Teatro Grottesco (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 2006; vuoden 2008 painos)

This is a difficult book to rate. As my earlier updates suggest, I started of very much liking it (although 'liking' may not be the right word, given the thoroughly unsettling nature of the stories). The opening story was utterly superb, and the quality continued through the next couple of sections - the book is broken into short collections of themed stories, the tales in each related to a greater or lesser extent - but, toward the end, I was beginning to find a sameness to the writing rather wearing.

The early sections are superb. Derangements is thoroughly surreal and creepy, with The Town Manager in particular having a circular element that reminded me an especially good, odd Twilight Zone. The tales in Defamations deal with a corporate horror, a weirdly Kafka-esque world where yu are utterly controlled by your employment which seeks only productivity and drains all other motivation from life. It made me think of Robert Chambers but in a pointedly modern, industrial setting.

It was the Teatro Grottesco stories themselves, forming the final section, that for me spoiled the collection. A sense that had been building from some of the previous stories that the narrative voices - always first person - were too similar too each other, all of a somewhat pompous, overly-wordy circumlocution that made me think of 19th century literature, did become a problem. ~The stories themselves I found less interesting, the ordinary people of the earlier stories replaced by bohemian artistic types further making the stories feel more dated and less relevant. The stories seemed rather pointless - in the way that some weaker Lovecraftian horror is, where rather than the feeling of hopelessness there is a sense of "huh?" - although the denouement of the final story did reverse this with a growing crescendo of dread and a final burst - or perhaps seep would be a better word - of existential terror. ( )

Not as good as some of his other work but does still have some of the same motifs as we have seen before. Definite Lovecraftian influences and also themes of nihilism and loss. There are some Ligotti favourites like puppets and malformation accompanied by severe pessimism. Good but at times hard work. Be prepared for dense but ultimately resisting prose. ( )

I've read Ligotti before, but this is the first time I've read several of his stories together, and I have to say that I don't think there is anyone else like him. Lovecraft comes close, but not quite. Lovecraft's stories usually at least begin in our world, while Ligotti's exist in one that is somewhat like ours, but is slightly off, though accepted as normal by his characters. His language is dense and precise, and his narrators (the stories are written in first-person) seem to have an obsessive nature that causes them to repeat phrases, not in an annoying or condescending way, but in a way that lends a kind of weird rhythm to the pieces. The stories are full of ambiguity and mystery, and by the end you may not know much more than you did when you began, but you will have had a unique and deeply unsettling experience. ( )

Ligotti's fiction is a dark dream, his characters wandering through strange towns and being made to face not ghosts or monsters but the horrors of their own existence in nightmarish and surreal realms that are just enough like our own to make us realize we share the dread. The dread that Ligotti evokes is akin to that brought out by the writings of Poe. Ligotti makes the world around us appear suspect, life appear absurd, and makes us wonder if ideas of a rational and "right" world are what is actually suspect. These stories make the sensations of agonizing woe and surreal melancholy that we often experience into whole worlds in which men are but puppets and playthings. "The soft black stars have already begun to fill the sky ..." ( )

A repetitive style and depressing atmosphere, with the occasional manic glimpse of the nightmarish and unreal - this all took some getting used to but the mood and imagery were hard to shake off. Unnerving. ( )