a solid foundation for the telling of the tale.
character
The setting of Ligotti's stories are always ill-defined. Lost in the backwash of some nameless town, they strike one as abstract representations of the shadowy places one encounters in the urban horror stories of Ramsey Campbell.
It would give the wrong impression that because Ligotti's characters and settings do not hew to some common standard of normality his stories are afflicted with the arbitrary occurrence of marvels that one associates with light fantasy. To the contrary, his characters and their milieu conspire to create a convincing atmosphere of nightmare that resonates from the page. The events that occur, and the fates that befall his characters, cannot be explained any more than can the progression of events in a bad dream - but they feel as correct (or at least, not incorrect) for the environments in which they occur as do experiences in nightmares. So it is that Ligotti's fiction has the same power to disturb as a nightmare.
Whether his stories actually involve dreams, or told in the manner of a dream, where the façade of surfaces is peeled back to show what happens when a collective delusion of reality breaks down, they disturb through their ability to suggest another reality as valid as our own, that may lie so closely just above or below our own that it would be arrogant to presume the superiority in the one we subscribe to.
This technique for suggesting an alternate reality that is metaphysically correct at the same time it is conceptually awesome - and often abhorrent - is what makes Ligotti's work as much akin to the so-called magic realism of Jorge Luis Borges, and the eerie surrealism that permeates the writing of Bruno Schulz and Stefan Grabinski, as to the writings of the horror authors with whom he is most closely associated: H.P. Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell. In his writing one sees how this approach can transform even the most familiar of horror scenarios into a tale with profoundly original insights.
His stories approach their themes from such unconventional angles that one would be hard pressed to categorize thematically, rather than only with the other offerings from Ligotti's pen. This describes in part the mystique of Ligotti's fiction: it is proof that originality is still possible within the horror genre, but that such originality is possibly largely by attending to basics, and asking how they can be crafted into fictions that disturb.
 
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Nothing insightful about this review in my opinion. In fact, I disagree with it in a few respects. But it is by a notable author, so for those curious, here it is.

Grimscribe
His Lives and Works.
By Thomas Ligotti
Carroll & Graf, $18.95.


If there were a literary genre called "philosophical horror," Thomas Ligotti's second collection of short fiction would easily fit within it. "If things are not what they seem," he writes, "then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing." But while Mr. Ligotti offers interesting and original ideas, his work is hampered by an apparent attempt to emulate H.P. Lovecraft. He includes the right elements: the rational first-person voice, the bizarre mentors, the unnamable evils and the alien realities. Yet despite the obvious parallels, he fails to convey the threat of inescapable contamination that empowers Lovecraft's work. Mr. Ligotti's protagonists survive with their sanity too much intact, as if the author declined to push himself to the edge where the most potent horror begins. Nevertheless, he makes up for this with provocative images and a style that is both entertaining and lyrical.

Katherine Ramsland

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
January 12, 1992


---------------------------

Katherine Ramsland (born 1953) is an American non-fiction author and professor of forensic psychology. Ramsland has written 60 books and more than 1,000 articles, mostly in the genres of crime, forensic science, and the supernatural.
 
This book review appeared in the fanzine Paperback Inferno 66 (1987)


Thomas Ligotti ---- SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER
(Silver Scarab Press, 1985, 166pp. $8 = $4 p&p -
from 502 Elm S.E. , Albuquerque, N.M. 87102,
U.S.A.)

