Some things remain inscrutable. I will never understand the elements of my reading interests. Why do certain matters excite and others repel? I have no great affinity for Cosmic Horror. I’m not terribly interested in madness or cults, nor the occult for that matter. There were a handful of brilliant stories here, some evoking Kafka or an uneasy totem of the Weird. Too many appear to be variations on a theme. Too much Ligotti left me suffocated, but never afraid.

Where to begin? Have you ever read a book so awful that you hated it? A book that despite being only 300 some odd pages took you weeks to read? A book that, after a while, made you hate not only this book, but the act of reading itself? After 300 pages of this garbage I think I not only hate reading, but have been rendered illiterate. Thanks Thomas Ligotti! Now I can't read! I'm only able to type this by using rage telepathy. Now I'm going to saw off my own head with the plastic cutlery from my

3 and a half stars.Thomas Ligotti is a tough nut to crack. You’ll rarely come across writing that manages to be very good, yet relentlessly bleak – but that’s how he writes: his settings are squalid, his characters always lonely and isolated, the sun never shines on the small towns they live in. His stories are absurd and unsettling, and sometimes very creepy. But I would use the words baroque and bizarre more than scary to describe his work.I had read some of his later work (“Teatro Grottesco”

To the best of my knowledge, and despite his regrettable decade of silence, Thomas Ligotti is the greatest living writer of horror. Jeff VanderMeer (Who I have always felt to be overrated) makes one cogent point in his otherwise clumsy introduction--”Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.)” The H.P. Lovecraft style (or

Penguin Classics has done a great service for the world of literature and letters by adding this superb edition to their collection, a book combining two previously published Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. Also included is an incisive introductory essay by Jeff Vandermeer.One Vandermeer quote I especially enjoy: "Every time you read these stories, not only do you reimagine them, but they seem to change shape and substance through some power rising from behind the words....

As a rule, I really don't like to write negative reviews. There are two reasons for this; the first is as a matter of aesthetic principal. As a youth I can remember thinking that the understanding/appreciation of an art form – what might broadly be described as 'having taste' – consisted largely of sharpening one's sense of contempt for the vast body of work in that particular form, and of being able to convey that distaste in a vicious and entertaining manner (we might call this the Pitchfork m...

I have a penchant for doing things in reverse order, especially when it comes to books. At least in my own mind. Like a literary Benjamin Button, when I wasn’t reading comics as a kid, I was usually reading “grown up” books (The Hardy Boys adventures being the big exception). And I didn’t read Moby Dick until I was 45, though I had many, many opportunities (and even assignments) to read it many, many years before that.So, of course, I read and loved Thomas Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco before havin...

Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare.Well that was...different. I honestly don't know what to make of this collection. On the one hand there are interesting ideas which drew me in and quite fascinated me, but on the other hand, more often than not, the execution gets muddled with flowery prose and one dimensional characters who I didn't care about in the slightest. Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate this book

Re-reads for both of these great books. Full review here at Electric Literature:http://electricliterature.com/the-hor...

I don't really like it when they bundle together multiple books/collections that were originally published separately and I usually try to break them up, treat the parts as if they are still separate books. I didn't do that with this book; so excited was I to finally get a chance to read Ligotti's first two collections. So rich and intense was the writing that I really think I ought to have done as it took me quite a while to finish.I seem to have worked my way backwards through his work, starti...

I started this book which bundles Ligotti’s first two story collections with high hopes but I soon found myself unwilling to read through it, thus adding it to my pile of abandoned books. We already sort of got off on the wrong foot with the first story because exploiting the suffering of children just with a view of providing sheer thrill never goes down too well with me. When I read on, I was taken aback by the overall style of the stories – a verbose, baroqueish rambling that is sometimes eve...

This really wasn't for me. Too much atmosphere and not enough decent storytelling. The majority of the stories have the same premise and come across as, for lack of a better word, wanky. I much prefer the Stephen King type of horror rather than this pretentious shit.

That kind of a book. The kind that makes you flip your head around to make sure no one is watching you. Luscious and rich, extravagant and perverse, labyrinthine and macabre and Poesque, a collection of intricate scares and one very important story on the writing of horror that will rattle your wits and teach you a thing or two about, you got it, writing horror. "Horror is not really horror unless it's your horror—that which you have known personally."

June 2016 Update: I'm giving this book another shot, and boy howdy, am I glad I chose to do this.Original review: I need to give this book another, more educated, chance at some point. Being early works from Ligotti, there are many glimpses of his brilliantly obsidian views, but often weighed down by prose so thick that it can be hard to follow his direction. Even so, the mood outweighs the words, and with stories such as "The Frolic" and the excellently distressing "Les Fleurs," I am left haunt...

I just did something weird. I stopped reading this book. Not after a few pages. No. I decided to stop on page 360. There are less than 100 pages left, but I cannot go on. Why?I can no longer endure the sprawling, excessive sentences that foam rabid, infected by diseases as of yet unnamed by men of science, as purple as the phallus of an ancient Egyptian god who has sexually ravaged a basket of blueberries. Dear god. Please. Just tell a story. Stop describing the light as it hits the rooftops of

What I read of this I loved before I left it on the plane once I arrived in Trondheim.Word to the unwise: don't trust that just because you're looking at it in that crappy net thing the whole flight that you'll remember it! You're a total div and you won't. You're just as derpy as every derpalot passenger you silently scorned for derping all over the place. DERP!!

And so on a sodden grey Sunday I finish this collection that I took several weeks to read. It still felt like too much Ligotti in too short of a time. The stifling oppression of much of his carefully controlled prose wears me down after only a story or two. In general, I preferred the stories in Teatro Grottesco to those in these first two early works. One of my main issues is with the endings...there were many stories that crackled with potential throughout only to fizzle out at the end. Of tho...

The more that I read the works of Ligotti, the more that I am convinced that the man is a genius. An author of a unique, singular vision; one of a kind, if you will. In this book we have the author's first two collections, generously resurrected back into print by Penguin in one volume. Here we see the master working in a mode closer in nature to Poe and Lovecraft, but to compare Ligotti to any other author simply leaves his individuality far too understated. For Ligotti's unique brand of cosmic...

Foreword, by Jeff Vandermeer Songs of a Dead Dreamer Dreams for Sleepwalkers--The Frolic--Les Fleurs--Alice's Last Adventure--Dream of a ManikinThe Nyctalops Trilogy:--I. The Chymist--II. Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes--III. Eye of the Lynx--Notes on the Writing of Horror: A StoryDreams for Insomniacs--The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise--The Lost Art of Twilight--The Troubles of Dr. Thoss--Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie--Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech--Professor Nobody's Little Lectures...

I don't know how I feel about Ligotti.I got the very charming Penguin Classics edition of his first two story collections, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe and to be frank I had quite a hard time finishing it. His horrors are cognitive, esoteric, barely tangible. More than cosmic, I think Ligotti is a master of psychological and existential horror. Nobody explores the theme of dark dreaming more deliberately than him. His urban anomalies, distorted realities and bizzare dreamscapes are the...