Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti (2006)

 This is the third collection by Ligotti I've sampled, and perhaps there's less to say here. This is a lot later on in his career, with the intervening titles often being currently available only in crazedly expensive limited editions, or insanely rare old paperbacks, making them also crazedly expensive. So who knows how the story unfolded, specifically? Here he has reached a place of virtuosity in terms of deft play between psychology and concept. Many of these are very satisfyingly clever. They occupy themselves with a lot less of what would be called horror tropes, and a lot more with states of mind, particularly among groups. But these are odd, slightly "off" groups, who are loners and eccentrics, with artistic leanings. They are taken to classic Ligotti territory, like almost abandoned towns, old gas stations, backstreet shopfronts which double as rarely-entered galleries, and so on, but there's a push here for the weird to be exemplified in peculiarities of mind and philosophy, and conceptual twists, rather than anything too monstrous. Look forward to the "missing" (bar a huge account balance) entries in the bibliography to be reinstated, so as to trace back. Only a novella and a philosophical non-fiction to go, I think.

Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (1991)

 Well, I'm a convert. This was published five years after his first collection. He seems to have settled into a more uniform mode in this one. The tone is one of American small and middle-sized towns, and of night. Some are lonelier and darker, some marked with the colours of downtown and carnival. The Lovecraftian part of him records a lot of this like an anthropologist of the less often touched parts of the secret soul. It also has the weightiness of that kind of prose, a formality. Then his Poe side takes up the heavy skein and thwacks it alive with something like poetry. It's a very involving mixture, though, like Lovecraft and Poe, it definitely survives better in small amounts. The image-making is shot through with shadows, and a weird kind of "bright murk". This is I'm guessing influenced by the artworks of horror during the period in which he grew up, or the design ethos of movies of that period - scarecrows under moonlight and so on. But his originality comes in, it seems to me, in a willingness to take that trope and extend it intellectually - we are led into refinements of mood and psychology which plumb a further sea little sailed upon. And it's this effort which marks him out for me - there are very few writers I've read from recent times who have the chutzpah to do this, to even want to do this. It's redolent of the intellectual appetite of writers of longer ago, who are my main fare - a crazily comforting thing to find that someone still "respects" that space - has the wish to go there. One other thing: I wonder if David Lynch was a fan. There's something about the "burnt people" in the last (2017) series of Twin Peaks, existing as blackened shadows buzzed alive with sporadic blasts of electricity in what appears an abandoned 50s small-town service station, emanating evil, which is very Ligotti, somehow.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti (1986)

 The date 1986 above reflects the volume's first publication. It seems to have had a very varied publishing history with different or augmented contents. I read the Penguin Classics recent reissue. First thing to say is that I loved the game I was invited to play as reader with these. Especially in the earlier ones, Ligotti set up an initial minimal scenario which gradually gathered elucidation - not overly unusual in essence, but there was a playfulness in only allowing certain key facets to emerge at preordained times so that the reader got wise to his intent only then. In a couple of this earlier group, 'Alice's Last Adventure' is a good example, there was an additional "meta" quality added which made the mixture even more tasty. Whether he has different modes according to moods, or whether these earlier ones were indeed written first and represent youthful work, I don't know. Because the later ones had less of this quality. One thing which unites them all is a delight in establishing a crepuscular tone. Shifting shadowiness, a sense of not knowing the intent of somewhat inscrutable, often eccentric, often near silent, characters. He alternates between relatively straightforward, though formal, prose and the high scintillations of Lovecraft and Poe, his main influences and most obvious predecessors. Like Lovecraft, this is occasionally vastly overegged. One thing here is a question: does this tendency veer some of this material into pastiche territory? There's definitely a feeling of "this is likely not his natural language" about it, like a striving for their effects. But I feel as though I can forgive him that, because the flavour of his inventions is so powerful. What droops the later stories a little for me at least is a sense sometimes of incompleteness - they are presumably efforts at establishing a mood and enjoying some (admittedly fascinating) plot elements, feeling that the necessity for rounding out can be dispensed with. The reader could feel a little cheated I think - I was disappointed at having to shrug at certain endings. There is an undeniable allegiance to dream-states here, which maybe explains some of this, although the completeness of the early stories would indicate that he's well able to smith this into richer metal. He's superb at that inchoate feeling which comes in the grey-bits-between-ness of dreaming, where locales are shadowy and loom with emotion and significance, and emotions become embodiments of locales, also where there is uncertainty of knowing why shifting events are unfolding as they are, and the place of the main character's emotions in either generating them, or responding to them. There is often concurrent philosophising about the unreal which I find less thrilling. The only other thing to mention is the fact that this is indeed a Penguin Classic (the black ones, not the Modern Classics). For an author who was very little known broadly before this publication, it is an odd step for Penguin - goodness knows what their rationale is for inclusion in this series, with Augie March and some Graham Greenes also in (that I know of). The Modern Classics would seem the right place for all. (But they agreed to Morrissey's autobiography entering the lists a few years ago - so who knows? Maybe he disrespects ideas of canon and insisted that if they were to have it, it would have to be there, as a satirical stab. And they were so desperate for his book, they agreed? Why?) But anyway, the window-dressing is not the story here; here's an intriguing writer.