Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

Other authorsJeff VanderMeer (Foreword)
Paperback, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Collection

Publication

Penguin Classics (2015), Edition: Reprint, 466 pages

Description

Fiction. Horror. Literature. Short Stories. HTML: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.… (more)

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User reviews

LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha
This volume collects Thomas Ligotti's first two books of short fiction: Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1985) and Grimscribe: His Life and Works (1991), with a new introduction by Jeff VanderMeer. These stories are all in the vein of supernatural horror, but with a distinctive tenor of pessimistic
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surrealism. VanderMeer notably compares Ligotti to Franz Kafka, Angela Carter, and David Lynch.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is divided into three sections: "Dreams for Sleepwalkers," "Dreams for Insomniacs," and "Dreams for the Dead." Each of these ends with a story which involves critical reflexivity regarding the horror genre: "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story," "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Horror," and "Vastarien," respectively. This first collection shows many of the tropes that Ligotti uses to communicate disquiet and the uncanny: puppets, masks, vegetable growth, insects, and others. The central section "Dreams for Insomniacs" has a few tales that work in well-defined weird subgenres, such as the Christmas ghost story of "The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise," the vampire story in "The Lost Art of Twilight," and sword & sorcery in "Masquerade of a Dead Sword."

"The Sect of the Idiot," opening with a quote from The Necronomicon, shows Ligotti's familiarity with the Lovecraftian corpus and its virtues, but is neither a pastiche nor an instance of Yog-Sothothery per se. More Lovecraftian in its overall texture is the longest Grimscribe story "The Feast of Harlequin," which is overtly dedicated to HPL. The things that most tie Ligotti's work to this predecessor are a preoccupation with dreams, a philosophical pessimism, and a general effort to portray the violation of metaphysical norms.

Ligotti's occasional representations of contemporary occultism and secret societies are highly credible, despite the anti-naturalism of his style. He affords addictive tomes, obscure ceremony, and exotic drugs, often with libidinal contexts/subtexts. Like Lovecraft, he prefers his grimoires to be as invented as his characters, but he does show a familiarity with actual occult tradition by invoking Austin Osman Spare (in "In the Shadow of Another World"). The magic employed by sorcerers in these stories is sometimes grounded in powerful hypnotic suggestion.

The stories of Grimscribe are all told in the first person by unnamed narrators, and an introduction establishes the conceit that these are received texts, drawn from a pool of consciousness through an authorial function personified by Ligotti as "Grimscribe." These are then grouped into "Voices" characterizing the specific narrators, such as "The Voice of the Demon" (culpable narrators) and "The Voice of the Child" (juvenile narrators). The final section "The Voice of Our Name" contains only the single story "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World." This last tale seems especially suited to seasonal reading, for those who want an elegant text to instill horror into Hallowe'en observances.

I would be hard-pressed to select a favorite from this book. There is not a dud among the 33 stories assembled here.
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LibraryThing member poetontheone
The thing I loved most about Ligotti's uncanny and unnerving short story collection Teatro Grottesco is that it made this world seem otherworldly in the most insidious ways and made the mundane into the horrific. This compendium of earlier work, however, feels like it relies on easy formulas and
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canned weirdness that have been done before and done much better. I'd heard praise of these collections in the same breath as Teatro Grottesco so I'd thought I'd be in for a similar experience. Some of the themes are similar, but they are executed in the most expected and obvious ways. These stories border on juvenilia, published by Ligotti in his thirties and written who knows how long before then, yet these stories are praised as vehemently as "The Red Tower" or "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land". In genre fiction, there is a lot of really bad writing, so even Ligotti's average or mediocre work seems somewhat polished by that standard. A few stories here like "The Frolic" or "The Night School" reminded me why I love his material, but in comparing the bulk of these collections to his later stories there is no contest.
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LibraryThing member TobinElliott
Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real. And to suffer a solitary madness seems the joy of paradise when compared to the extraordinary condition in which one's own madness merely emulates that of the world.

So...Thomas friggin' Ligotti...

Damn.

I
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took two long months to go through this book's 31 stories, because I realized very early on that Ligotti's subject matter and narrative style were not the same as most authors. This was not a book to be chewed through, but instead to be consumed in small, careful bites, savouring not just each story on its own, but virtually every carefully constructed sentence.

I don't know that I'd necessarily call this horror fiction. There's absolutely horror elements strewn through here. But there's also fantasy and perhaps a touch of science fiction, with a dollop of Lovecraftian cosmic horror mixed in to add a little spice.

Honestly, if I were to tag Ligotti's particular genre as anything, I'd simply term it "weird fiction"...because it's certainly weird.

There's not necessarily a lot going on in a Ligotti story. Don't look for action, or fight scenes, or love scenes, because there are none. Instead, his stories are home to very troubled individuals who have to go through situations and come to some sort of quiet, but impactful realization. But the settings they go through these situations in is what truly makes this weird. At times, the world seems just like ours, only he may shine a light on a darkened, previously ignored corner we hadn't noticed before. Other times, you've never experienced a world like this, or a house like this, or a person like this.

