Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

El mejor escritor de terror del cambio de milenio

The best terror writer of the turn of the millennium

Good morning. I do not know why, but century changes also lead to a series of critical changes in the cultural field. In this sense, we already have writers that dispute the genre of terror in an outstanding way. Today I want to talk about one of the writers which I admire most in this field. I am referring to the North American Thomas Ligotti. 

The nightmare factory

My references about Thomas Ligotti come from the musical field, concretely from project Current 93. Its leader, David Tibet, is a devourer of underground culture, and he highlights unknown artists he considers relevant. Between those we can cite the stories of the writer Eric Conde of Stenbock, decadent Baltic author and sinister, who had fallen into forgetfulness.

Knowing these references, one day in a bookshop in Granada I came across a comic book by Thomas Ligotti published in Spanish and I went for it. Its title: La fábrica de pesadillas.

The comic consists of four original stories by Ligotti with the singularity that two have been scripted by Stuart Moore and two by Joe Harris, with drawings of four different illustrators:  Lee Loughridge, Ben Templesmith, Ted McKeever y Michael Gaydos.

Ligotti himself makes an interesting reflection at the beginning of each one of the stories, letting us see his influences that come from classics like H. P. Lovecraft, E.T.A. Hoffman or Bram Stoker. The four stories are of a pretty intelligent and an unobvious terror, almost paradoxical I would say. He uses elements of the genre like clowns, mannequins or asylums but without falling into hackneyed, there are even mild references to cinema like Jack Arnold’s 1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man

Noctuary

Of course, Valdemar had to be the first publishing house in bringing the first line of the Spanish edition, a compilation of the best stories by Thomas Ligotti. Being aware of the importance of the writer, Valdemar has opted to put them in his head collection, “Valdemar Gótica”, as it well deserves.

Ligotti’s stories reveal to us a new glance at terror. The psychological dimension is fundamental for the writer, who tries to locate its characters in spaces and in times outside reality, as a first way to relocate the reader, to leave him without references, so that he does not know where he is really going.

Indeed, Ligotti leads us where he wants and towards where he wants. Sometimes he takes characters from the universal mythological imaginary–such is the case of “Medusa”– to bring them to his world and use their disturbing and magical facets, which he puts at the service of his pen to bewilder the reader. Other times he uses ellipsis: in an enumeration of yearly events, like the apparently innocent festivity of Halloween, the horror that the reader imagined materialized in a brief notice that with mastery, Ligotti drops a year after it happened. Fantasies of a past science -which Ligotti, however, calls the science of the future- with the inventions of a crazy doctor remind us of the member The man of sand of E.T.A Hoffmann. 

The versatility in the records and knowing how to take advantage of each of his sentences make Ligotti capable of filling the concert with the reader’s soul even in microfictions of one or two pages, as are those collected in the last part of the book.

Grimscribe

Grimscribe. Life and Works is another compilation of stories published by Valdemar. This is a genre in which Thomas Ligotti moves like a fish in water, and in which he is capable of developing brilliant short plots, capable of terrorizing the contemporary reader.

In «The Last Feast of Harlequin», the author tells us the immersion of an anthropologist in a strange village in which during winter every year a festivity that is characterized by some sinister clowns is celebrated. The protagonist will immerse in this odd world, where the imagination of the author brilliantly takes us by the hand through a creepy story. 

Another story that surprised me pleasantly is titled «The Spectacles in the Drawer». In it, this element permits its carrier to travel to magical worlds that bring nothing but dire consequences. Also, «Nethescurial» is a good sample of horror, which sinks its roots in a strange document found among the bundles of a library. Finally, «The Sect of the Idiot», a very Lovecraftian tale, in which he cites a strange character, is the excuse to find a fateful ending.

The conspiracy against the human species

As a reader of Ligotti, I am interested in getting to know his ideology, his ethics, the values that make a writer break the norm. Well, The Conspiracy against the Human Race is an essay by this author which gives a reply to those questions.

The thing is, Thomas Ligotti is a pessimistic writer. He thinks that the fact that the human being has a conscience is not something good, quite the opposite. For him, the human condition carries an intrinsic suffering implicitly, linked with the existence and therefore to the knowledge of death. This suffering is something that the man shuns and buries in his conscience to try to forget that it is there. Only the one who is brave and decides to look at the world with clarity and warn his own death realizes this fact. To Ligotti the discovery of this sorrow conforms a rite of passage that is necessary and after which there is no turning back. You sink into a state similar to depression, from which you will not get out any more.

For the setting of this ideology, Ligotti has fed on the ideas of authors like Schopenhauer or Zapffe, besides many others (even though the two cited look like their principal referents). In the search for a solution, the author also approaches Buddhism for considering it as a more adequate way to understand the being, even though he finally rejects it.

The final part of the book is the most interesting one, in this part it applies what has been said about the great horror writers, mainly Poe and Lovecraft. This highlights an important point: ‘Without death (i.e. without our awareness of death) no supernatural horror story would ever have been written’.

Ligotti and Current 93

The collaboration of Thomas Ligotti with Current 93 is limited to three albums: “In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land” (1997), “I Have A Special Plan For This World” (2000) and “This Degenerate Little Town” (2001), in addition, Tibet has published in limited editions diverse stories of Ligotti.

If you like Lovecraft you will like Ligotti

If you are a fan of H.P Lovecraft, Thomas Lugotti is surely someone who you should not miss. Having said this, I take the opportunity to recommend to you the volume of Herejía y Belleza dedicado a H.P. Lovecraft y el horror cósmico  that we have just published on Amazon. If you do not have it, in it you will discover a series of interesting essays about the life and work of the master of Providence.


OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (27 de febrero de 2025). El mejor escritor de terror del cambio de milenio. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 12 de marzo de 2026 de https://doi.org/10.58079/13e04


Deja una respuesta

Tu dirección de correo electrónico no será publicada. Los campos obligatorios están marcados con *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.