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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Stuff of Our Best Nightmares,
By Edward Scott Haas (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Nightmare Factory (Paperback)
Mr. Ligotti is the true Master of contemporary horror. He understands how to communicate the breakdown of rationality. If you have read Kafka, you probably know what I am talking about. His stories take place in a bleak post-industrial zone of decaying cities, drifting artistic failures and dark mystics playing with the soul-searing secrets of an unfriendly cosmos. In a King or Koontz story, you may be chased by a horrible monster. But you still retain your identity and place in linear space-time. Not so with Ligotti's world. He submerges his doomed characters in a void where everything becomes menacing and lawless. One of his stories describes a sect who once believed that everything was filled with a divine essence. Exploring the matter deeper, however, they discovered that the reverse was true. The entire universe was filled with a hostile decaying essence and the only hope for happiness is ignorance. People tried to find out the ultimate truth, discovered to late that it was unspeakably horrible and then could not forget what they had learned. Pieces of an idol representing the foul nature of existence were scattered like the body of Osiris to the ends of the earth so as to hide the truth from the innocent. Another story concerns enchanting music played by mysterious performers in an abondoned building on nights when the moon is full. Anyone who hears the music is found mutilated and wrapped in a web-like bandages the next morning. We are never told why this happens, but it communicates a feeling of dread--humans are being preyed upon by incomprehensible forces. A small town is dominated by a creepy clown-like cult that are anything but funny. A grown man is driven near madness by memories of a disturbing carnival sideshow attended in his boyhood. These stories are for you if you like to be challenged to take a look at the world from a radical new perspective. Philosophical pessimists will them for their bleakness, poets for their haunting use of language and vague but emotionally charged descriptions. People just looking for something different will not be disappointed. This book was out of print for a while but, thankfully, it is available again. Buy it while you can.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Carrying the traditional weird tale into the next century,
This review is from: The Nightmare Factory (Paperback)
The work of Thomas Ligotti is the revival horror literature was in dire need of since the swamping of the genre by writers with below-average imagination and a writing rate of three paperbacks a year. If you have liked the works of E.A.Poe, or H.P. Lovecraft, or both, then Ligotti will come as a blessing to you. "Nightmare Factory" combines the four collections of Ligotti, sadly missing the drawings and poems that were included in the original editions of "Songs of a Dead Dreamer", "Noctuary", "Grimscribe" and "Teatro Grottesco". Being a nihilist himself, Ligotti delivers a verse that carries a very strong sense of foreboding gloom. His settings are out of place, nightmarish and maddeningly surreal. As you read through paragraphs, you feel yourself walking just steps behind the helpless protagonist into dread regions of madness where everything is a broken reflection of its original self. Horror unfolds as the "Greater Festival of Masks" nears its time of unmasking, where faces without soul take the stage. Young girls are abducted into frolicking, without a scream, without a whimper. A way lost in twisted alleys ends up in the worst place one can possibly hope not to get. Reflections in windows refuse to leave until people step over their dread and step into shuttered rooms. Sects worship idiot gods, intoning phrases and chants neither they, nor their idol understand. With a strong use of language, Ligotti carries us through his Nightmare Factory, where the line between light and darkness gets fuzzy, meanings of words are sinisterly re-defined, and it is impossible to tell whether angles are acute or obtuse. If you read horror, please do yourself a favor and take my advice. Ligotti is easily the best writer in the genre, and it seems he'll stay that way until someone else comes along.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a fabulous collection from a master of gothic literature,
By syrinx.2112@btinternet.com (Stockport, U.K.) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Nightmare Factory (Paperback)
Thomas Ligotti is perhaps the only living gothic visionary. His tales shimmer with dread and a sense of creeping doom. Who could read "The Frolic" and not be disturbed by it's menacing portnets of imminent doom? "The Red Tower" reads like a nightmare from a David Lynch movie, most notably "Eraserhead". Truly, Ligotti is a prince of Darkness and this collection cannot be recommended enough. It is a massive collection containing most of his collected fiction from "Songs of a Dead Dreamer", "Grimscribe" and "Noctuary". It also has four new stories including the unforgettably macabre "Red Tower". Really, this one cannot be left from the list of essential collections. It ranks alongside the brilliance of masters like Ramsey Campbell, Robert Aickman, Russell Kirk and Dennis Etchison. Good enough company for anyone I would have thought.
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