Tales Old & New with H.P Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, Robert W. Chambers & Carcosa, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, and Laird Barron - More2Read
 

Tales Old & New with H.P Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, Robert W. Chambers & Carcosa, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, and Laird Barron

Tales of Old & New

This is my new project. I hope to read these tales for the joy of reading and research, will be immersed with great voices and characters from a wide spectrum of styles.

This page will form soon with each respective book and connected tribute short story collections. 

Once read, the reviews will be added.

First up is Thomas Ligotti’s works along with The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Edited by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.
Once read will link review, completion expected by end of May 2021, starting with Teatro Grottesco collection.

 

 

Thomas Ligotti 

 

 

 

About Thomas Ligotti

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 Grimscribe (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 his works was released in 2007. For more information visit: http://www.ligotti.net

 

Thomas Ligotti is simply one of the most masterful American writers alive today. Most would consider him an author of horror stories, but his work is unlike anything else being written in any genre. He has been favorably compared to both Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, yet Ligotti’s fiction, far from being merely derivative of any one writer, has a distinctiveness that is singular both in its voice and its quality. Mr. Ligotti’s work has been internationally acclaimed. His latest collection, The Nightmare Factory, won both the 1997 Bram Stoker Award and the 1997 British Fantasy Award for best anthology/collection of the year; The Red Tower also won a Bram Stoker Award for best novella of the year. Ligotti’s latest novella, My Work Is Not Yet Done, won both the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Awards recently (May and June ’03 respectively). Thomas Ligotti was born on July 9, 1953, in Detroit, Michigan. He lived his childhood and most of his adult life in that area, graduating from Wayne State University in the early 70’s. For the past twenty 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 country (their Contemporary Authors series, for instance, can be found in the reference department of institutions of higher learning throughout the USA). Most recently, Ligotti quit his job at the Gale Group and moved to the Tampa area in Florida.

(sourced from Ligotti.net)

 

Thomas Ligotti (born July 9, 1953) is a contemporary American horror writer.[1] His writings have been noted as being rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have overall been described by many critics as works of philosophical horror, often formed into short stories and novellas in the tradition of gothic fiction.[1] The worldview espoused by Ligotti in his fiction and non-fiction is pessimistic and nihilistic.[1][2] The Washington Post called him “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction.”[3]

 

 

The Nightmare Factory 

 

In the realm of the supernatural, Thomas Ligotti is the master of stylish, eerie writing of the highest quality. This new edition brings together his collected short stories with ‘Teatro Grottesco’, a sequence of new stories not published before.

Four books in one collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, Noctuary & Teatro Grottesco.

Contents:
The Frolic (1982)
Les Fleurs (1981)
Alice’s Last Adventure (1985)
Dream of a Mannikin (1982)
The Chymist (1981)
Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes (1982)
Eye of the Lynx (1983)
The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise (1996)
The Lost Art of Twilight (1986)
The Troubles of Dr. Thoss (1985)
Masquerade of a Dead Sword (1986)
Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech (1983)
Dr. Locrian’s Asylum (1987)
The Sect of the Idiot (1988)
The Greater Festival of Masks (1985)
The Music of the Moon (1987)
The Journal of J. P. Drapeau (1987)
Vastarien (1987)
The Last Feast of Harlequin (1990)
The Spectacles in the Drawer (1987)
Flowers of the Abyss (1991)
Nethescurial (1991)
The Dreaming in Nortown (1991)
The Mystics of Muelenburg (1987)
In the Shadow of Another World (1991)
The Cocoons (1991)
The Night School (1991)
The Glamour (1991)
The Library of Byzantium (1991)
Miss Plarr (1991)
The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (1990)
The Medusa (1991)
Conversations in a Dead Language (1989)
The Prodigy of Dreams (1986)
Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel (1991)
The Tsalal (1994)
Mad Night of Atonement (1989)
The Strange Design of Master Rignolo (1989)
The Voice in the Bones (1989)
Teatro Grottesco (1996)
Severini (1996)
Gas Station Carnivals (1996)
The Bungalow House (1995)
The Clown Puppet (1996)
The Red Tower (1996)

 

Songs of a Dead Dreamer
by Thomas Ligotti

 

Songs of a Dreamer was Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of supernatural horror stories. When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris’s Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989, an expanded version appeared that garnered accolades from several quarters. Writing in the Washington Post, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick extolled: “Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.”