(Reviewed by Mark Valentine)

As Ramsey Campbell points out in his brief but perceptive introduction, Thomas Ligotti belongs to 'the most honourable tradition in the field (of horror fiction) that of subtlety and awesomeness rather than the relentlessly graphic.' This American small press paperback collects 14 pieces by Ligotti. In several of the stories - ' The Frolic', 'Les Fleurs', 'Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes' - amoral outsiders taste, test or trick, then discard, oblivious victims. There are signs that these sinister strangers are of supranormal provenance. Other tales take place in a bizarre 'Elsewhere' parallel to M. John Harrison's 'Viriconium' work. Ligotti also explores - in 'Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story' and another piece - the very nature of this type of writing, and its relationship to human realities. Many of the pieces seem shot through with a vein of century's end aestheticism, possessing those qualities of consummate poise, cool irony and sensitivity to style which the Decadents espoused; also something of their melancholy. (The photo-collage artwork, in its juxtaposition of objets d'art and distorted faces has the same lingering and baroque presence.) Ligotti gives the 'Dark Fantastic' new character, cogency, and grace.
 
Thank you very much for this thread, bendk. It is endlessly fascinating to know when and where Ligotti's name pops up.
 
Some excerpts from S.T. Joshi's Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction .


And now we come to Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953). Ligotti is certainly the most distinctive, if not unusual, figure in contemporary supernatural fiction.
His first volume, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), was published by a small press with almost no fanfare, and I daresay that many readers and critics (I was among them) dismissed the poorly printed book as a tedious instance of “fan fiction.” But Ligotti, who had been publishing in magazines since the early 1980s, was the real article. Songs of a Dead Dreamer was reissued in 1989 by a mainstream British publisher and was quickly followed by the collections Grimscribe (1991) and Noctuary (1994); an omnibus, The Nightmare Factory, appeared in 1996. But after the appearance of My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002), Ligotti appears to have suffered some health problems that have virtually curtailed his fiction writing, and he has done very little original work in the past decade or more.
The publication of Ligotti’s impressive treatise The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010) emphasizes what has really been evident in much of his work: it is fueled by a deep pessimism regarding human life and action. Drawing upon the philosophical work of Peter Wessel Zapffe and others, Ligotti concludes that consciousness renders human existence so painful that it becomes folly to remain alive. There is some suggestion that Ligotti is merely attempting to create a philosophical patina to cover his own pessimism, but the cogency of Conspiracy is nonetheless a challenge to both religious and secular conceptions of the “gift” of life. What is refreshing about Ligotti, from a purely literary perspective, is his frank disinclination to market himself. Even when his books were being issued by mainstream publishers, he was content to publish his fiction and other writing in non-paying small-press magazines; and he has frankly declared not only his inability to write a horror novel but the dubious aesthetic status of any horror novel. In some ways this stance is connected with Ligotti’s devaluation of human character in his own fiction, a direct product of his pessimism.
The focus of all Ligotti’s work is a systematic assault on the real world and the replacement of it with the unreal, the dreamlike, and the hallucinatory.

... Ligotti’s literary goal is to suggest that other realm which we glimpse either through dreams or, worse, stumble upon by accident in obscure corners of the world. As a result, his tales refuse to conform to the standard distinctions in weird fiction—say, between supernatural horror and psychological suspense. In “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror” Ligotti speaks of the “logic of supernatural horror” as “a logic that is founded on fear; it is a logic whose sole purpose states: ‘Existence equals Nightmare.’ Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure”. Ligotti’s literary quest, therefore, is not so much a replacement of the real world by the unreal as a sort of turning the real world inside out to show that it has been unreal all along. The vehicle for this transformation is language. Ligotti has evolved a highly distinctive and idiosyncratic style that, with seeming effortlessness, metamorphoses existence into nightmare.

Ligotti’s effective fiction-writing career lasted scarcely more than two decades, but in that short interval—which, let us recall, was just as long as the careers of Poe and Lovecraft—Ligotti has bequeathed a rich storehouse of literary terror that is unlike that of any writer who preceded him.

The nearly total silence of T. E. D. Klein (since the mid-1980s) and Thomas Ligotti (since the early 2000s) has been an immense loss to literate weird fiction; but the continued productivity of Ramsey Campbell has not only elevated him to the pinnacle of the field, but has enriched the genre with a substantial body of both novels and short stories.

