Standouts:"The Last Feast of Harlequin""The Spectacles in the Drawer""The Dreaming in Nortown""The Shadow at the Bottom of the World"

Not quite as good as Songs of a Dead Dreamer, but the highlights are some instant favorite horror stories.Highlights-The Last Feast of HarlequinThe GlamourMiss PlarrThe Shadow at the Bottom of the World

This collection is really my first full exposure to Ligotti. I certainly have read a story or two, but never a full collection. I think, to this point, I have never read a modern horror author that does what Ligotti does with his stories (particularly in the use of his prose style). The only modern author that leaves me feeling a bit tainted like Ligotti, is Laird Barron. Barron's stories just stick with you, often because of the monstrous things he does to his characters. Ligotti on the other h...

Seldom in this life do I meet anything that I feel an immediate connection with. Perhaps its that the suggestion to read this author came from one of my closest friends and one of the few people who "get me" in that profound way that few people do. Perhaps it's the fact that I feel Ligotti is the first true heir to the throne left empty on the Ides of March 1937. The writing of Thomas Ligotti fits perfectly into my skewed view of this futile existence. The stories collected in this book strike m...

I’ve decided to re-review this almost a year after reading it, because I’ve decided that Ligotti might just be one of the best authors of short stories that (most) people have never heard about.This isn’t something that I say very often: best. In order to explain myself, assuming that you haven’t already started ignoring me, I’m going to need to compare Ligotti to some other writers. We’ll start with what Ligotti is not; Stephen King. Now, most people know who Steven King is. If you’ve never rea...

Till now, Teatro was my favorite collection, and that still stands... well kind of...I'm feeling obliged to give it a 5-star rating... I'm not sure why on earth I rated Teatro a 4! Probably I've gone mad.When I first started this book, my senses as a reader werer telling me that it's somewhat inferior to the previous collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The first piece, "The Last Feast of Harlequin", was very good, but the immediate next stories in that section didn't make much impression on me....

This guy just came onto the weird fiction scene and beat everyone's asses. Completely eerie, the kind of book that makes me lament the loss of the word "queer," because that's the best word for it. In the old sense of the word. In the new sense of the word it's perfect for Anne Rice.

For me, the standouts in this collection were "The Last Feast of Harlequin" and "The Night School" -- but I didn't find myself disappointed by any of the tales. My understanding is that this is a reprint of a long out-of-print book. Ligotti wrote these stories many years ago. And yet, the horror field has yet to catch up with him. Brilliant stuff. Highly recommended.

The Last Feast of HarlequinAn academic’s discovery of a subterranean worm cult gives Ligotti a chance to showcase his anti-natalist views. The Spectacles in the DrawerLigotti’s anti-natalist views are on full display as a pair of glasses prove all mysteries are meaningless.Flowers of the AbyssDon’t go into the darkness beyond the darkness, or you might become an anti-natalist.Nethescurial Existence is the nightmare of a demonic demiurge, thus an anti-natalist philosophy is advisable.The Glamour...

Note that I read this collection immediately after Songs of a Dead Dreamer since they were bundled together. It’s possible that many of the negatives come from reading 440 big pages of Ligotti prose. Then again, I survived a longer book with prose more purple and the result was a novel so fantastic, I think it’s required reading for anyone who wants to understand existence and other big ideas.Ligotti has an odd problem with prose. Generally authors who rely on prose to deliver good fiction do it...

I think it's me, not Ligotti. Well, maybe it's him too. I'm not a great fan of endless-narrative-without-dialogues cosmic horror, although I've quite read and loved Lovecraft in my time. But Lovecraft is Lovecraft and Ligotti is Ligotti but, for some reason, he wants to be Lovecraft. I mean yes, his prose is haunting but his style isn't his own and I usually prefer to read the original, if possible. At all times, it felt like reading Lovecraft and that turned me off. If I wanted to read Lovecraf...

These have to be the least scary horror stories I have ever read. Way too much repetition and writing that reduces the impact of the horror than prolongs it.Most of the stories have the same formula. A first person protagonist who always sounds exactly the same, encounters either a person or an object who threatens damnation. Literally, they sound exactly the same even if they are a child-both the Library of Byzantium and Miss Plarr concern child protagonists in first person style who sound like...

“All around me invisible games had begun.”A thornier collection than it’s predecessor, more baroque and literary than arch and academic. It may lack the highs of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, but it makes up for it with a far tighter conceptual focus, all obscure therapies and esoteric teachings, dying kingdoms and dingy shops in dismal cities, worlds and visions beyond the veil. So, business as usual for the author, but presented in a far more novelistic-feeling way than it was in Dead Dreamer.

Re-reading this collection five years later I am once again impressed with everything -- the prose, the originality and the explorations of Ligotti's philosophy.I won't re-write my old review, but I know I enjoyed almost every story here more this time around than I seemed to originally. It's multi-dimensional writing you can turn over and over in your mind that improves with repeated reading. ==============This is intimidating, how do I even begin? Late last year I was completely blown away by

Incredible, this is what horror should be. All these stories are extremely unsettling and Ligotti's bleak existential world view really permeates each one. These stories are definitely of the cosmic horror variety as each one seems to be about some unknowable evil that defies description. I love that.

After bathing in the dark imagination of American contemporary horror fiction writer Tomas Ligotti’s first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, I was keen to read his second book of thirteen macabre yarns entitled Grimscribe. My experience did not disappoint – in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, absolutely first-rate, well-crafted bizarre and ghoulish narratives told by first-person narrators to make your hair stand on end and keep you up at night. As by way of example, I will focus on two ee...

Another collection of darkly evil short stories by the author of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works makes for great Halloween and Day of the Dead reading. Unlike H P Lovecraft, whom he superficially resembles, Thomas Ligotti sets his stories in a nonspecific time and place. There is an uneasy queasiness to his tales that is at the same time curiously satisfying to a devotee of the genre.Highly recommended.

Ligotti's second collection of short tales is a considerable advance on his first. I won't deny that Songs for a Dead Dreamer contains a number of effective stories, but the collection as a whole is uneven, and many of its most powerful effects occur in stories that are not in themselves successful. This is due primarily to an immaturity of style. Ligotti was not yet capable of fashioning a world that could contain his most characteristic phantasms, and many of his personal horrors appear to be

This book was brilliant from start to finish. I never get scared while reading horror but this got me scared shitless. So the atmosphere was there.When I pick up a horror book I have two criteria: for the atmosphere to be dreadful so that I can actually feel frightened and to enjoy the narration.Both were great here.I must change my rating and give it a 5 star because a lot of the stories are still vivid in my head. In a sense, the writers’ style reminds me of the legendary Edgar Allan Poe,

This is a superb collection of short stories - very spooky and creepy. Its not gory, just very atmospheric and lingers - particularly the story about 'The Scream'. Reviewrs often talk about his wok being like Poe and Lovecraft, and they would be right, just with a more modern setting. His language is excellent and complex and its a superb book to get your teeth into ;)