If someone who either knows me or knows what I’m doing recommends a certain book or author, it rarely turns out to be far off the mark. One terrific recent recommendation, by a casual reader over at Voidpunk, was Hodgson’s The Night Land; another, by one of my students, was Thomas Ligotti.
As for the latter, I did some bibliographic work today, which is always tricky with shorter genre fiction that lives predominantly in magazines, anthologies, and collections, often with different reprint titles and/or revisions. Nevertheless, I found out that during the last months I’ve devoured every single one of Ligotti’s horror stories, novelettes, and novellas, except for The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales, a collection of “retold” classic horror tales that he wrote between 1982 and 1994.
If you like horror stories in general, stories that often touch upon Mythos horror, and highly imaginative, unsettling existential horror to boot, then Ligotti is for you. The more so if you have a predilection for masks and masquerades and cheerful crowds at carnivals and festivals, all vaguely menacing to begin with, which regularly appear in his stories from the mid-eighties on. Plus, there’s the story collection My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror that might make you want to rethink your life choices.