These stories got real creepy and I am there for it ( )

Having read Ligotti's bigger works before this, this one strikes as, in true Ligottian fashion, both too much Ligotti, while also not quite Ligotti enough.

He's still plumbing those very weird depths that no one else is using, and he's still doing so to good effect. The stories are weird, hypnotic, dreamlike, claustrophobic, dark, and confusing in a frustratingly entertaining way. The first half of this collection is filled with stories of workers in bizarre industries, all seemingly interrelated in some horrid way. The second half tends to focus more on artistic types and the nefarious art they do (or don't) produce. So, we're still treading the strange pathways of the mind of Thomas Ligotti, all right.

At the same time, however, these stories don't seem quite as fantastical as his previous collections, at times relying on the same plot devices more than one (that man! it was me! and intestinal issues galore).

Too me, I feel like Ligotti is definitely branching into different areas, but they seem to be somewhat more dull and repetitive, more drab than usual. Perhaps that was his goal all along. ( )

Kafka on steroids. I didn't like this book as much as I thought I would because, although I love Kafka, I've moved on in how I think fiction should address the nihilistic worldview. I'm in the Harlan Ellison camp where the best stories have flesh and blood characters that we actually care about. The stories were weird and somewhat disturbing but never creepy or scary. The atmosphere is more absurdist than horror. Ligotti is definitely unique in his fictional translation of the ultimate meaningless of life. I suppose some people would find this "horrifying" and I understand and appreciate what he is trying to do but it's just not part of my belief system so it doesn't work as well for me as say Lovecraft, or better yet, Ellison does. I'm also more frightened of the bogeyman in my closet than I am of the vapory supervisor in the corner office. If he spent more time developing his characters and making me care for them then I would probably find their meaningless lives more tragic.

I see Kafka here not Lovecraft. It starts at the same place: an uncaring neutral cosmos, but is developed in a more everyman-type Kafka way, not into horror or science fiction.

Some of the stories are actually quite funny, at least to me.

Worth reading if just for Ligotti's unique vision. ( )

Dang I like this ( )

Ligotti hooked me through his philosophical treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. HIs pure pessimistic-nihilism intrigued me: it is better not to exist at all, consciousness is not a gift but pain.

The stories in this collection are an embodiment of this philosophy, often extending it to its highest conclusion.

Of all the stories, the one that captivated me most was the one with the bungalow. Ligotti captures the feeling of loneliness and isolation terrifyingly well, focusing not just on the concept of being truly alone but also at the pure annihilating aspect of it on the psyche.

The final story with Grossvogel is another standout. His thesis: there’s an underlying shadow in the world that must be experienced through the body. This shadow not just permeates through everything, it also destroys any and all meaning that dares to come near it. Ultimately, there’s no light, no hope, no dreams, just pure, black nonexistence. And isn’t that sweet? The joy of not existing at all.

I hope Ligotti produces even more stories, but the next time around, please skip the Lovecraftian language. It feels derivative rather than nostalgic at this point. It’s also a chore to read. ( )

I've heard Ligotti can be an acquired taste, and also that this isn't an ideal first work to read from him; based on this introduction, it's easy to see that being true, but I do plan to try another of his works.

This collection was rather hit-and-miss for me. There were a few stories that I loved, particularly in the first two sections of the work. There were others that felt almost nonsensical, and I'm honestly not sure if that had more to do with the story/writing, my own patience with the stories, or the fact that I was reading this book straight through for a book club even though I suspect it would be much more enjoyable if the stories were spaced out in time. And, admittedly, there was still a third category of story, where Ligotti had me entranced right up till the last few pages, at which point it felt like things would either simply stop, anticlimactic as the ending was, or rush into some form of chaos that felt like it brought the whole story down.

