Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

448 pages

English language

Published 2015 by Penguin Classics.

ISBN:: 978-0-14-310776-7
OCLC Number:: 900623546

(11 reviews)

Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

Ligotti’s stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness of the abyss below.

1 edition

Mysteriarch 📖 reviewed Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (Penguin Classics)

Great collection

4 stars

As expected of a short story collection, the quality varies a bit, but skews to the good side. All the by now classic Ligotti elements are here: moody nihilism, crooked cities, the futility of... anything really, the trapping of illusion such as masks and manikins,... And throughout the idea of mental illness, not as a ruinous consequence of occult knowledge but as a normal way to deal with the world as it is. Some of the highlights for me were: - Drink to Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes - The Lost Art of Twilight - Dr. Locrian's Asylum - The Sect of the Idiot - The Music of the Moon - The Last Feast of the Harlequin - Nethescurial - The Night School

Fardels Bear reviewed Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (Penguin Classics)

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

5 stars

Thomas Ligotti's stories are influenced by H.P. Lovecraft and Kafka but he goes far beyond their wildest imaginings. His protagonists exist in worlds enshrouded in mystery. Sometimes they are seekers after arcane truths, sometimes ordinary people living gray lives in gray, menacing landscapes. But just out of sight in the fog there are monsters to which they will surely be introduced. It's at this point that Ligotti takes us behind the sideshow freaks of predictable horror fiction and shows us the real existential horror. These are, without a doubt, the most disturbing stories I've ever read.