No, for Ligotti the monsters that lurk in the shadowy darkness beyond our perceptions are the fear of realizing the utter meaninglessness of your existence and the slow comprehension that nothing we do or can ever do will, in the grand scheme of things, ever matter.
The main difference-aside from the undercurrent of racism that permeates Lovecraft’s work-is that Ligotti’s horrors don’t typically involve the machinations of elder gods who could, on a whim, destroy us all. He is a writer of the Lovecraftian tradition, weaving tales of uncanny supernaturalism that peer deep into hearts of men and showing them exactly where they stand in this universe. Those two collections, perhaps more than any other, exemplify all that makes Ligotti what he is. In 2016, the publishing house reprinted his first two collections, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe into a single collection, marking the first time that his work was unleashed upon the literary masses. Since then, I’ve become a Ligotti proponent of near Sutter Cane proportions, asking all whom I suspect might be interested (and many whom I suspect are not), “Do you read Thomas Ligotti?” For years, even as his work has been made more accessible by the advent of e-readers, the answer has, frustratingly, been no. (In fact, for a time in the 80s, many were certain that Ligotti himself didn’t really exist, that he was the pseudonym of another author unwilling to attach their name to works so bleak as those written by Ligotti, whose existential nihilism is enough to make Nietzsche say, “Relax, guy.”) I first came to Ligotti in the Peter Straub edited collection Poe’s Children, where his “Notes on the Writing of Horror” was republished for a wider audience. Their limited availability has made for some rather insane prices in the used market-I myself once happily paid $60 for a used copy of Noctuary and, in all fairness, would likely do the same again.Īs part of his mystique, his inaccessibility over the years has been somewhat maddening. For most of his career, Ligotti has published only small runs of collections published by small houses. It takes a certain kind of reader to be gripped by the works of Ligotti, but even supposing that you’re the kind of reader who would partake in his brand of existential horror, there exists yet another block: availability. He has, for most of his career, existed in the shadows.
The path to Ligotti is circuitous, beset by roadblocks and warnings, sign posts that warn the undiscerning that here there be monsters. Thomas Ligotti hasn’t done much to, as they say, put himself out there to be widely consumed by the masses. You couldn’t be blamed if you had never heard the name of one of the modern era’s foremost writers of uncanny and supernatural horror.
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