All that said, there were moments where I absolutely fell in love with Ligotti's language and scenarios, dismal as most all of them were. I'm looking forward to trying him again, though I'll take a break first since one of my issues with this collection really was that it felt too one-note, and a bit heavier on atmosphere than story in some spots, which grew wearing after a while. I would certainly recommend horror lovers try him at some point, to see if he's their cup of tea, but I'm not so sure this is the book to start with. ( )

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 ..." ( )

Teatro Grottesco is the latest collection of Thomas Ligotti short stories and represents the mature phase of his fiction. In this mature phase, Ligotti's style has shed much of the baroqueness of his earlier style, which made him seem an obvious heir to Poe and Lovecraft. However, Ligotti's sparser style, which often emphasizes the banality of places and people, is probably even more potent in capturing the sense of existence as nightmare, which is one of the main cruxes of the Ligottian tale. If, as appears quite possible, Ligotti does not return to writing fiction, this collection will serve as a brilliant summing up of his thematic and narrative interests. ( )

Impressed enough by the Ligotti work I've seen in anthologies devoted to following up on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, I bought this anthology.

Is Ligotti a Lovecraftian writer? Well, based on this collection - and I have no idea how representative it is - yes and no. There are no explicit Lovecraftian allusions in this collection - no references to the forbidden books, nightmare locations, and mysterious entities created by Lovecraft and those adding to the Mythos. Yet, the pre-eminent, most important aspect of Lovecraft's work, "cosmic horror", the "infinite terror and dreariness" of existence, as one story here puts it, is shared by Ligotti.

Yet, that horror is expressed in vaguer and more general terms than in Lovecraft. In one of his stories, the horrific revelation is one of man's hidden evolutionary past, miscegenation in a family's past, the existence of alien races. The revelation at the end of a Ligotti story is rarely so specific.

And their prose differs. The scientific references in a Lovecraft story are not here. The technological trappings of a Lovecraft story frequently link it to its time of composition. Ligotti's stories are noticeably lacking in any specific technological reference. An "audiotape" is the most time specific reference there is. Otherwise, they could be set almost anytime during the 20th century. Ligotti's prose reminded me more of Lovecraft's idol, Poe, than Lovecraft. Always told in the first person, they frequently deal with odd psychological states and fixations. The notion of the alternate self, the doppelganger as pioneered by Poe in his "William Wilson", also shows up a lot.

In fact, if one wanted to be snarky, you could say Ligotti was a writer of bloated prose, stories almost always told in the same way, ending usually with some horrible revelation of malevolent, vague cosmic forces, a recycler of the images of dilapidated buildings and towns, abandoned factories, clowns and puppets, and intestinal viruses. In short, Ligotti's not a storyteller telling many tales in many ways, but a writer obsessively telling the same story the same way.

Yet, when that story is worth telling and told well, that sort of writer is also called an artist. And, by that definition, Ligotti is an artist.

What might seem, on a quick reading, bloated prose with frequent repetition of the same phrases and the same details of event and character, is not exactly poetry but it is incantory, akin to the repetition often found in writing for children. But here, rather than a child, it is adults introduced to a world of horrible wonder, the world of "the icy bleakness of things". The use of those recurring images is varied enough not to bore - though I can see some readers perhaps wanting to ration themselves an occasional Ligotti story rather than gulping them down all at once. And Ligotti is consistently, even more than Lovecraft, a writer of weird, not horror, fiction. The rewards of each are different.

Ligotti groups his 13 stories into three sections - Derangements, Deformations, and the Damaged and Diseased. These classifications are a bit too general to provide a sense of the collection.

Two of Ligotti's best stories deal with the world of work. In "The Town Manager", we are told of the mysterious disappearances of a town's unelected, unrequested town managers, each of which institute reforms which hasten the town's decay. "Our Temporary Supervisor" has the narrator in a meaningless job detailing how a new employee, in collusion with a new, horribly undefined and unseen supervisor, transforms a factory job into virtually round the clock enslavement via social pressure. While it is tempting to see these stories as commentaries on politics and capitalism, I think Ligotti has just set his existential horror in a more recognizable, specific setting.

The Quine Corporation is the force behind the latter story and is also mentioned in "My Case for Retributive Action". The title brings to mind the opening of Poe's "The Casque of Amontillado" and the plot Kafka's "Metamorphoses". The story seems to share the same vague setting, near the border of an unnamed country, with "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land". In this collection of four first person accounts obliquely gazing the horror encroaching on a town, Lovecraft fans may strain to see echoes of the master's "The Festival" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

The technique of multiple accounts in one story also shows up, as an artist's vignettes rather than recollections of characters, in "Sideshow, and Other Stories". It is an interesting story of trying to compare our world to an unknown order which may or may not exist, but compounded ambiguities make it a failure. Also, in the failed category, is "The Clown Puppet". The titular figure and his attached strings are a metaphor for unseen forces. But the image is too common, and the plot not very compelling.