Purely on the level of prose, Kiernan already ranks with the most distinctive stylists of our field—Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Thomas Ligotti. With Ligotti’s regrettable retreat into fictional silence, hers is now the most recognizable voice in weird fiction. No one is ever likely to mistake a sentence by Kiernan for a sentence by any other writer.
 
Jessica Amanda Salmonson, in an introduction to "Masquerade of the Dead Sword," in Heroic Visions II, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ACE Fantasy Books, 1986, pp. 187-88.

I first encountered the work of Thomas Ligotti in the macabre-surrealist journal Grimoire... Ligotti has been creating a fierce stir among the fanatic devotees of horror literature. But his voice is perhaps too original for instant recognition among the typical editor or anthologist of horror fiction, a field where conservatism invariably translates artistic as being pretentious and where even a microscopic moment of experimental creates paroxysms of disdain. You see, Thomas Ligotti is a fellow whose chief inspiration can be seen to be the dreary horror of the pulp era. He tempers his inspiration with an easy comprehension of the gloomier aspects of the German expressionism and French symbolism long before "the pulps" degraded fiction to the level of comic book scripting.
 
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William J. Grabowski, in a review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, in The Horror Show, Vo. 5 No. 2. Spring 1987 pp. 32-33

Watch for the fireworks.

If you haven't already spotted them, don't worry, you will. To that wrinkled and stained list - your Catalog of the Craven - onto which are scrawled the names of your favorite authors, please add one Thomas Ligotti. I have; and while I hate to tell you what to do, you'll quickly realize that Songs of a Dead Dreamer is fresh and quality stuff.

The strongest story in this collection has to be "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech," in which a fellow called Cheev (who enigmatically, becomes "Veech" only upon entering the nightmarish loft of Voke) visits the reclusive doctor searching for some way to eliminate a man who is courting the woman who tickles Cheev's fancy. Particularly memorable is the scene where Cheev, in the wake of being cackled at by an unnamed ventriloquist's dummy, encounters Voke whose attire is "... not unlike the dummy's, but the clothes hang on him..." Then Voke inquires " Did you ever wonder... what it is that makes the animation of a piece of wood like that dummy so horrible to see, not to mention to hear. Listen to it. I mean really listen. Ya-ha-ha-ha-ha..." Ligotti has the ability to make one ponder certain things one would rather not. (What is it about a ventriloquists' dummies?) The logic in his fiction is that of the dream, of paranoia. I think you'll gulp as forcefully as did I when you ascertain just how the good doctor dispatched Cheev's problem. It is a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage. Ligotti makes one feel precisely that dizzy dread that blooms within the stomach an instant before one lays eyes onto a gruesome auto accident.
His opening story "The Frolic," shares that same aura of timelessness possessed by such classic screamers as "The Monkey's Paw" and "A Rose For Emily," yet derives its potency from the visionary end of the spectrum - closer to Machen than, say, Lovecraft. You'll honestly be astonished, after reading these stories, when you consider that before now Ligotti has never seen professional publication. Some of his work has appeared in Nyctalops and Eldritch Tales, but I don't see his future as one in which his truly disturbing yarns are going to be strictly a part of low-circulation magazines - and that of course is up to Ligotti, and you.

I've got Ramsey Campbell backing me up on this.

"Songs of a Dead Dreamer has to be one of the most important horror books of the decade." he proclaims in his introduction to the volume. And as all of know by now, Ramsey Campbell is one chap who takes his horror seriously. Thomas Ligotti is another.
 
This thread does a great service. Several interesting essays on Ligotti's work, and with principle ideas about weird fiction in general.