"We sleep...among the shadows of another world. These are the unshapely substance inflicted upon us and the prime material to which we give the shapes of our understanding. And though we create what is seen, yet we are not the creators of its essence. Thus nightmares are born from the impress of ourselves on the life of things unknown. How terrible these forms of specter and demon when the eyes of the flesh cast light and mold the shadows which are forever around us. How much more terrible to witness their true forms roaming free upon the land, or in the most homely rooms of our houses, or frolicking through that luminous hell which in pursuit of psychic survival we have name the heavens. Then we truly waken from our sleep, but only to sleep once more and shun the nightmares which must ever return to that part of us which is hopelessly dreaming."

Through the two months of reading these strange and wonderful (and I mean "wonderful" in the truest meaning of the word...these stories are full of wonder) stories, I struggled with how to describe Ligotti's writing. His lexicon is massive, and he busts out words I've never read before...but they're always the precisely right word. Always.

But it's more than that.

There's horror authors who come at a story like a serial killer to their victim, hacking and slashing, ripping and tearing, with no thought of finesse or subtlety. Probably a Graham Masterton type.

There's horror authors who come at a story like a butcher. They're still cutting, but now there's more expertise, more finesse, but it still gets messy. But you'll end up with some prime cuts. Probably someone like Joe R. Lansdale's horror stuff, or Skipp and Spector, back when they still liked each other.

Then there's the horror author surgeons. Now there's a lot of skill involved. There's subtlety, and there's true purpose. Their cuts are precise, and there's no wasted movements. Think Stephen King, Clive Barker, or Jack Ketchum.

And then there's Ligotti. He's the Hannibal Lecter of horror authors. He's got the requisite background knowledge and skill that he doesn't need to make a single cut. He cuts by getting into your mind. He flays with the precision of the words and thoughts not only that he uses, but that he puts into your mind, where they'll ricochet like small bits of targeted shrapnel. And if he does decide to actually cut, he has the most expensive instruments. The sharpest. And the steadiest hand. And when he cuts, he'll leave you forever changed. The scars won't be visible, but they'll always be felt.

That's what his writing is like. These stories, this author, are not to be read. These stories are to be experienced.

Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world.
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LibraryThing member aadyer
A collection of well regarded but none the less, early work by Ligotti, that deals with a variety of macabre subjects. He has a style reminiscent of Nabokov but also of a form of higher literature than most Cthhulhu fans are used to. Literate, and in the most part, engaging me some these tales are
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truly haunting, with some very unpleasant but highly memorable plots and situations. For those with an interest in weird fiction, his is a collection not be missed, but if you're new to the game, then this probably isn't the place to start. Haunting, truly is the word.
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LibraryThing member sunil_kumar
I've already read both the collections separately and I thought I'd read this to celebrate the fact that they are now considered classics. I really don't have much to say about Ligotti at this point. He is a beast of his own unlike anyone else out there, piling adjectives and descriptions on top of
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each other and suffocating you with them. Conjuring haunting dream-like imagery that stays with you for days. I could go on, but I'll stop.
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LibraryThing member sunil_kumar
I've already read both the collections separately and I thought I'd read this to celebrate the fact that they are now considered classics. I really don't have much to say about Ligotti at this point. He is a beast of his own unlike anyone else out there, piling adjectives and descriptions on top of
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each other and suffocating you with them. Conjuring haunting dream-like imagery that stays with you for days. I could go on, but I'll stop.
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LibraryThing member meznir
Ligotti writes stories you have to read one at a time, then perhaps re-read, to really understand and feel all the nuances, twists and turns. One of my new favorites.
LibraryThing member elucubrare
I feel that I should explain my rating on this one. Part of it is technical: I gave his prose the benefit of the doubt until about three quarters of the way through, when it became clear that he wasn't being slightly stilted on purpose and that that was just the style he thought was appropriate to
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horror.

I have noticed that certain experiences are left to languish in the corners of life, passed by like waifs on the street, as if they should be dissuaded from circulating too freely among legitimate persons.

That's overwritten and faux-deep. "Legitimate persons" especially sounds as though he's reaching for eloquence on a shelf just beyond his arms' length.

Part of it is philosophical: was there a consistent philosophy, besides maybe "things are bad", in the book?

Part of it is that I don't think anything happens in any of these stories. He has great predecessors in this genre, Poe and Lovecraft, but both of them had better, or at least more interesting, prose.

And part of it is a softer thing that I might call emotional: it's silly to talk about "the" point of fiction, but at least one of the points is to cause a reaction in the reader, and, whether it's a fault in me or in the text, I don't think I had a single one over however many pages this was.
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LibraryThing member datrappert
Ligotti writes very well. The best stories here are very good indeed, but like many collections of horror stories, they shouldn't all be read at once. As I proceeded into the second volume here (Grimscribe), I started to notice a sameness in the themes. Ligotti is always writing about hidden
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horrors, and the characters encounter them in a number of creative ways, but in the end it all amounts to the same thing. The obvious influence here is Lovecraft; however, Ligotti's writing is much more refined. Although he does like to use a wide vocabulary including some unusual words, his writing is always under control. It always has a tone that invites the reader in--but again--don't read these all in a row or your pleasure will definitely be reduced.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2015

ISBN

0143107763 / 9780143107767
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