Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

(Online library) Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

R8tet34MC Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe GEJj0BtTO QT-63013 pZ5DJkfcU US/Data/Literature-Fiction pUnJTlriO 4/5 From 445 Reviews yKG5hP0IC Thomas Ligotti Fh1lqXRWQ ePub | *DOC | audiobook | ebooks | Download PDF m5p5LM28P sA2CWr1Nn 1UwNx4n54 IHgTGAqbp i1OiWiWAk 6P0NXeC1u 4IS6r51l6 OY5EVTGck 71 of 75 people found the following review helpful. Nihilism For MarionettesBy 0UVIS1GBU Jonathan StoverSongs of a Dead Dreamer (With these contents 2010) by SzmLxI3xv Thomas Ligotti, in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2015). r0TIw7NM6 Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer; containing the following stories:The Frolic ASquJfMD2 (1982)Les Fleurs (1981)Alice's Last Adventure (1985)Dream of a Manikin k7m2XDlHO (1982)The Nyctalops Trilogy, consisting of The Chymist (1981), Drink to Me C5OCOFEPQ Only with Labyrinthine Eyes (1982), and Eye of the Lynx (1983)Notes on the InWeUB1vv Writing of Horror: A Story (1985)The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of LAs5xb50U Possession in Old Grosse Pointe (1983)The Lost Art of Twilight (1986)The APTEuLPXG Troubles of Dr. Thoss (1985)Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie ZyWGQmWDr (1986Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech (1983)Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on xHRlK1YhP Supernatural Horror (1985)Dr. Locrian's Asylum (1987)The Sect of the Idiot s2TZ2ehR7 (1988)The Greater Festival of Masks (1985)The Music of the Moon (1987)The IgT3jbFHX Journal of J.P. Drapeau (1987)Vastarien (1987)Songs of a Dead Dreamer first appeared in 1985 as Thomas Ligotti's first short-story collection. Its contents changed in different editions over the years. In this Penguin 'Double,' paired with Grimscribe, his second collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer uses the same contents as the 2010 Subterranean Press edition.Ligotti is a relatively unknown quantity outside horror fiction -- his biggest career exposure came as people on- line debated whether or not he'd been plagiarized in the first season of True Detective to supply Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle with all his best lines.Prior to that, Ligotti was a mysterious figure. After that, he was also a mysterious figure. His reclusiveness isn't at the level of Pynchon or Salinger, but it's still remarkable in today's media-saturated age. His stories and essays tell the story. He doesn't write novels, though he has written one fairly long novella (My Work is Not Yet Done). He's certainly not for everybody, but then again, what writer is?Ligotti's literary universe, already distinctly Ligottian early in his career, resembles something assembled in a laboratory from pieces of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. Then someone threw in an obsession with puppets, mannequins, and marionettes. Then someone set Phasers to Nihilism and roasted everything for about an hour. And that doesn't really describe his corpus all that well. He's got a more noticeable sense of humour than the four named authors, for one. Poe occasionally had a similar sense of humour in his blackly comic stories, but he didn't tend to exhibit that sense of humour in his horror stories. Ligotti often does.But while there will always be attempts to classify Ligotti as Weird (including one by Weird spokesman Jeff VanderMeer in his clumsy, vague introduction to this Penguin volume), he's horror all the way down. His narrative structure and voice sometimes seem more Absurdist than horrific, but next to Ligotti, Kafka and other absurdists look like Pollyannas.There are no happy endings in these stories. There aren't even any points where one can imagine that anyone, anywhere is happy, or fulfilled, or anything other than Totally Damned except when that person is fulfilled by doing terrible things to other people. The biggest positive moral triumph in any of these stories comes when a mind-blasted person manages to kill himself, leaving a "victorious corpse" as a rebuke to his nemesis, a nemesis which is in actuality the personification of the Universe as a malign chaos at eternal play with everything that composes its body. That's a happy ending.For all that nihilism, the stories are exhilarating, witty, unique, intellectually challenging, aesthetically pleasing, and often bleakly hilarious. Ligotti riffs on predecessors such as H.P. Lovecraft and genre tropes such as vampirism at certain points ("The Cult of the Idiot" posits a cult devoted to Lovecraft's burbling, bubbling, atomic chaos of an idiot god Azathoth; "Alice's Last Adventure" bounces Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl and several other writers off some very hard and unforgiving walls; "The Lost Art of Twilight" makes vampires both horrible and absurd).Throughout, Ligotti offers short stories with enough Big Ideas to support entire novels. Ligotti may not write novels, but he certainly doesn't write miniatures. Stories such as "Vastarien" and "Les Fleurs" supply massive mythologies in Fun-Size form. And "The Frolic" presents one of the most annoying and tired of modern horror tropes, the antic and seemingly omniscient serial killer, in such a fresh