Customer Reviews

The Shadow at The Bottom of The World

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had never read Thomas Ligotti before I bought The Shadow at the Bottom of the World but I had high hopes, especially since Lovecraft is one of my favorite fiction writers. Most of the reviews for Ligotti are very enthusiastic. In the end, however, I was disappointed. Most of the stories have very little plot and the plots they do have are too vague to be very interesting, especially since there is often a suspenseful build-up which doesn't really lead anywhere. I found the best aspects of Ligotti's writing to be his ability to convey surreal, visual, dream-like images, and his very unique, though sometimes monotonous and droning writing style. I especially liked "Purity." That story seemed a little more based in reality than the others and I think that made it more engaging.
Ligotti's writing certainly has its good points but overall I found it disappointing. I don't necessarily object to negativity or pessimism but Ligotti's brand of it is depressing. Three stars for writing style and surrealism.


Added much later:
It has been some time since I wrote the above review. While I still think my estimation of the book's strengths and weaknesses was for the most part a good one, Ligotti's writing seems to have grown on me. I am currently reading another of his books, My Work is Not Yet Done, and have been very much enjoying it. In the above review I mentioned especially liking "Purity", and I do remember that as being a good story, but I think the one that has stayed with me the most is "Teatro Grottesco", a tale about a mysterious something that visits artists and takes away their creativity. Unfortunately I can't edit the number of stars I gave this book.


Added still later:
Thomas Ligotti is now one of my favorite living horror writers, along with Ramsey Campbell, Michael Cisco, Terry Lamsley, and a few others. This is a good introduction to his work. It is a "best of" sort of collection, so if it turns you into a fan and you are willing to pay the sometimes very high prices for his out of print collections, you will soon own duplicates of all the stories in this book. For that reason, this book is useless to me now, except for the excerpt from Ligotti's yet to be seen nonfiction book, which is an interesting read and cannot be found elsewhere.
I considered taking this review off of Amazon. It is now embarrassing to me that I gave an excellent writer like Thomas Ligotti an unfavorable review. However, I think the three parts of this review, separated by time, show that perhaps Ligotti's work can take time to grow on some people. So, if you are reading this review and have never read Ligotti, I suggest reading him, and if it doesn't immediately appeal to you then set the book aside and maybe sometime later you will discover that some strange images have unobtrusively made a home somewhere in your mind...

This is a collection for both old fans of Ligotti and new ones eager to dive head on into his twisted and deformed world. All of the stories (with the exception of "Purity") can be found in The Nightmare Factory, but if you missed TNF, here's your chance to read the best of the best. That's how I think of this - as a "Best of" collection of Ligotti's widely published works. The title story acts as a sort of guidebook for how "existential horror" should look like. Lovecraft fans will probably enjoy "Nethescurial" and "The Tsalal". In my opinion, the last three stories ("Teatro Grottesco", "The Red Tower", and "Purity") are some of, if not the, best stories Ligotti has composed.

This should tide over most of us until Durtro releases what should be THE best Ligotti collection later this year or early next year.

"The Shadow At the Bottom of the World", while only containing one unread story for Ligotti fans, will be entirely new for others ignorant of the Ligottian cosmos. I think that is the point--and even brand new fans get the additional treat of discovering which stories Ligotti himself holds in high regard.

Heavyweight Champion of the macabre, Ligotti's new story "Purity"
shows without a doubt that his reputation as the best since Lovecraft is more than deserved. If I'm not mistaken, the life of "the boy" may have some autobiographical undertones to it. The boy lives in a slum neighborhood that sounds just like Detroit. His relationship with "Candy", a nearly catatonic old black woman, is unusual to say the least for his work. Somehow different, although the same in basic message, than his other stories, Ligotti is "not afraid anymore": there are moments of daring few other authors in this field, Ramsey Campbell or even the old greats like Arthur Machen, would attempt. Not only is this mentally deranged narrator slowly losing it because of his father's bizarre determination to destroy everything "wholesome" and "good": his mind is coming apart in a most creative fashion.

"Because it was a cold night, and the house wasunheated, the smell was not terribly strong. I knelt at the edge of the hole
and shined the flashlight into it as far as its thin beam would reach. But the only other objects I could see were some broken bottles stuck within the strata of human waste. I thought about what other things might be in that basement...and I became lost in those thoughts" (pg. 250).

This slow Lynchian loss of sanity is not new for Ligotti, but the way he employs it here IS new. Anyone who doesn't know about Thomas Ligotti should first purchase this, "The Nightmare Factory" and "Noctuary". These are the real primers.

