Ligotti was still learning his craft when this early anthology was published, and he had not yet perfected his cold, eccentric narrative voice or his talent for selecting only the most evocative and terrifying details. Many of these stories are pretty conventional, with just a hint of extra nastiness and a whiff of the terrors of the abyss. "The Frolic" and "Alice's Last Adventure" are examples of such transitional stories. Toward, the end of the book, however, Ligotti shows us some pieces in th...

This is the first published collection by contemporary American horror fiction writer Thomas Ligotti (born in 1953). To provide a sense of the richness of the author’s style and plot development, here are my comments on one of my favorite tales from the collection - as convoluted and multifaceted as an intricate Chinese box puzzle, Dream of a Manikin features a psychoanalyst writing a letter to his psychoanalyst wife regarding one of his patients, a young lady by the name of Amy Locher, the same...

I was tempted to give this book only four stars, because it's not quite as strong as later volumes like GRIMSCRIBE or NOCTUARY. But the fact remains that even when he's not at his best, Ligotti's work is head and shoulders above the vast majority of authors. Hence, five stars.I believe the stories in this collection can be roughly grouped in three tiers.At the top, I place "Vastarien" and "Masquerade of a Dead Sword"...two tales that can go toe-to-toe with anything else Ligotti's written. In the...

Ligotti is a master with words. He creates the mood he wants and lets you gently sink into the black waters of his stories rather than force you down. His writing is captivating, while the very nature of his subjects is haunting. Clearly influenced by Lovecraft and Poe, he doesn't seem to merely imitate them but takes the best of them and reshapes it into a form of his own. But...Apart from 2-3 of his stories, most of them were mediocre. Not bad, not exceptional. This tired me at some point, whi...

Ligotti is the true heir to Bruno Schulz's vision. An immaculate prose writer of unmatched creativity and dark wit. Few modern writers can pierce the veil of reality and mold it to their whims in a manner similar to either of these masters. The only reason they are not frequently spoken of in the same breath is because one had the misfortune of being relegated to an oft maligned and misunderstood genre, though I'd argue that Schulz was as much a horror writer in his own time as Ligotti is in our...

Ligotti often traffics in a realm of imagery I frankly occasionally find rather stale (that of masks, puppets, mannequins, etc), but, perhaps fittingly, he animates these old tropes with a palpable sense of dread and an arch, academic and darkly humorous tone that is entirely his own. A deeply exciting debut collection that has me looking forward to reading more.

4.5 because even though Ligotti is a master and a genius, one can still feel this is a debut. If I had to be objective I would probably rate it 4. Some elements are repetitive and echo throughout several stories in different variations (one could argue this is purposeful and achieves a thematic/stylistic unity), a few of the stories felt a bit lackluster but this might be due to the fact that not all of them pop out the same when gathered together like this. Still, the quality is extremely high

This is by far one of the best collections of supernatural horror that I've ever read. At first I was a little off put by Ligotti's flowery often-gothic language, but I got used to him playing with styles and using it to his advantage in exploring old horror tropes with new breaths of imagination. I got a lot of The King in Yellow vibes in that a frequent topic was whether or not madness was actual insanity or knowledge of a different plane of existence. Ligotti's stories are so original, that i...

What can I say about this book that hasn’t already been said? Songs of a Dead Dreamer is a heady dose of atmospheric dread, characters grasping onto sanity as they traverse the line in and out of reality. Forces in their locales often push them toward uncertainty and paranoia. If Songs of A Dead Dreamer were music, it would be the intricately heavy stuff that takes a few listens to get through the layers for the reward.

As you can see from the comments on individual stories below, I went up and down with this collection. Some stories I really enjoyed, others, I see now in retrospect, I wasn't motivated enough to comment on. (And it did take me 9 months to read them all.) Ligotti's prose style is pretty good--although I love Hemingway and Vonnegut and other similarly terse writers, it's nice to see a postmodern writer eschewing the style of the era for a more flowery approach to English prose. Still, Henry James...

Reminiscent of the music of Swans, in that much of its power is realized through its relentless adherence to the repetition of themes and imagery, this claustrophobic collection of horror stories from odd duck Thomas Ligotti features twenty tales that strive to demonstrate a view of reality as an absurd and purposeless existence, one in which the individual's autonomy is no more than the illusion of life that a marionette may enjoy at the end of its strings. No enlightenment awaits Liogtti's pro...

Because it's out-of-print (although a new edition, combined with Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, is due out in October), I paid $75 to own a copy of this-- the most I've ever spent for a book. Was it worth it? Hell yes. Did the price deter me from marking it up? Hell no; I've dog-eared and underlined like a maniac. My copy must have spent time incarcerated in a library, as it's laminated, stamped and tagged, making it look like I stole it. I like that. Now, to begin my long review of the twenty...

Ligotti is an acquired taste - sort of like Joy Division. The first time I read him I didn't think he was any thing special. Now, he's my favorite horror writer. He exemplifies the Lovecraftian ideal of atmosphere first, everything else second. Imagine a horror story about how to write a horror story - "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story". "Dream of a Mannikin, or the Third Person" is one of the first stories I read by him and had to reread several time before I got hooked. "Les Fleurs" and...

Creepy as fuck and wonderfully written. Ligotti’s stuff is extremely refreshing, as he’s less about scares and gross-outs and more about instilling a sense of existential dread. It took me forever to get through these stories because I couldn’t get too far into the collection without starting to feel unsettled as hell (and also because I’m not used to prose as challenging and rich as this.) Dream of a Manikin has to be one of the most disturbing and macabre stories I’ve ever read, it was like I

#reread Still a stunning read three decades later.

SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER (SoaDD) is now my second Ligotti short story collection and while I enjoyed it immensely, I feel as though GRIMSCRIBE (his later collection) is a bit stronger, story for story. I also think overall, Grimscribe's brightest embers (such as Harlequin, Shadow, etc...) smoldered a bit brighter than some of the best stories in SoaDD... but really... SoaDD was intensely enjoyable.Some key themes, explored by Ligotti, are of course directly related to the void regions of unrealit...

I had seriously thought that all the great horror classics had already been written years ago, until I ran into Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti. This collection of horror stories has a strange expressionistic slant, as if all the places of which the author writes resembled the sets of Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Although Ligotti is an American, the stories can almost be set anywhere at any time. There is not the fruitiness of Lovecraft's style -- though Ligotti has ofte...

I've wanted to reread Thomas Ligotti's fiction (all of it, in order) for a while now. Well, here we go. I'm reposting my original review below from about 5 years ago, not wanting to write a new one, but I will give some thoughts. Ligotti's first collection wasn't my favorite and still isn't, but I definitely saw things here which I didn't the first time around, so I'm raising the rating from four to five stars.I found myself liking some stories more than I did initially, perhaps because I read t...

Being Ligotti's first story collection, this has some strange tales of darkness with many colors and accents, with comparatively more philosophical and psychological overtones than Teatro Grottesco, which remains my most favorite collection (I've only read these two btw!).If compared with Teatro, then I've found this to be still somewhat "immature" state of his writing where he experiments with words and settings and themes; and Ligotti's stories are different from other writers in the way that'...

Earlier this year I had a chance to read two of the most recent projects by horror writer Thomas Ligotti -- contemporary corporate novella My Work Is Not Yet Done and his nonfiction primer on "pessimistic philosophies," The Conspiracy Against the Human Race -- and found both of them to be excellent, really dark and unique stuff that appealed to me as a non-fan of this genre. So I thought I'd take a chance and read up on a bunch of his short fiction too (Ligotti has never actually written a singl...