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A collection of horror fiction turns the abstract matter of dreaming moments into vivid and compelling nightmares

Running the gamut of modern horror fiction, this collection of twenty tales ranges from the domestic terrors of "The Frolic" and "Aunt Elise" to the exotic nightmares of "Masquerade of a Dead Sword" and "The Lost Art of Twilight"

A gruesome scientist and addict of the paranormal shares his encounters with mad characters and paranormal events, including the Shadow at the Bottom of the World; the Last Feast of Harlequin; the mystics of Muelenberg; and Fr. Sevich, the priest from the old country

This is number 12 of a selection of authors copies printed for Thomas Ligotti and Harry Morris. That is, this is not one of the 500-copy edition published for sale. The number is printed in red to distinguish it from the regular state of the book, and this is so noted on the signature page of the volume. Otherwise, this book is identical to the state published for public sale. For further info, see centipede.com/horror/agonizing.html. This item is being sold by the author, Thomas Ligotti, and on request I will personally inscribe it to the buyer or whomever the buyer chooses.

This collection of horror stories, many previously unpublished, includes "The Medusa," "Conversations in a Dead Language," and "Mad Night of Atonement"

This is scarce Ligotti title that was out of print upon publication. Cream buckram-covered boards with front and rear cover illustrations. Contents are four short stories in the fantastical horror vein of Lovecraft: "His shadow shall rise to a higher house", "The bells will sound forever", "A soft voice whispers nothing", and "When you hear the singing, you will know it is time". The book is accompanied by a CD of music by Stephen Stapleton of Current 93, which is the suggested appropriate aural ambience for reading the stories.

Thomas Ligotti is often cited as the most curious and remarkable figure in horror literature since H.P. Lovecraft. Celebrated for his exceptionally grotesque imagination and facility as a prose writer, he is a five-time recipient of the most prestigious awards in horror literature. This fact is unusual in that Ligotti's work does not display the traits which have come to be associated with contemporary horror - sympathetic heroes, settings in the everyday world, and good versus evil scenarios. Instead, he has followed a literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe, portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. The stories collected in Teatro Grottesco, for instance, feature tormented individuals who play out there doom in various odd little towns for which Ligotti is noted as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics. The cycle of narratives that include the title work of this collection introduces the readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that threaten their lives and their sanity. In other tales, characters live in the shadow of menacing forms and forces that ultimately envelop them in the most perverse and deranged destinities. The 'funny town' of 'The Town Manager', the 'medicine shop' of 'The Clown Puppet', and the foggy terrain 'across the border' of 'Our Case for Retributive Action' and 'Our Temporary Supervisor' are among the venues that close in on those fated to exist within their precincts. These are selected examples of the bleak array of persons and places that compose the fiction of Thomas Ligotti. As one critic has written, 'Ligotti is wonderful and original; has a dark vision of a new and special kind, a vision that no one has had before him.'

Second printing, 200 pages. Full color wrap-around cover and interior black & white frontis by Harry O. Morris. Contains the stories "I Have A Special Plan For This World" and "The Nightmare Network" and the unpublished novella "My Work Is Not Yet Done". Winner of the 2002 International Horror Guild and Horror Writer's Association awards.

Chap Book. Signed by Author. Limited to 350 signed and numbered sotfcover chapbooks and SOLD OUT at the publisher. Signed by Author. Sideshow and Other Stories is at once the story of a writer who has reached a crisis point in his own writing, and his encounters with another, older writer who he comes to regard as his lost literary father. Sideshow and Other Stories also contains five stories by this older writer, as well as notes, uncollected phrases, of a sixth story with the apparent working title of Sideshow. CONTENTS: Foreword, The Malignant Matrix, Premature Communicati on, The Astronomic Blur, The Abyss of Organic Forms, The Phenomenal Frenzy, Afterword.

Thomas Ligotti’s Death Poems is a curious little book, a collection of morbid poetry by the renowned writer of intense and literary tales of supernatural horror.... The book is a diminutive hardcover, carefully designed, with gilt-edged paper bound between marbled endpapers, and was limited to 333 copies. [spamula.net]

Author Signed & number edition.

The mind-bending universe of horror master Thomas Ligotti awaits in another graphic adaptation of his haunting work. Enter a sphere where bizarre gas station carnivals serve as the first stop on the road to oblivion, a malevolent puppet steals people's identities, a deranged chemist engages in horrific experiments, and nameless beings skulk about in a stone tower, waiting to envelop the unsuspecting into the nebulous reaches of unreality. Ligotti's world is a thoroughly modern one where both identity and reality are fleeting, and nothing is truly as it appears to be. Four more of Ligotti's arresting tales are adapted into fine graphic literature by famed creators Stuart Moore, Joe Harris, Vasilis Lolos ( The Last Call ), Bill Sienkiewicz ( Elektra: Assassin ), Toby Cypress ( Killing Girl ), and Nick Stakal ( Criminal Macabre: My Demon Baby ), featuring all-new introductions to each story by Thomas Ligotti.

