It's entirely unsurprising to learn that Thomas Ligotti is from Detroit. His storytelling is suffused in a certain distinctly post-industrial sense of destruction and despair. This context is especially prevalent in the neighborhood descriptions of opening tour-de-force "Purity" which shoves several disquieting philosophical principles through a slalom of screwed-up events, ranging from explicit action to entirely sub-narrative suggestions. All told in the conversational voice of an eerily unfaz...

About a year ago, I made a commitment to read all the H. P. Lovecraft I could find. Finding it all was easy. You can get the entire short stories and poetry, including some essays, all in one volume for your Amazon Kindle for something like ninety-nine cents. Reading it wasn't that difficult either. If you've never read Lovecraft, or even if you have and loved it, I would highly recommend that you read a short story then go over to The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast and listen to the correspon...

One of the weirdest, most unsettling books I've ever read. Very enjoyable.I'd been pre-warned that Ligotti was something of an anomaly in the world of writing - an author who created strange, horrifying and sometimes incomprehensible stories...all eerily positioned in the everyday, the mundane and the wholly relatable. Reading through this collection of short stories, it was immediately apparent that I wasn't in for an easy ride, which I welcome from time to time (it's nice to be challenged!). T...

It's a solid four-star read. I do not have the faintest idea how to review it, though, because spoilers (in the case of horror fiction) really consist of telling readers what to expect to feel or think about the stories.So...here it is...if you've read my other reviews, and you find that you agree with me at least 70% of the time, this collection is very much worth your money and your eyeblinks. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported L...

"No one anticipates the arrival of the Teatro." So voices the tale's narrator, a writer of what he terms nihilistic prose. I wonder if he was familiar with that famous line from Monty Python, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."Only with Thomas Ligotti, the Teatro means real terror.One aspect of a Thomas Ligotti tale I especially appreciate: the author leaves room for a reader's imagination - Teatro Grottesco serves as prime example. I'll focus on the title story since I will be writing sep...

Teatro Grottesco was the first short story collection I read by Ligotti. I must say that I am glad I read it, but happy to unmire myself from the unrelenting, bleak nightmare land of his visions.Was it a good read? Yes.Was it all I that it was hyped up to be? Not in my opinion.I did find many of the stories particularly delightful (The Red Tower, Gas Station Carnivals and Purity) but after several dips in the hopelesness of the collection, I found that it all became a bit repetitive.A couple of

Industrious NihilismLook not here for meaning. But, upon finding any, do try to restrain your enthusiasm. The meaning of these stories is that there is no meaning. Our instinct is to fight against this, to supply explanations or additions to Ligotti’s prose. We are prone to create meaning out of thin air, as it were. But with Ligotti, don’t. Meaning doesn’t exist ‘out there’. And what’s ‘in here’ is totally arbitrary, including, of course, the absence of meaning. One suspects a limitation with t...

To be honest, I have no clear idea what to say about this book. It isn't easy to read even if it's not very long. As soon as I started reading it, I realized this won't be one of those anthologies to breeze through. It demands your full attention and, let's be honest, your patience. So I decided not to mark this as 'currently reading' to avoid pressure and to take my time with it one or two stories at a time. It worked well for me.The thing is, I can't say I loved it. There is nothing to love (e...

This is some of the worst writing I've read in a long time. I was only able to stomach the first five stories in this collection before surrendering to the obvious - this man writes like an amateur 14-year-old who is getting a C-minus in English.First, the stories aren't very imaginative, they are underdeveloped, and unresolved. The writer repeats himself for no discernible reason, repeats descriptions unnecessarily, shows zero sense of rhythm in his prose, uses endless adjectives, uses word com...

Now this really isn't bad. Dude can write, and though he's clearly dangerously in thrall to Thomas Bernhard, the substance of his writing is so different from that of the misanthropic Austrian that all is forgiven. At first I'll admit I was unsure, but at some point I accepted his vision - which to my knowledge is unique - and my consciousness of the slightly derivative prose-style all but vanished behind my appreciation of the world it creates. Here's a fairly typical (for Ligotti) decription o...