"Purity" is another strong story. Rather than demolishing a vague and general notion of existence and replacing it with some general, nihilistic notion of cosmic reality, this story attacks the universal human anchors and consolations of country, faith, and family. The child narrator's father is up to something creepy in the basement - but Ligotti neatly surprises us with what that horror is and then throws in another hint about what the rest of the family has been up to. "The Red Tower" is the most Poe like story in its prose which recounts the odd appearance, history, and function of an abandoned factory. "Teatro Grottesco" has a writer seeking out a mysterious cabal that strips artists of their creative impulses and powers. Like so many stories in this collection, its narrator ultimately embraces the maleovelent forces that are revealed. This is also the first of four stories in the collection's last section that feature physical distress, specifically gastrointestinal distress, as a revelatory ordeal. "Gas Station Carnivals" is all right as a story but is mostly interesting for the delusional details of the title attraction. "The Bungalow Horror" combines a Poe-like doppelganger with "Teatro Grottesco"'s notion of destroyed artist. It is also something of a rumination of what people get out of writers like Lovecraft and Ligotti - and how the art serves its creators. "Severini" is the most physical story and the story whose images most evoke Lovecraft. Actually, its glimpses of a priesthood of Tantric Medicine on an island near the Philippines using dysentery as a tool of enlightenment reminded me of one of Lovecraft's favorite stories - A. Merritt's "The Moon Pool". "The Shadow, the Darkness" is a powerful story that, in its horrific insistence on humans as only bodies, tools for the Tsalal (evidently, recurring entitites in Ligotti's works) raises questions of free will and cosmic parasitism. ( )

Inhabiting geographies which exist only in the margins of reality between nightmare and wakefulness, Ligotti's stories distort the reader's perceptions of banal everyday life, leaving behind the debris of dreams. Whether populated by characters in search of some semblance of a truth, characters who know the truth only too well, or completely unpopulated as archaeological ruins, each story has the ability to relate to its reader's familiarity with situations as mundane as factories, small towns, corporate offices. But then Ligotti, before the reader unfamiliar with his work, is even aware, gradually upends the scenario until only a creeping dread remains.

The doomed denizens of a small town are at the mercy of a town manager whose directives eclipse the divide between eccentric and insane. A man recalls visits in his youth to carnivals which seemed to always be located adjacent to gas stations. An apparently abandoned factory located literally in the middle of nowhere may yet unburden its dark secrets. Metafiction abounds in the title story's theater troupe and in a cultish excursion by the followers of a self-appointed guru into landscapes of mind and body.

In service to this pursuit, Ligotti utilizes a trove of descriptive language worthy of all the comparions to Poe and Lovecraft (though with an infinitely more assured grasp of grammar, structure and flow). Plot often becomes secondary to the picture being painted, thus allowing the reader to become immersed in the nightmare offered. The stories in this collection, some previously published elsewhere, others new to this book, are lyrical in the manner of a funeral dirge. For those seeking to explore behind the curtains of reality, Ligotti makes a wonderful tour guide. ( )

[b:Teatro Grottesco|2452401|Teatro Grottesco|Thomas Ligotti|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1209961143s/2452401.jpg|2479514], a collection of short stories by [a:Thomas Ligotti|128466|Thomas Ligotti|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1241208763p2/128466.jpg], contains 13 stories in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft. All of the stories are cryptic, psychological thrillers that build upon that feeling that something's just not quite right in the scenes they describe. My favorite stories were The Red Tower, My Case for Retributive Action, and The Bungalow House. However, all of the stories are very enjoyable. ( )

I almost feel bad giving this only one star. Ligotti is talented, without a doubt. His choice of words is masterful, his descriptions often startling (for better or worse). However, neither of those attributes were able to hold up what I found to be slow, boring stories.

