Many of his stories center on the distorted perspective of a frequently doomed narrator. But now Ligotti has pulled together a collection of his favorite fiction, both old and new, representing his best and most characteristic works.Thomas Ligotti's stories are perhaps best described as dark magical realism. That being said Liggoti is great and worth reading, he is an amazing prose stylist, but in my opinion none of his works will ever match the greatness of the Lovecraft canon or Barker's BOOKS OF BLOOD.Īnd if you want to see what happens when I try to write a Ligotti with Zombies story try my tale Parthenogenesis on for size.A longtime Lovecraft devotee, who has extended the weird tale to the next level via the likes of Borges and Burroughs, Thomas Ligotti is usually published as part of a general anthology of horror writers. Actually I find a lot of his stories fall into the second category. Puzzle over his clever ideas and move on.
"Les Fleurs and "Dreams of a Mannikin" are in in my opinion the second type of Liggoti stories.
He leaves me screaming at the page "WILL YOU JUST GET TO THE FRIGGIN' POINT?" or alternately "Whoops! Someone forgot an ending." Thing is though when Liggoti is pointless and pretentious he is everything I had about modern horror fiction- a triumph of clever writing and imagery over plot and characterization.
You read them, ponder them and suddenly find yourself going over and over them like a half-remembered nightmare. When he is brilliant as he is in 'The Frolic' and 'Last Feast of The Harlequin' Ligotti is amazing. Other times I wonder if the emperor has no clothes. There are times when I think his work perplexes me because I spent too much of my formative years reading Terrance Dicks' DOCTOR WHO novelizations. I'm also a little confused as to the last paragraph in "Dreams of a Mannikin", but only because I can't decide who to attribute those words to, or if it even matters since it could just imply a complete collapse of the doctor's objective reality. Anyone care to tell me what they got out of the story? Everthing in it is just opaque to me. There's just something that I plain don't get in that story. I like to think of myself as a fairly perceptive reader, patient and able to see much of what an individual book or story has to offer. Is there additional material in those volumes that wasn't included in The Nightmare Factory.Ģ) This is slightly embarassing, but I'll put aside my pride. I was finally able to locate a copy of Thomas Ligotti's The Nightmare Factory, after being very intrigued by J Harper's comments in this thread.ġ) From what I can tell, the contents of The Nightmare Factory are drawn from some of Ligotti's other collections, including Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Noctuary.
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