Often at the conclusion of an author interview, a question is posed, one that allows the subject to announce or promote forthcoming projects and publications. In the case of Thomas Ligotti, the response has invariably been to the effect that he never has any idea what he is going to produce in the future, if anything. Since he began publishing in the early 1980s, this answer has perhaps seemed somewhat disingenuous. Some may have thought that it was an affectation or diversionary tactic. After all, books under his name have since appeared on a somewhat regular, if not exactly prolific, schedule. But as the years went by, it became more and more apparent that Ligotti's output was at best haphazard. A chapbook here, a slim or full-fledged story collection there, a book of poetry or unclassifiable prose out of nowhere, and then at some point a quasi-academic statement of his philosophical ideas and attitudes. Such a scattered crop of writings is not unheard-of, but for one who toils in the genre of horror, whose practitioners are commonly hard at work on a daily basis, it does seem as paltry as it is directionless. Accordingly, the present volume is another unexpected contribution to Ligotti s desultory offerings. And no one could be as surprised by its appearance as he was. As anyone knows who has followed his interviews and obsessions as they appear in his fiction, Ligotti must take his literary cues from a lifetime of, let us say, whimsical pathologies. Other authors may suffer writer's block. In the present case, the reason may be dubbed 'existence block,' one that persisted for some ten years. This is less than an ideal development for anyone, but for a word-monger it can spell the end. And yet the end did not arrive. During 2012, it seemed that it might in the form of a sudden collapse and subsequent hospitalization prefigured--one might speculate--by the abdominal crisis suffered by the character Grossvogel in Ligotti's story 'The Shadow, The Darkness.' Yet like the agony endured by the aforementioned figure, the one in question led only to a revitalization of creativity. This revitalization may not be exactly spectacular, but all the same here it is. Throughout Ligotti's 'career' as a horror writer, many of his stories have evolved from physical or emotional crises. And so it was with the surgical trauma that led to the stories in The Spectral Link, an event that is marginally mentioned in the first of these stories, 'Metaphysica Morum.' In the second story, 'The Small People,' Ligotti returns, although not precisely in the usual fashion, to his fixation with uncanny representations of the so-called human being. Having nearly ceased to exist as he lay on the surgeon s table, the imposing strangeness of the nature and vicissitudes of this life form once again arose in his imagination. So what project and publications are forthcoming from Thomas Ligotti? As ever, not even he knows.

Two terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” ( The Washington Post ) Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer , and his second, Grimscribe , permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction.  Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels. Ligotti’s stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness of the abyss below. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The majority of the pieces in The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, and Other Gothic Tales feature characters and storylines that have previously made appearances, sometimes many times over, throughout the history of supernatural horror. This is not unusual. Like cannibals or vampires, authors have fed off the flesh and blood of one another’s creations in various ways. Even if the intent is not monstrous or malign in the manner of the aforementioned beings, this practice is as old as literature itself. In the early 1980s, Thomas Ligotti began exercising his auctorial right to revive familiar figures from the ancient literary line. Naturally, those he selected belonged to the lineage of his chosen genre, that is, horror fiction. Among them were the physical freaks fashioned by mad scientists, including those in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and the distinguished man of parts known only as Frankenstein’s monster. As is commonly the case with horror writers, Ligotti displays a tendency to sympathize with the miscreations that emerged from Moreau’s and Frankenstein’s laboratories rather than with their creators. Nevertheless, as an artist of horror, he was also bound to the signal emotion of his genre. The solution to these this seeming conflict was to depict the dreadfulness of the misguided efforts of the fictional scientists—who, after all, were pitifully mad—and to make the awful fates of all concerned more awful still. One critic described the Ligotti’s revisionary designs in The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein as amounting to “an apotheosis of pain.” Seemingly this was the case, even though others regarded the book as no more than a playful diversion. If the endings of the originals were quite terrible, those of these new tellings attempt renderings that are even more terrible. As with the physical horrors of the section titled “Three Scientists,” whom Ligotti gave an extra turn on the rack, those of such metaphysical aberrations as Dracula, the Wolf Man, sundry malicious revenants, and other-dimensional critters and phantasms as devised by Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft also became the source of nightmares with as much pain and tragedy as the present writer could put into them. In addition to the deranged or diabolical actors in stories well-known to seekers after horror, Ligotti has provided newly fabricated accounts to express a greater variety of pain. Much in the style of the older agonies, these take the reader into realms of pathos that may also be found elsewhere in his published work of the same period. As an addendum, it should be said this edition The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, and Other Gothic Tales contains the revised and definitive incarnations of earlier versions of these works as they appeared in Fantasy Macabre, Grimoire, and other little magazines of horror, the Silver Scarab edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1985), and the 1994 Silver Salamander collection of the same name.