and sinister way that in other hands it would have supported a trilogy."the Frolic" is the first story in the collection and it's a killer -- a serial killer who makes Hannibal Lecter and his ilk look like the tired pop contrivances that they are and a horror mostly implied that clutches the heart. "The Frolic" also showcases a relative rarity for Ligotti as 'normal' suburban characters are set off against the horror of the world. It could almost be a Charles Beaumont or T.E.D. Klein story except for the bleak, nihilistic cosmic vistas described by the serial killer.Songs of a Dead Dreamer is an extraordinary collection, one that does indeed make one nervous about the realities of, well, reality. If your perfect model of horror runs to Stephen King (or John Saul, gods help you), then one should probably avoid this collection -- or buy it and shake yourself up. To lift Buzz Aldrin's phrase about the Moon, this is Magnificent Desolation. But Jesus, does Ligotti love puppets. Highly recommended.Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991/This edition 2015) by Thomas Ligotti, containing the following stories:Introduction: Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991): Janus-like, the introduction peers toward pomposity and parody.The Last Feast of Harlequin (1990): Almost certainly Ligotti's most- reprinted work, a novella that is both somewhat obliquely an homage to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Festival" and its very own thing, a striking, funny, droll, disturbing journey through a small town and its mysterious festival and the narrator who gets pulled into stranger and stranger situations as he investigates the town for anthropological reasons. Ligotti takes a number of horror tropes and makes them seem new and horrible again through the sheer force and inventiveness of his imagination and his narrative POV. One of the all-time great stories of cosmic horror, and perhaps Ligotti's most accessible major work.The Spectacles in the Drawer (1987): Quintessential Ligotti in its combination of reality-busting and extraordinarily idiosyncratic characters.Flowers of the Abyss (1991): Another tale of a polluted reality and its peculiar attraction for people who should probably know better.Nethescurial (1991): Another oft-reprinted piece of Ligotti's Major Arcana. Vaguely Lovecraftian in tone and content, but distinctly a working-through of these things from Ligotti's assured, unique perspective. Puppet alert.The Dreaming in Nortown (1991): Reality breaks down in disturbing ways, all narrated by Ligotti's most Poe-esque protagonist.The Mystics of Muelenburg (1987): Oblique, bleak reality-bender.In the Shadow of Another World (1991): Very strange and distinctive tale takes the haunted-house story and utterly scrambles it.The Cocoons (1991): Very, very horrific piece of absurdism, or at least near- absurdism. One of Ligotti's stories that disturbs without offering anything in the way of an attempt to frame things within a rational explanation.The Night School (1991): Worst night class ever.The Glamour (1991): A trip to a movie becomes a nightmarish, inexplicable tour of some peculiar, horrible sights and sounds. One of Ligotti's stories that leaves one shaken without any real way to parse what has happened in the story.The Library of Byzantium (1988): Sinister drawings, sinister priests, a sinister book, and a surprisingly traditional use of holy water.Miss Plarr (1991): Nothing really terrible happens in this tale of a boy and his nanny, yet the story defies simple explanation while it constructs a world that alternates between claustrophobic interior spaces and fog-erased exterior spaces.The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (1990): One of Ligotti's more straightforward stories in terms of its construction of what Evil is and what position it occupies in the universe. Another horror trope (the scary scarecrow) becomes revitalized by Ligotti's imagination.In all: a great collection of Ligotti's late 1980's and early 1990's work with all its cosmic, absurdist, horrific, comic, infernal devices. Highly recommended.11 of 12 people found the following review helpful. the best of a good lot!By patricia a pryceSince the death of Gore Vidal, I regard Thomas Ligotti as our finest living writer. I see him in good company: C.B.Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. ligotti is greatBy grew up in the 1960sgreat bargain. ligotti's first 2 books in one bargain price book. these are the books put ligotti on the map. i greatly enjoyed rereading them. if you like these try "TEATRO GROTTESCO" which i think is his best, most fully developed collection. ligotti has said he's now done with weird tales. he had a dark message he wanted to get across and he succeeded. it even made it to tv a couple of years ago (true detective, season one). i guess he figuires there's no need to repeat himself. anyway, if you like weird tales in the poe, lovecraft, clark ashton smith style (ligotti has his own very original style) don't miss this bargain collection. it's great, disturbing fun to read

Two terrifying classics by the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction (The Washington Post) Thomas Ligottis 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.Ligottis stories take on decaying c ...