The revisions in the present volume of Songs of a Dead Dreamer have been calculated to make its stories into enhanced incarnations of the originals. This edition is and will remain definitive.

For those already familiar with the stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, an invitation is extended to return to them in their ultimate state. For those new to the collection, it is submitted to engage them with some of the most extraordinary tales of their kind. In either case, this publication of Songs of a Dead Dreamer offers evidence for why Ligotti has been judged to be among the most important authors in the history of supernatural horror.

Contents

Dreams for Sleepwalkers
The Frolic
Les Fleurs
Alice’s Last Adventure
Dream of a Manikin
The Nyctalops Trilogy:
I. The Chymist
II. Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes
III. Eye of the Lynx
Notes on the Writing of Horror
 
Dreams for Insomniacs
The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise
The Lost Art of Twilight
The Troubles of Dr. Thoss
Masquerade of a Dead Sword
Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech
Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror
 
Dreams for the Dead
Dr. Locrian’s Asylum
The Sect of the Idiot
The Greater Festival of Masks
The Music of the Moon
The Journal of J.P. Drapeau
Vastarien

 

 

Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
by Thomas Ligotti

 

Grimscribe: His Lives and Works is the second volume in a series of revised, definitive editions of the horror story collections of Thomas Ligotti. First published in 1991 by Carroll & Graf in the United States and Robinson Publishing in England, Grimscribe garnered significantly more recognition than Ligotti’s first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, which was issued two years earlier by the same publishers.

In the view of many commentators, it was with Grimscribe that Ligotti consolidated his reputation as a horror writer of high stature. As Steven J. Mariconda remarked in a 1992 essay surveying the stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: “Of the two collections, Grimscribe achieves near-classic status and is recommended to all.” Included in this volume is “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” a novella that, in the observation of H. P. Lovecraft scholar and biographer S. T. Joshi, “may perhaps be the very best homage to Lovecraft ever written.”

 

Contents

1. The Voice of the Damned
The Last Feast of Harlequin
The Spectacles in the Drawer
Flowers of the Abyss
Nethescurial

2. The Voice of the Demon
The Dreaming in Nortown
The Mystics of Muelenburg
In the Shadow of Another World
The Cocoons

3. The Voice of the Dreamer
The Night School
The Glamour

4. The Voice of the Child
The Library of Byzantium
Miss Plarr

5. The Voice of Our Name
The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

 

 

Noctuary
by Thomas Ligotti

Noctuary is the third volume of Thomas Ligotti’s horror stories to appear in a revised, definitive edition from Subterranean Press. The first two collections in this series, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (2010; 1986; expanded edition, 1989) and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (2011; originally published 1991), are now collector’s items. Like its predecessors, Noctuary received numerous plaudits from reviewers upon its initial appearance. According to Library Journal, Noctuary is “another colorful collection of horror stories–which spring on the unsuspecting reader the combination of supernatural characters, natural props, and ‘weird’ circumstanced.” As Booklist observed, “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 rich evocative tales of Noctuary–For those willing to immerse themselves in Ligotti’s world, the rewards are great.”

When an interviewer asked Ligotti the derivation of the word “noctuary,” he replied that it was the nocturnal counterpart of “diary,” that is, a journal of what occurs on a nightly timetable rather than during the light of day. Echoing the tenebrous tone of the book’s name are the section titles into which Noctuary is divided–Studies in Shadow, Discourse on Blackness, Notebook of the Night. Shadow, Blackness, Night: these are substance and signification of the themes of Ligotti’s works and the signature of gloom in which they are signed.

New to Noctuary are the tense pieces of the volume’s third section. Composed of nineteen dreamy entries, Notebook of the Night is a journal–or perhaps only excerpts of a greater work–of insidious exploits, delirious freaks, hymns to the void, esoteric rituals, and carnivals of the abyss. As an introduction to this and the other segments of Noctuary is “In the Night, in the Dark: A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction.” Perhaps the reader will fight guidance in the words of this meditation on what separates the aberrant from the norm, the diseased from the wholesome, and the night from the day.