Ligotti is often compared to Lovecraft, but I feel this isn't an accurate comparison. Underscoring Lovecraft's stories was a continued sense of dread, or wrongness or otherness pulsing unseen under the skin. Ligotti seems to aim for that very trait, but he misses, leaving me with only page after page of banality that ends in a whimper, not a bang ( )

If you're one that has nightmares (or daymares) this book will seem familiar. If you're one that usually dreams of fluffy bunnies and flowers that may change if you read this book. What is a nightmare but a familiar place or action that is intensified, put under a magnifying glass until it's presence is overwhelming? I enjoy my nightmares when I can get them because there's always the surety of waking up even if that option isn't evident during the action. Reading Ligotti is like having a waking nightmare... you can always close the book, but would you?

Thomas Ligotti creates people and places that appear just off the edge of what we might consider reality. Pegged as a horror writer, he doesn't build suspense and surprise you with sudden attacks from hideous beasts. He doesn't charge at you with ax brandishing crazy people. Forget the ghosts, spirits and vampires that lurk in other horror tomes. Ligotti's prose slowly wraps around you and pulls you down into places that appear believable, places that seem familiar, and peopled by characters that you may have met (most are of the artistic character). Before you know it, he has brought you into a town you'd rather not visit and introduced you to people you'd rather not know. The horror of Ligotti lies in the familiar that is just slightly skewed.

Outside the walls of the Crimson Cabaret was a world of rain and darkness. At intervals, whenever someone entered or exited through the front door of the club, one could actually see the steady rain and was allowed a brief glimpse of the darkness. Inside it was all amber light, tobacco smoke, and the sound of the raindrops hitting the windows, which were all painted black. On such nights, as I sat at one of the tables in that drab little place, I was always filled with an infernal merriment, as if I were waiting out the apocalypse and could not care less about it. I also like to imagine that I was in the cabin of an old ship during a really vicious storm at sea or in the club car of a luxury passenger train that was being rocked on its rails by ferocious winds and hammered by a demonic rain. Sometimes, I thought of myself as occupying a waiting room for the abyss (which of course was exactly what I was doing) and between sips from my glass of wine or cup of coffee I smiled sadly and touched the front pocket of my coat where I kept my imaginary ticket to oblivion. ( )

This collection of short stories was my first introduction to Thomas Ligotti, I definitely plan on reading more of his work. The style is not for everyone, in the way that both Lovecraft and Kafka are acquired tastes. Many of the stories are vignettes - brief glimpses into a parallel, but strange world. Most of the stories lack a clear beginning or a definite conclusion, the reader is sort of thrown into the scene without much explanation about where the story takes place, or exactly who the characters are. Part of his overall style involves the use of repetition, of a word, an image, a phrase, or a general idea/theme. In some stories, this works better than in others. "The Red Tower was for me an example where the repetition did not succeed to build a particular mood - it just became annoying.

On to the stories more specifically, while avoiding spoilers, the book is broken up into 3 sections; Derangements, Deformations, and The Damaged and Diseased. The first part was my favorite overall, and reminded me of Lovecraft the most though with a decidedly modern flavor. The strongest piece I felt was the very first story "Purity," which strongly reflects the "vignette" nature of the author's work. The horror invoked by this story and the others definitely stems from what is left unsaid or merely hinted at. The reader is allowed only a glimpse into what is quite likely a thoroughly terrifying "derangement."

The second section "Deformations" invoked Kafka, especially the Castle. The stories in this section are connected by a specific setting "the northern border town", a few recurring characters, and this shadowy yet utterly controlling (and terrifying) bureaucracy known as the Quine Organization. I thought the stories in the section were pretty strong too, especially the first one.

Finally, in the third section, we get to the title story "Teatro Grottesco, which I felt was perhaps the weakest as far as pacing and overall interest. In this story, the repetition of a phrase is supposed to tie the piece together, but really it fails to have any sort of memorable impact. I read through the book quickly up until this story, and then it took me about a week to finish it. The story after it isn't all that great either, which leads me to believe that in general this is the weakest section of the book.

Some of the stories definitely have an obvious element of horror, but others are more subtle, just plain weird, or maybe unsettling in a way that isn't quite definable. Overall, I would recommend Thomas Ligotti if you are into similar types of fiction. ( )

Contents:
Derangements
Purity * The Town Manager * Sideshow, and Other Stories * The Clown Puppet * The Red Tower

Deformations
My Case for Retributive Action * Our Temporary Supervisor * In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land

The Damaged and the Diseased
Teatro Grottesco * Gas Station Carnivals * The Bungalow House * Severini * The Shadow, the Darkness ( )