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A review by deimosremus
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Thomas Ligotti is an author who has piqued my interest over the past few years, as I’ve been a fan of the concepts behind cosmic horror, but rarely one of the writing or ability on the authors’ part to capture the qualities associated with it. As the most well-known example, Lovecraft is someone who I can appreciate, but only to an extent, as I find his writing often betrays the brand of horror he’s shooting for. Ligotti on the other hand, is a writer with much more subtle sensibilities and a more acute sense of capturing not only the pessimism and nihilism associated with man’s cosmic insignificance, and of the primal quality of mankind’s fears, but also of its stranger and more esoteric qualities.
Songs a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe is a collection I’ve read a handful of stories from in the past, but seeing as though I’ve taken it upon myself to make October a month of nothing but horror-reads, I read the collection in full, and… there’s a handful of shorts in here that might be my favorite short stories ever written. The Sect of the Idiot, The Last Feast of Harlequin and Masquerade of a Dead Sword particularly captured qualities and moments that I just absolutely adore about horror and dark fantasy… and with phenomenal and confident prose.
For someone who hasn’t read nearly as much horror as I’ve read fantasy and sci-fi, It might be jumping the gun a bit to make a statement like this, but I might go so far as to call Ligotti the greatest writer in the horror genre of the latter half of the 20th century. His writing perfectly tows like the line between obtuse and clear, and he’s not willing to distill the genre down to its most common and overused tropes. All his stories feel like reading a nightmare, in all of its disorienting logic, environments and characters that never feel like they have a full grasp on reality, tapping into that fear of the unknown and of the obscured. Beautifully realized with the right amount of ambiguity.
Songs a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe is a collection I’ve read a handful of stories from in the past, but seeing as though I’ve taken it upon myself to make October a month of nothing but horror-reads, I read the collection in full, and… there’s a handful of shorts in here that might be my favorite short stories ever written. The Sect of the Idiot, The Last Feast of Harlequin and Masquerade of a Dead Sword particularly captured qualities and moments that I just absolutely adore about horror and dark fantasy… and with phenomenal and confident prose.
For someone who hasn’t read nearly as much horror as I’ve read fantasy and sci-fi, It might be jumping the gun a bit to make a statement like this, but I might go so far as to call Ligotti the greatest writer in the horror genre of the latter half of the 20th century. His writing perfectly tows like the line between obtuse and clear, and he’s not willing to distill the genre down to its most common and overused tropes. All his stories feel like reading a nightmare, in all of its disorienting logic, environments and characters that never feel like they have a full grasp on reality, tapping into that fear of the unknown and of the obscured. Beautifully realized with the right amount of ambiguity.