This book did, in all honesty, give, or at least contribute to, nightmares. The sheer viciousness of the evil acts of the protagonist of the main novella might be enough to do that for some people ... but the real nightmare, as always with Ligotti, lies in his dark vision of existence.My more considered opinion on Thomas Ligotti's place in contemporary culture is to be found elsewhere - http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/... - but this book adds to the canon.The book is slim - really it is a n...

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything.This is the third collection by...

I don't read much horror. I mean, just look at the much-neglected horror shelf at the back of any bookstore, dominated by Anne Rice, Stephen King, Dean Koontz. Nothing much too alluring. But as someone who is very interested in horror cinema, it seems strange to me that outside of the standard Poe and Lovecraft and a few Clive Barker stories, I give the stuff such a wide margin (please suggest). So when I ran across Ligotti, who draws comparison to Bruno Schulz and Thomas Bernhard, Kafka and Bur...

Thomas Ligotti is as close as I come to a living literary hero. Now that I have learned we share a common loathing, however, I find him more sympathetic but less heroic than before. Yes, Thomas Ligotti and I both loathe meetings, and--unfortunately--Ligotti's visceral loathing of meetings is evident on almost every page of this book.In 2001, after 23 years, Ligotti retired from his position as an editor with The Gale Group (publisher of research volumes for schools and libaries, best known for I...

This was my first Ligotti read. Don’t know what took me so long. He definitely has his own style which really worked for me in the first and third stories in this collection of corporate terror tales. The second story “I Have A Special Plan For This World”, was a bit of a chore to get thru and seemed to be a series of super long run-on sentences, stream of consciousness style. The main story and the namesake for the collection was my favorite of the three stories. The voice was strong and drawn,...

Corporate small-mindedness, corporate politics, corporate backstabbing - the chap above appears to have been on the receiving end of such swinish behavior.What will he do now? Go postal, get himself a gun and return to his office on a murderous rampage? Or, much more likely, just think about extracting revenge but simply leave the building and move on to his next job.In My Work Is Not Yet Done, master of horror fiction Thomas Ligotti has Frank Dominio deal with such corporate swinishness by taki...

Yes, this is a five-star book...I've always held that Teatro Grottesco is my favorite collection by Ligotti, and in which he's at his darkest and peakest state of his craft and maturity both as a writer and as a storyteller. And here I'm again, blown away by nightmares and horrors that I savored to the last period.Yes this stands as my second most favorite collection by Ligotti, and also one of the best works I've read in my meagre timeline as a reader.The same haunting prose and rendering that

I didn't know whether Ligotti could live up to the impressively high standards that he attained in Teatro Grottesco but fortunately he did. I am once again humbled by this man's brilliance. This is precisely the kind of thing I'm looking for in horror; smoothly, eloquently written prose with creeping unease that makes one tremble in the face of the universe and the unseen that hide in its shadows.Ligotti presents a starkly atheistic, cynical view of life and the universe. If asked whether the gl...

I don’t think you’re going to like this book. Here’s the thing. Thomas Ligotti is one of my favourite modern horror writers, but he does not work very hard to be liked by the average reader. His stories are the concentrated expression of a personal philosophy which goes beyond bleak. Most eloquently expressed in his book ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’, it is something not often found in mainstream fiction for the simple reason that it isn’t the kind of thing most people want to read. Mo...

Pearls to SwineThere is a peculiar aspect of corporate sociology that never seems to get discussed or analyzed - any lack of ambition for status and promotion by an employee is perceived as a subversive act. I suspect the reason for such a perception is that a lack of ambition connotes an absence of loyalty, or at least respect, for the collective enterprise. The insufficiently motivated are feared for what they might not do as well as for what they might do, namely, the unexpected. Ligotti unde...

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Regular readers will remember that I recently read the new In the Mountains of Madness by W. Scott Poole, which is not just a biography of horror writer HP Lovecraft but also an examination of the "Lovecraftian" culture that has built up around his work since his death; and that got me interested not o...

Just never gets off the ground. I found the angst of the main character to be, well, juvenile. The author obviously has issues with the corporate world or he is trying to project something... but it doesn't work for me. The main character garnered nothing but negatives from me - first in his reactions and lack of accountability to himself, and then , even worse, by just quitting. Quitting everything. The "I have decided to die and take everyone with me" motif is just... boring. I didn't find the...

This is a grim, sad, violent book, which suffers a bit from scattershot plotting that seems to take the story in arbitrary directions, without tying up loose narrative ends.Still, the rendering of the tale is what helps it overcome structural slips, as no one writes horror fiction like Thomas Ligotti writes horror fiction, especially set in areas of urban, moral, and capitalistic decay.A pitch black gut punch to optimism and corporate culture.

What a bleak, dark tale of corporate culture and the ways in which the bugs of the corporate world go about surviving day-in and day-out. I can't say that I am going to recommend this, but if you have a hankering for dark material, search no further. I need to read some more of his stuff before I can fully state if I even like this author...to me, that says something. Nightmares, here I come. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Okay, I've had some time to think

Thomas Ligotti is the best "horror" writer at work today, though not many people have heard of him because he chooses to publish with small presses. But to pigeon-hole him as horror is certainly a disservice, as if he and Stephen King could even remotely be grouped together. King has his place and can be scary and entertaining, but Ligotti is entertaining and not only spooky scary but philosophically scary as well. He's in possession of about as bleak a vision as is possible while still retainin...

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to burst out laughing when reading Thomas Ligotti, but I confess that I did on several occasions while reading "My Work is Not Yet Done". Let me explain why.I discovered Ligotti's work last year, with the "Teatro Grottesco" collection (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), and I really liked it: his prose is wonderful, and he creates amazingly gritty, cloying and paranoid tales of weird cosmic horror - which I love. "My Work Is Not Yet Done" was next on m...

There were three stories in this book, of which titular and first story was the longest, and the most offensive. Ligotti's attempt to wring shock value out of various issues, including rape and eating disorders was disgusting, at least to me. The whole first story was an angsty revenge fantasy that dragged on for much too long. Ligotti somewhat redeemed himself with the second two stories though. The second, "I Have A Special Plan For This World" was less focused than the first story, but also m...

Up until this morning this was in line for the "best thing I've ever read in my life", but since the main narrative MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE kind of ended in a predictable whimper, I'll only say this: MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE: THREE TALES OF CORPORATE HORROR is just one of the best things I've read in 2015. Whoever calls himself a horror fan and hasn't read Thomas Ligotti yet is like a man saying he likes painting despite looking at the same wall of the same museum for years.The man is a universe

MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE SUMMARIZED IN PICTOGRAMS MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE SUMMARIZED IN BORING OLD WORDS4.0 stars. This is a bleak, bizarre and wonderfully original story that I thought I would have real trouble describing in a way that conveys the “unique feel” of the book. Then, as I was contemplating visual aids for my review, the images above popped into my head and I thought...That's pretty much it!!! Still, I will do my best to explain my weird picture equation. 1. Say Hello to Dilber

One of the most sinister terms in the English language in my mind is "corporate culture." The gruesomeness lies in the fact that the dehumanization is covered up by superficial banality. The anxiety comes with the expectation that one is to be satisfied, nay elated, at one's lot in life, even when one's prospects for any kind of real joy or satisfaction become narrower and narrower. Ligotti's characters, well, they do the Ligotti thing and bug out in decaying cities and cavernous fluorescent-lit...