But when Joshi speaks of the "real world", it sounds almost as if he positions in the materialistic standpoint and doesn't take the weird completely serious. : )
 
This is from the Editorial page at the beginning of Dagon No. 22/23 Thomas Ligotti Double Issue (1988)

In 1984 the Silver Scarab Press publishing house, run by Harry O. Morris, released a collection of weird tales by a relatively unknown author. The collection was entitled Songs of a Dead Dreamer and its writer, Thomas Ligotti. At the time of publication Thomas Ligotti's work had only appeared in a handful of small press publications, but no sooner had the Dreamer volume appeared Ligotti was praised from high and low for his qualities as a writer of macabre fiction.
Which supernatural terrors did Ligotti write of which moved Ramsey Campbell to call the collection "one of the most important horror books of the decade"? What dark visions did the author convey to Michael A. Morrison which had Morrison state to Fantasy Review readers "Ligotti is an ambitious, original, provocative writer... well worth your attention"? Why, in her Haunted Library Newsletter, did Rosemary Pardoe claim that "There is no other writer producing anything like this"? The Horror Show: " To that wrinkled and stained list - your Catalog of the Craven - onto which are scrawled the names of your favorite authors, please add one Thomas Ligotti"? In this double issue of Dagon we will attempt to explain the Thomas Ligotti phenomenon.
Sadly, Songs of a Dead Dreamer was produced as a limited edition of only three hundred copies, and is now out of print. I suspect that the tome will in time become The Outsider of the '80s. Let us hope some enterprising professional publisher chooses to give us a reprint.
I shouldn't have to add my weight to the statements made above or, indeed, to the essays you will find in this magazine. Nevertheless, I can't help but consider Thomas Ligotti's fiction to be the best of the amateur field. When you consider the author's output and the remarkable high standard of horrific prose it is quite amazing that Thomas remains a writer for low-circulation magazines. in an introduction to the excellent "Masquerade of a Dead Sword" in Heroic Visions II, editor Jessica Amanda Salmonson observes that "his voice is perhaps too original for instant recognition among the typical editor or anthologist of horror fiction, a field where conservatism invariably translates artistic as being pretentious and where even a microscopic moment of the experimental creates paroxysms of disdain." I think I'll go along with that. Thomas Ligotti refuses to write for a large audience or sacrifice style for a large bank cheque. for these reasons I respect Tom greatly, as do a large number of other Ligotti devotees. So, settle down and enjoy.
And wait'll you get a sniff of that stuff, you will be amazed.

- Carl T. Ford
 


This book covers the best horror books (not anthologies) from 1986 - 2220 when the author noticed the beginning of a horror renaissance. The author assigns the book he chooses with a numerical score usually in the 80s or 90s. The book also has many contributors - notable horror authors and editors - that list their favorite top 10 horror books from this time period. Of the 150 books the author included in this volume, only 5 scored higher than the Ligotti book he selected, and 3 had an equal score.

Grimscribe His Lives and Works by Thomas Ligotti (1991) 94

"The second collection of 12 short stories (and better than the first such offering, Songs of a Dead Dreamer) by an author considered a cult master of the genre. In these stories, Ligotti pays homage, in a unique style, to some of the greats such as Lovecraft, Poe, Blackwood, and Hawthorne. From cosmic and psychological horror the author branches off into other directions, extending the visions from which he draws inspiration and bringing us closer to existential concern over our more arcane natures. My favorite stories include Nethescurial, In the Shadow of Another World, The Last Feast of Harlequin, and The Night School. The deep, disturbing and philosophical prose opens imaginary windows onto the psyche. A brilliant author, but not for everyone."

(Two contributors - S.T. Joshi and Brian Evenson - both chose Grimscibe as one of the 10 best horror books from this time period.)

Beloved by Toni Morrison 96
Dread in the Beast by Charlee Jacob 95
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski 95
Skin by Kathe Koja 95
The Shaft by David J Schow 95
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk 94
The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan 94
Unamerica by Cody Goodfellow 94

Some TLO members made the list:

The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco 92
At Fears Altar by Richard Gavin 88
Blood Will Have Its Season by Joseph S. Pulver Sr. 88
Burnt Black Suns by Simon Strantzas 86
Mister Suicide by Nicole Cushing 85
 
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