The Edge - Index
Thomas Ligotti
Songs Of A Dead Dreamer
Robinson Publishing, paperback, 275 pages, £5.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1990)
Reissue of an American limited edition.
‘Buried many years before in antiquated clothes of a formal and funereal cut, they seemed to belong to the dying town in a manner its living members could not emulate.’
Thomas Ligotti’s name has been hanging around the edges of horror fiction for several years, but only now is he finally given a whole book to weave his intricate threads.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer is a collection of twenty short stories of shadows and insanity.
Ligotti’s prose is complex and dense – this book is not light reading – and he frequently writes in a first person narrative, snatching pages from a diary (‘Les Fleurs’) or a one-sided conversation (‘The Chymist’). His horrors are not those of exploding entrails and pierced eyeballs; in many ways they recall the work of Dennis Etchison in their understatement and delicate building of subtle atmospheres that may well leave many a reader perplexed at their climax.
Those that come closest to conventional horror fiction (‘The Chymist’ and the strangely titled ‘Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes’) show Ligotti to be a master of the trick-ending format when he desires to be, though even here the endings are breathtakingly grotesque. However, it is in a work like ‘Notes On The Writing Of Horror’ that his style shines. At its opening it is apparently just that, a simple story examined from the viewpoint of several different approaches, but somehow he manages to switch midstream into the telling of a completely different story. This collection is worth reading for that story alone.
Those prepared to spend the necessary time on Ligotti will be rewarded with what Ramsey Campbell’s introduction calls ‘. . . one of the few consistently original voices in contemporary horror fiction.’
Songs Of A Dead Dreamer will become a classic of the form.