I’ve been a fan of Thomas Ligotti for some time. My friend Michael Lotus (of America 3.0 fame) first recommended I read him when I checked out Songs of a Dead Dreamer from the college library. Teatro Grottesco and The Nightmare Factory are Ligotti at his intellectual best, while My Work Is Not Yet Done is laugh-out loud hilarious.
But my appreciation for Ligotti dramatically increased after reading The Thomas Ligotti Reader. Like the book H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houllebecq or the documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, The Thomas Ligotti Reader provides a context for stories, emphasizing their themes and ideas, and making the body of work seem like an organic whole.
I was particularly surprised at the central role The Shadow at the Bottom of the World plays in Ligotti’s writings. Before reading the Reader, I know of Ligotti’s philosophical horror and non-fiction work (both Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been) which are non-fictional expression’s of Ligotti’s nihilophilia. But several piecesin the Reader emphasize unusual aspects of Shadow, including its final position in Grimscribe, its use of the first-person plural “We” as narrator, and the text and symbolism in the story to argue it a high water mark of a gnostic writer.
To me, this last element made Ligotti’s writing more sensible. Ligotti has long struck me as someone who is accurately describing what a Godless universe, by philosophical necessity, would be like. A pandemonium he describes in The Cult of the Idol is a more cynical, and perhaps more wise, view of the pantheism much appreciated by intellectually lazy hippies. But Ligotti’s view is not just that the universe is indifferent, but actively hostile. Thus, atheism ends not in indifference, but in Catharism.
I read The Thomas Ligotti Reader in dead-tree edition.
