Teatro Grottesco

PRAISE FOR THOMAS LIGOTTI

‘Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and is a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I’d say he might just be a genius.’ Ramsey Campbell

‘Ligotti is wonderfully original; he has a dark vision of a new and special kind, a vision that no one had before him.’ Interzone

‘[Ligotti’s] is a unique voice, which speaks with a profound elegance — and a precious seriousness — of matters which few other literary voices have ever touched — Ligotti is old-fashioned in the very best sense of the term and there is nothing dated about his work, which is unmistakably contemporary.’ Brian Stableford in Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers

‘Ligotti gave me the first genuine frisson — in the literal sense of the term — that I had received in years. His work made me realize why I had become a student of weird fiction to begin with — it was to experience that indescribable sensation of being unnerved.’ S. T. Joshi, author of The Modern Weird Tale, in Horror: Another 100 Best Books

‘Ligotti is arguably the pre-eminent living writer of horror fiction.’ Matt Cardin (in The Thomas Ligotti Reader)

‘Songs of a Dead Dreamer is full of inexplicable and alarming delights… Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.’ Michael Swanwick, The Washington Post

‘Grimscribe confirms [Ligotti] as an accomplished conjuror of nightmares in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft.’ The Times

‘In Grimscribe Ligotti manages to write that secret book, presenting us with stories that are paradoxically beautiful and horrific.’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘The most disturbing terror comes from within, springs unexpectedly from bland or half-formed memories of the past. This is the terror that Ligotti cultivates in the richly evocative tales of Noctuary.’ Booklist

‘My Work Is Not Yet Done displays a Thomas Ligotti at the height of his form — in imaginative range, in verve of style and precision of language, and in cumulative power and intensity.’ S. T. Joshi, Necrofile

Thomas Ligotti was born in Detroit in 1953 and grew up in the nearby suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods. He graduated from Wayne State University in 1978. From 1979 to 2001, Ligotti worked for a reference book publisher in the Detroit area, serving as an editor on such titles as Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism and Contemporary Authors. His first collection of stories, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was published in 1986, with an expanded version issued three years later. Other collections include Grim-scribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), and My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002).

Ligotti is the recipient of several awards, including the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker award for his omnibus collection The Nightmare Factory (1996) and short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done. He has also written a nonfiction book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short Life of Horror, which comprises an excursion through the darker byways of literature, philosophy and psychology. A short film of Ligotti’s story The Frolic was completed in 2006 and is scheduled to appear as a DVD. In addition, through an agreement with Fox Studios’ subsidiary Fox Atomic, a graphic novel based on his works was released in 2007. For more information visit: http://www.ligotti.net