We also get treated to another one of his razor sharp introducing, slashing our fabricated hopes apart like
ribbons. A must read.

I first encountered Ligotti's writing in the "Call of Cthulhu" series as "The Last Feast of the Harliquin" (included in this book) and "The Sect of the Idiot" (unfortunately not included in this book). After reading Robert Price's description of Ligotti as a "philosophy of nihilistic zen", I had to try this book.
Unhappily I found most of this book to be disappointing. In most of these stories nothing ever really happens as far as any plot. Ligotti does a pretty good job of evoking the darkness behind all things, but there is a lack of any kind of *movement* which would allow something to play out. Thus the stories set a mood, but don't do anything much with it, which creates much less of an impact. In "The White People" Machen said that a great sin would be having a rose talk. But if there is no one interacting or responding to it, so what?
I enjoy Ligotti's writing style but (as another reviewer noted) he has the annoying habit of repeating a particular phrase over and over. For instance, in The Red Tower we are told that a factory made unique novelty items. Then we are told 20 more times throughout the story that the factory made unique novely items. This is a common occurence throughout most of these stories.
For me, the best stories (aside from the aformentioned Last Feast of the Harlequin) occur in a clump towards the end of the book. "Nethescurial", "The Cocoons", "The Tsalal", "The Bungalow House" and "Teatro Grottesco" are excellent and worth the price of admission. The rest of the stories I could live without.
Ligotti is pretty good, but he is certainly not the next major figure after Lovecraft.

Thom Ligotti is writer of dark, subversive and sometimes even violently pervers literature. Marginal as his writings are, he is a classic and an enigma in his own genre.
His debut "Songs of a dead dreamer" hit the market in 1985 and was a bull's eye's shot. From the creepy, domestic horror in the story "The frolic" and the madness-of-memories-tale "Dr. Locrian's asylum", to the almost plotless, David Lynchian nightmare of "The greater festival of masks", Ligotti graps you with his singing, Gothicly hymning language by the throat and never lets go.

One of Ligotti's most powerful assets is that the `dark', the `evil' is more of a mytaphisical presence than a plain visible and fysical one. There may be people with knives or nooses but they are always in the background, and not at all being the Main Menace like in more accessible, main stream horror pulp.
Read the sublime story "The shadow at the bottom of the world". Indeed at some point there is a man yielding a knife, but in no way this is what the story is about; in fact, the knife doesn't penetrate any flesh at all - the knife and the hand which is holding it just is part of a series of omens and forebodings; the real evil is, however so omnipresent, very much untouchable, and even more: impossible to describe. And there is nothing more fearfull and frightning than something you cannot see.
It's like a black hole: nobody has seen this intrigueiging but horrifying and destructive force of nature, it's presence is only suggested by the things and celestial bodies that move around and interact with it.
In Ligotti's "Shadow at the bottom of the world" it's the fields and the trees, the gazing sunrays and a strange overall `feel in the air' that tells the inhabitants of the village something quite fearfull is lurking in the not too great distance. But what?
Only the scarecrow seems to know, Mr. Marble perhaps, or the farmer who owns the land that `doesn't seem to get cold' even though the harvest season is setting.

This "Best of..." collection is a book filled with dream-in-dream confusions, stunningly dark, grotesque but suggestive imagery and ice cold discriptions of dark subworlds behind crumbled, nameless facades often reminds us of the nightmares we had when we were ill and had terrorising fevers and we were trembling all over, watching seemingly everlasting shadows slowly go by in the night.

(Following is actually my review of the paperback edition)

Thom Ligotti is writer of dark, subversive and sometimes even violently pervers literature. Marginal as his writings are, he is a classic and an enigma in his own genre.
His debut "Songs of a dead dreamer" hit the market in 1985 and was a bull's eye's shot. From the creepy, domestic horror in the story "The frolic" and the madness-of-memories-tale "Dr. Locrian's asylum", to the almost plotless, David Lynchian nightmare of "The greater festival of masks", Ligotti graps you with his singing, Gothicly hymning language by the throat and never lets go.

