Wow, I enjoyed this way more a second time!Even though I haven't touched it since this time last year (or since I threw it in this short film I made!) somehow Ligotti's writing flowed much more easily for me this time.I mean last year was just not a good year for me. Still recovering from grief (it takes a loooooooong time), my brain was running a loop of precisely the type of ideas that fill this book. It wasn't the time to read something that told me, "You're actually one of the few non-crazy

Ligotti is a pessimist—and not some namby-pamby, equivocating, of course it will rain every day of my vacation! kind of doubting dude: Ligotti's pessimism is old school, pure, richly endowed with the ichor of nullity. Ligotti believes, firmly and avowedly, that, as the human race would have been better off never having come into existence in the first place, the most beneficial and sensible outcome for our species, as constituted at this particular point in the space/time continuum, would be to

Lighten up, Francis.I was very tempted to leave it at that, but I do have more to say.I should be the perfect audience for this book. I love Lovecraft's work, my worldview could best be summed up as "life is mostly pain, punctuated by moments of joy," and I'm congenitally pessimistic as was my father before me. At least, by the standard definition, but that's not far enough for Ligotti, who restricts the ranks of the true pessimist to those who believe that life is fundamentally not worth living...

Years of meditating and reading books on philosophy, psychology, years of lucid dreams and night terrors, do not make a person unique. But it is singularly unique to find what feels like your own thoughts reflected back at you when you didn't pen them. As I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, I had a strange feeling, as if Deja vu and vertigo had somehow been blended together. Had I read this before, if I hadn't written it? Yet that disturbing familiarity regards an utterly useless proce...

A remarkable if sometimes exasperating work of philosophy. Let me begin by saying that I agree with essentially all of the core assumptions of this book. As a Buddhist practitioner, I was especially moved by his treatment of suffering and of the Buddhist tradition, which I feel is mostly very perceptive, even if far from the platitudes of contemporary Buddhism. Further, the book spoke very directly to the sense of profundity I have occasionally experienced in the horror genre (HP Lovecraft and L...

Brilliant. Genius? Who can say? As for a review, the most respectful thing to do is to try to let the bruising from the punches to the face fade away and then complete a second reading. Literally stunning for me at times. Let's keep our heads up, keep turning pages, and I'll you see all out there on the field! (waves)

Darkest book I've ever read; and perhaps the most convincing. Highly recommended for all readers, except those with sanity or self-delusions left to lose.

Are you one of those hardcore True Detective fans held in thrall by Detective Rust Cohle's rants about the bleakness of the universe? Did you wonder where all that weird stuff was coming from? Here. From this book. That's where it was coming from. Sometimes even verbatim.This is an impressionistic survey by weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti of the bleakest practitioners of modern philosophy, the guys who make Cioran look like a stand-up comic and Schopenhauer and Camus like irresponsible polly...

The fundamental thesis of Ligotti's philosophical work, is that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS. The words malignantly and useless are capitalized because this is the most obvious reality, an absolute truth. Once the banal masks of idealized religiosity and morality are taken off, the real germ of life reveals itself. this germ is that life truly is MALIGNANTLY USELESS. We are essentially clockwork automatons, devoid of free will. Consciousness is an absurd mistake. Life is a deadly paradox. Our onl...

A disappointment but perhaps not an unexpected one. Thomas Ligotti happens to be one of the greatest exponents of uncanny fiction, equal to his earlier masters Poe and Lovecraft - but in small doses. We have already reviewed some of his short stories which are magnificently disturbing and thought-provoking but have also noted that he has difficulty in developing them to novella length.His art is that of the short story. This foray into non-fiction is little more than an opinionated, often repeti...

I read this because Nic Pizzolatto mentioned it in one of his interviews about books that influenced his writing for TRUE DETECTIVE.To be accurate, I should write that I "read" it. I found Ligotti's book to be unreadable: haranguing, desperate, and bloated. Once I realized that I couldn't stand to read the book cover-to-cover, I tried to read each section separately. Each time I started another section, I was simultaneously bored and irritated by the style, the cynicism, and the constant insiste...

Consider the following postulation: ‘Schopenhauer concurs that hypothesizing a thing-in-itself as the cause of our sensations amounts to a constitutive application and projection of the concept of causality beyond its legitimate scope, for the concept of causality only supplies knowledge when it is applied within the field of possible experience’. Now, imagine this psycho-babble oops, sorry, this aesthetic perception as a mode of transcendence, spread over 500 pages, and try reading it through.

Exasperating.DNF so far. I'll back, though.

The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.Remember when you were 16 and you thought too much about life and its implications that you wound up in a "dark valley", got so depressed and borderline-suicidal that you decided to leave the "valley" and never look back? Thomas Ligotti has built himself a nice house in that valley.To summarize the thesis of this non-fiction book/treatise: being alive is not alright, optimists are deceiving...

Whenever I have the misfortune of turning the television on and coming across Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss or another of their pop atheist peers. I hope that instead of again arguing their materialistic perspective by denouncing religion, they might actually get to the heart of the matter of what that denouncement means. They don't however. Instead, like all humans (materialistic and religious alike) they try to force their subjective experience on the objective and call it a day. The first

I found myself basically siding with Ligotti's against the cult of affirmationism, with one exception. I don't think the carnival has been going on quite long enough. I mean, have we really seen everything? Who among us really has the guts to say that they aren't at least remotely excited by the prospect of plumbing the ever more irredeemable depths of depravity that the future holds for our race? This book is not out to convert you, but it will leave profound lacerations on your consciousness.W...

If you're anything like me, Ligotti's tone in this peculiar nihilistic screed will creep into daily life. Your girlfriend's listening to celebrity gossip Youtube videos in bed? MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Having to wait for three trains before you can finally cram onto the subway? MALIGNANTLY USELESS. The difference in your pool skills between your second and your fourth beer? MALIGNANTLY USELESS.Is Ligotti a profoundly elegant writer? Yes. Does he successfully defend philosophical pessimism? Yes. Does...

Thomas Ligotti is currently the best writer of English prose. Cormac McCarthy was better till the detestable Border Trilogy, and maybe The Road is up there with his best. Until McCarthy tops The Road, however, the honor goes to Thomas Ligotti. It doesn't matter at all you've never heard of him: I believe he prefers it that way.I do not agree with the ... what? ... the anti-metaphysics of this, Ligotti's first nonfiction book. The fact I don't agree does not diminish the dark grandeur of this boo...

Neither Positive Nor Equivocal: The Malignant Uselessness of BeingFear is an instinctual response to threat common to all animals. Horror, the self-generation of fear without threat, is unique to human beings. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is an extended meditation on this remarkable fact. And its conclusions are even more remarkable: that the faculty we call consciousness, and consider as the apotheosis of evolutionary genetics, is profoundly destructive, not because we possess it but b...

Nudged up to five stars just for how damn readable it was....We are not ad idem on everything, not least because where he sees horror, I see the hilariously absurd, but he provides an excellent overview of the more extreme pessimistic position, and has introduced me to some very interesting thinkers of whose work I was unaware...Well worth a gander...