Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti studied at Wayne State University and Macomb Community College. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are horror. Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov and H. Lovecraft are recorded as an influence. Distinctions recorded are British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology or Collection, Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement and Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection.

• Name — Thomas Ligotti • Born — 9 July 1953 • Birthplace — Detroit, Michigan, U.S. • Occupation — Writer • Period — 1981–present • Education — Wayne State University • Genre — Horror fiction, weird fiction, dark fantasy

Ligotti started his professional writing career in the early 1980s with short stories published in American small press magazines. He was contributing editor to Grimoire from 1982 to 1985.[4] In 2015, Ligotti's first two collections, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, were republished in one volume by Penguin Classics as Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe.[5] Michael Calia of The Wall Street Journal wrote of the reprint that "Horror writer Thomas Ligotti is about to enter the American literary canon. Penguin Classics published a volume of Mr. Ligotti’s short stories, making him one of 10 living writers, including Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, among the hundreds the imprint has published in the U.S."[6] Ligotti's work received high praise following the publication from the likes of The New York Times Book Review,[7] the Los Angeles Review of Books,[8] The Washington Post,[9] and The New Yorker.[10] Terrence Rafferty contrasts Ligotti with Stephen King, observing, "King, the great entertainer, needs the story as the comedian needs the joke, and when he can’t quite deliver it he dies (in the comedian’s sense). King is a master of horror, though. When inspiration fails, he has the technique to fake it. Thomas Ligotti is a master of a different order, practically a different species. He probably couldn’t fake it if he tried, and he never tries. He writes like horror incarnate." Ligotti collaborated with the musical group Current 93 on the albums In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997, reissued 2002), I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000), This Degenerate Little Town (2001) and The Unholy City (2003), all released on David Tibet's Durtro label. Tibet has also published several limited editions of Ligotti's books on Durtro Press. Additionally, Ligotti played guitar on Current 93's contribution to the compilation album Foxtrot, whose proceeds went to the treatment of musician John Balance's alcoholism.[11]

He has cited Thomas Bernhard, William S. Burroughs, Emil Cioran, Vladimir Nabokov, Edgar Allan Poe, Giacomo Leopardi, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Bruno Schulz as being among his favorite writers. H. P. Lovecraft is also an important touchstone for Ligotti: a few stories, "The Sect of the Idiot" in particular, make explicit reference to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and one, "The Last Feast of Harlequin", was dedicated to Lovecraft. Also among his avowed influences are Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Arthur Machen, all fin de siècle horror authors known for their subtlety and implications of the cosmic and supernatural in their stories. He has also invoked the influence of philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Peter Wessel Zapffe. Ligotti has suffered from chronic anxiety and anhedonia for much of his life; these have been prominent themes in his work. Ligotti avoids the explicit violence common in some recent horror fiction, preferring to establish a disquieting, pessimistic atmosphere through the use of subtlety and repetition. Ligotti has stated he prefers short stories to longer forms, both as a reader and as a writer, though he has written a novella, My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002).[12] Ligotti's ancestry is three-quarters Sicilian, one-quarter Polish, a genetic combination he likes to think "contributed to the bizarre quality of my imagination and to what has been called its 'universality'." He says that his Polish grandmother's stories, though not horrific, "put me in touch with an older and stranger world than I would otherwise have known and that emerged when I started writing stories so many years later".[13] Ligotti attended Macomb County Community College between 1971 and 1973 and graduated from Wayne State University in 1978.[14] For 23 years Ligotti worked as an Associate Editor at Gale Research (now the Gale Group), a publishing company that produces compilations of literary (and other) research. In the summer of 2001, Ligotti quit his job at the Gale Group and moved to south Florida. Politically, he identifies as a socialist.[15][16] Ligotti has described himself as an atheist.[17]

Graphic novels • The Nightmare Factory (2007) • The Nightmare Factory – Volume 2 (2008)

Thomas Ligotti is recorded as writer.

Collections • Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986) • Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) • Noctuary (1994) • The Agonising Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1994) • The Nightmare Factory (1996) • In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land (1997) • The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (2005) • Teatro Grottesco (2006) • The Spectral Link (2014) Novella • My Work Is Not Yet Done[33] (2002) Non-fiction • The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) Poetry • Death Poems (2004) • Pictures of Apocalypse (2023)

• Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986, rev. & exp. 1989) • Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) • Noctuary (1994) • The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1994) • The Nightmare Factory (1996). Essentially an omnibus of selections from Ligotti's first three collections, with a concluding section containing new stories. All of the stories in the concluding section were later printed in Teatro Grottesco. • In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land (1997, accompanying CD by Current 93) • I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000, accompanying CD by Current 93) • This Degenerate Little Town (2001, accompanying CD by Current 93) • My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002) • Crampton: A Screenplay (2003, with Brandon Trenz) (Unproduced screenplay written in 1998 for an episode of The X-Files) • Sideshow, and Other Stories (2003) • The Unholy City (2003, Words and music Thomas Ligotti) • Death Poems (2004) • The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (2005) • Teatro Grottesco (2006, reprinted in 2008) • The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) • The Spectral Link (2014) • Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014), edited by Matt Cardin • Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe (2015) • The Small People (2021). A chapbook reprint of a single story previously collected in The Spectral Link. • Paradoxes From Hell (2021). A chapbook reprint of a previously uncollected story and two poems. • Pictures of Apocalypse (2023). A collection of 20 new poems.