One of Ligotti's most powerful assets is that the `dark', the `evil' is more of a mytaphisical presence than a plain visible and fysical one. There may be people with knives or nooses but they are always in the background, and not at all being the Main Menace like in more accessible, main stream horror pulp.
Read the sublime story "The shadow at the bottom of the world". Indeed at some point there is a man yielding a knife, but in no way this is what the story is about; in fact, the knife doesn't penetrate any flesh at all - the knife and the hand which is holding it just is part of a series of omens and forebodings; the real evil is, however so omnipresent, very much untouchable, and even more: impossible to describe. And there is nothing more fearfull and frightning than something you cannot see.
It's like a black hole: nobody has seen this intrigueiging but horrifying and destructive force of nature, it's presence is only suggested by the things and celestial bodies that move around and interact with it.
In Ligotti's "Shadow at the bottom of the world" it's the fields and the trees, the gazing sunrays and a strange overall `feel in the air' that tells the inhabitants of the village something quite fearfull is lurking in the not too great distance. But what?
Only the scarecrow seems to know, Mr. Marble perhaps, or the farmer who owns the land that `doesn't seem to get cold' even though the harvest season is setting.

This "Best of..." collection is a book filled with dream-in-dream confusions, stunningly dark, grotesque but suggestive imagery and ice cold discriptions of dark subworlds behind crumbled, nameless facades often reminds us of the nightmares we had when we were ill and had terrorising fevers and we were trembling all over, watching seemingly everlasting shadows slowly go by in the night.

Finally, a volume you can risk loaning your friends! The man has done his work over the years and many of his best are gathered here (including an in some ways untypical but fascinating new story at the end). Not for the philosophically squeamish. My only complaint is that the cover of the book, while fine in itself, is somewhat cheesy-looking for a Ligotti book; seems evocative of Christ and the Wizard of Oz all in one. Well, maybe that's where it's at... Here's hoping this volume sees another printing after this one, and another. Drop his name to people. It's like putting the modern Poe in someone's hands.

nothing bad to say about this collection, but DO NOTE that it is almost entirely comprised of reprints from his earlier releases; if you think you'll be getting a book full of new ligotti horror, think again...

Seeing various glowing quotes & claims of 'genius', I expected some great stuff from Ligotti, but these stories aren't so great. First of all, they are way too derivitive of H.P. Lovecraft---the foreward speaks as if Ligotti is 'the next step' in horror, but these 16 stories didn't really strike me as anything new; his themes & plots are recycled Lovecraft. Ironically enough, one of the best stories in this collection is his earliest story ("The Last Feast of the Harlequin")---which is dedicated to 'the memory of H.P. Lovecraft', because it's so obviously influenced by him. So it seems that Ligotti is at his best when he simply admits what he's trying to do, which is to be H.P. Lovecraft.

Ligotti's writing is good for an amateur, but I think he falls a little short of being a professional---many times his choice of words is poor, as if he's playing Scrabble instead of crafting smooth, pleasing sentences. Lovecraft was writing awhile ago, so there's no use to copy him to the point of mimicking an outdated writing style. Ligotti's language is too often clunky, 19th-century emulation, and I was hoping for something more modern. I think a lot of Ligotti's pleasure in these stories is their antiquated style, which is fine if that's what you like, but it keeps these stories from being as new & inventive as the hype on the back of the book would have you believe.

It often seemed that a few more critical re-reads by Ligotti or an editor would have tightened these stories up a little. He over-uses certain words & phrases, thereby slacking off of the writer's duty to deftly describe & make the story real---for example, in "Teatro Grottesco", the narrator says he finds himself in a "backstreet hospital", and then over the course of just a few pages goes on to repeat this phrase "backstreet hospital" about 5 times, instead of doing the writer's job of actually DESCRIBING this hospital and what makes it so 'backstreet' (well, he vaguely references "outdated fixtures" several times as one of the only descriptions of the place). When this happens, it simply feels like words written on a page, not a real account of something that actually happened.

Another weak point, for me, is that his treatment of evil also suffers from Lovecraft's weaknesses---the evil is always so all-encompassing & vague that there is little to actually say about it, other than to imply that it's just really, really unspeakably horrific & bad and that everything will be very bad once it takes over. Well, I'm sorry, but you can only imply & generalize so much before the reader just loses interest for want of concrete plot, concrete examples of evil. I expected a little more philsophical thought to be present in the stories, a little more thought about what evil is, what evil wants & why, etc., but Ligotti keeps harping on very trite, well-worn examples of 'evil'. He seems to have a weakness for this masturbatory tendency to wallow in cliched, romanticized, nebulous notions of decay & bleakness, and to belabor them to the point of neglecting his plots.

In short, there's not much in the way of good, memorable writing, and Ligotti's brand of horror is not nearly as original as I'd hoped. I enjoyed parts of the stories for the basic fact there was some dark suspense and a few cool ideas, but too often this tension doesn't ultimately deliver--instead it peters out into vague, nebulous, generalized endings where "evil takes over", whatever that even means.

only one new story. I gave it to my friend tom and he went out and got the corp. horror book. Tlow is a very good writer!