This was the collection that made me a Ligotti fan for life. While I'd already owned and read his previous collections -- and for the most part enjoyed them -- it wasn't until I cracked Teatro Grottesco open in 2008 that something unlocked in my brain, allowing me to become fully absorbed in his nightmarish worldview and disorienting prose, both here and when re-reading his earlier collections.Ligotti had definitely evolved a lot as a writer by this period (mid-90s to early-2000s). Mostly gone i...

Ligotti is usually classified as a "horror" writer, but this label is much too limiting. Ligotti embodies the eccentricity and loneliness of Poe (minus the romantic sentimentality), the bleak existential inner landscape of Kafka, the lunatic small-town atmosphere of Bruno Schulz and the mordant epigrammatic nihilism of Cioran. Ligotti is a profoundly disturbing writer, an unclassifiable talent right up there with such unique voices as Borges, Calvino and Lem.

For reasons unknown to me (or hidden from me? Once can never be sure.) this past year or so has been chock full of existentialist texts. From philosophical surveys to plays to role-playing supplements to novels to novels that were later turned into movies, I seem to be crawling my way up a mountain of stark realizations, worrisome revelations brought forth by prophets of . . . not gloom per-se, at least not in the sense of utter nihilism and hopelessness, but soothsayers of "facing that which yo...

I was able to pick up a hardcover edition published by Mythos Books. This first edition originally sold for $35.00. Some of the stories here are amazingly good. Others are just kind of good. All are interesting and well written. Mr. Ligotti's command of the language is awe inspiring. The reason for only four stars is due to the "sameness" I felt in some of the stories. They took me to somewhere that I had been taken to previously with in this book.To be sure there are some exceptional examples o...

This collection of thirteen tales can be labelled horror, but not in the conventional sense: these reflect an existential horror, in which enigmatic and superficially placid individuals—all suffering from Q-balls interfering with the orderly functioning processes of the mind—find themselves lost and stranded within unfamiliar and nightmarish settings that unfold like the dreams of a rachitic madman. The everyday world in which Ligotti's stories take place—this cramped existence itself—is never l...

The biggest red flag you can ever throw, I think, is to compare someone's writing to another, more prominent writer's. It's more likely to make me suspicious or impatient than anything else; really, is the best thing you can say about Thomas Ligotti's collection of short horror stories "Teatro Grottesco" that his narrative reminds you of Lovecraft's style? Since when is that a selling point? If I wanted to read Lovecraft, I'd read Lovecraft.I'm not saying you can't do worse than this sleepy litt...

Bizarre, dark and delicious with eau de Lovecraft generously splashed at all the right pulse points. The stories are neatly subdivided and labelled to give a gentle steer: ‘Derangements’, Deformations’ and ‘the Damaged and the Diseased’, just in case I (e.g. the reader) don’t get it. Helping hand appreciated, but not necessary. The delineation of stories based on theme and structure is practically pock-marked. ‘Derangements’ is a powerhouse of the uniquely bizarre: unspecified locales, structure...

October Spooky Read #1! “I’ve even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It’s only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominantly a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsession that you fear you might act upon.” Thomas Ligotti is one of those authors I kept meaning to read, as his reputation as a writer of wonderfully creepy stories is impossible to ignore: it is no small

"His trembling words also invoked an epistimology of 'hope and horror', of exposing once and for all the true nature of this 'great gray ritual of existence' and plunging headlong into an 'enlightenment of inanity'..."- "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land"reading the collected tales in Thomas' Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco over the course of a rainy, gray day and the rest of a chilly, glum weekend was an interesting experience. it certainly helped to create a gray, glum, and introspective mood, l...

Ligotti gets compared to those other masters of the horror short Poe and Lovecraft and he obviously loves their tales of deranged minds, half glimpsed horrors, and nihilism. The opening line of “The Clown Puppet” seems a wonderful parody of a Lovecraft opening. Ligotti’s true muses are actually Bruno Shultz and Thomas Bernhard. Fans of those writers should run not walk to the store/library to snatch up Ligotti before he vanishes into out of print limbo. Using Bernhard’s repetition and comic dis