 

Contents 

Foreword: In the Night, in the Dark
Part One: Studies in Shadow
The Medusa
Conversations in a Dead Language
The Prodigy of Dreams
Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel

Part Two: Discourse on Blackness
The Tsalal
Mad Night of Atonement
The Strange Design of Master Rignolo
The Voice in the Bones

Part Three: Notebook of the Night
The Master’s Eyes Shining with Secrets
The Inquisitor
New Faces in the City
Autumnal
“One May Be Dreaming
Suicide by Imagination
The Unfamiliar
The Career of Nightmares
The Premature Transfiguration
The Demon Man
The Puppet Masters
The Spectral Estate
Primordial Loathing
The Nameless Horror
The Mocking Mystery
The Interminable Equation
The Eternal Mirage
The Order of Illusion
Charnel House of the Moon
Ten Steps to Thin Mountain

 

Teatro Grottesco
by Thomas Ligotti

This collection features tormented individuals who play out their doom in various odd little towns, as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics. The cycle of narratives that includes the title work of this collection, for instance, introduces readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that ultimately engulf their lives. These are selected examples of the forbidding array of persons and places that compose the mesmerizing fiction of Thomas Ligotti.

Contents

Derangements
Purity
The Town Manager
Sideshow, and Other Stories
The Clown Puppet
The Red Tower
Deformations
My Case for Retributive Action
Our Temporary Supervisor
In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
The Damaged and the Diseased
Teatro Grottesco
Gas Station Carnivals
The Bungalow House
Severini
The Shadow, the Darkness

The Grimscribe’s Puppets
Edited by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

Contributing Authors: Livia Llewellyn, Daniel Mills, Michael Cisco, Kaaron Warren, Joel Lane, Darrell Schweitzer, Robin Spriggs, Nicole Cushing, Cody Goodfellow, Michael Kelly, Eddie M. Angerhuber, Jon Padgett, Mike Griffin, Richard Gavin, Scott Nicolay, Simon Strantzas, Paul Tremblay, Ally Bird, Jeff Thomas, John Langan, and Gemma Files.

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Thomas Ligotti is beyond doubt one of the Grandmasters of Weird Fiction. In The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., has commissioned both new and established talents in the world of weird fiction and horror to contribute all new tales that pay hoame to Ligotti and celebrate his eerie and essential nightmares. Poppy Z. Brite once asked, “Are you out here, Thomas Ligotti?” This anthology proves not only is he alive and well, but his extraordinary illuminations have proven to be visionary and fertile source of inspiration for some of today’s most accomplished authors.

List of tales:

Livia Llewellyn “Furnace” [5,800]
Daniel Mills “The Lord Came at Twilight” [3,950]
Michael Cisco “The Secrets of the Universe” [3,360]
Kaaron Warren “The Human Moth” [2,700]
Joel Lane “Basement Angels” [2,697]
Darrell Schweitzer “No Signal” [1,735]
Robin Spriggs “THE XENAMBULIST: A Fable in Four Acts” [3,369]
Nicole Cushing “The Company Town” [1,700]
Cody Goodfellow “The Man Who Escaped This Story” [8,490]
Michael Kelly “Pieces of Blackness” [3,750]
Eddie M. Angerhuber “The Blue Star” [2,970]
Jon Padgett “20 SIMPLE STEPS TO VENTRILOQUISM” [4,490]
Mike Griffin “Diamond Dust” [4,900]
Richard Gavin “After the Final” [3,100]
Scott Nicolay “Eyes Exchange Bank” [9,050]
Simon Strantzas “BY INVISIBLE HANDS” [6,200]
Paul Tremblay “Where We Will All Be” [4,900]
Ally Bird “Gailestis” [4,019]
Jeff Thomas “The Prosthesis” [4,835]
John Langan “Into the Darkness, Fearlessly” [10,499]
Gemma Files “OUBLIETTE” [8,424]

 

Reviewed by Lou Pendergrast on 12 October 2020