Greetings, everyone. Thanks as always to Brian Poe, who transformed a modest--though ambitious--Ligotti fan site into a thriving community of like minded individuals.
In the interests of time (I have little today), I offer you this revised, partial TLO history that I wrote a couple of years back:
After discovering, Ligotti’s work back in 1991, I felt like the only reader alive who felt a profound connection with his fiction. And I wanted to share that feeling. Sure, I had successfully recruited a Ligotti reader here and there over the years, but for the longest time I felt like my enthusiasm (sometimes fanatical enthusiasm) for his work wasn’t widely shared, and I longed to discuss Ligotti’s prose with other like-minded folks. As a research and later a law librarian—in the days before Netscape—I was utilizing the World Wide Web using an early version of a text only browser called lynx. From the beginning of my web use and for years of solid web presence thereafter, I tried to spread the word about Ligotti’s work as I was able but became increasingly frustrated at the relative lack of awareness about Thomas Ligotti and his fiction throughout cyberspace.
Finally, in 1997—upon receiving a job in New York City which paid me very little but gave me tons of free time to mess about on the Internet—I truly became a Ligotti advocate (some would say an annoying advocate) on the old alt.horror.cthulhu Usenet newsgroup. After some argument and semantical wrangling (see this [
http://tinyurl.com/yg6tras] rather hilarious proposal thread featuring a much more uptight version of myself), I managed to get the alt.books.thomas-ligotti newsgroup created. A website, cobbled together using stolen HTML from a William Faulkner fan website, wasn’t far behind. Version 1 of TLO from early 1998 is—sadly—lost to the cyber-void as far as I know. Version 2 came out in 1999 and an archive can be found here (
Horror - Thomas Ligotti Online Stories and FAQ).
In retrospect, I’m proud of these difficult, initial efforts and the even greater efforts others (e.g., Matt Cardin; Brian Poe) have made throughout the years. In version 1 and 2 of TLO, 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 over 14 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. I’m proud to state that TLO published Cardin’s remarkable short story, “Teeth,” for the first time anywhere (which led to a successful and well-deserved writing career [
Matt Cardin).
About five or six years into TLO’s fourteen year life to date, the website had fallen into quiescence—mainly due to my challenging job and active home life in New Orleans. Fortunately, back in 2004, Brian Poe contacted me with a plan to revive the site. And, boy, did he ever revive it. Now TLO is 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 in the past eight years. The level of talent and intelligence on the site is sky high, and I couldn’t be happier with the state of TLO since Brian took over development and day to day operation of the site. Back in 2005, Tom 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.” Seriously, does any other author have a more excellent online community than this one?
