Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Thomas Ligotti

Book Overview

Songs of a Dreamer was Thomas Ligotti's first collection of supernatural horror stories. When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris's Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881845809
• ISBN13: 9780881845808
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Lurid songs, lost cinema, überdense poetry, a panorama of nightmares, uncomfortable masks and highly

Urban solitude, houses that are suggested to appear and disappear, empty voids laying hidden behind dark crumbled brick facades, streets with a mysterious accumulation of names seemingly coming from nowhere, doors hanging in their hinges but do not open that easily, pieces of clothing laying abandoned in the street, shadows rise and fall, voices in the distance calling your name, or do they? These are the settings for the superb short story "The greater festival of masks" and believe me, this is just the beginning. From here on, from the moment lead character Noss walks in a shop that solely sells costumes and masks and falls asleep, it only gets worse, and more eerie, and untouchable. And at the end, you're not realy sure what you've just witnessed. What happens exactly behind the deceitfull brick walls of the old houses and behind the wooden fence at the back of the shop? Why de some masks perfectly fit the customer's face while other hurt and slide of with every step you take. What cries out underneath the blank faces of the inhabitant who have no facial features or expressions what so ever? Like the best poetry there is so much more than meets the eye. It's between the lines that the real things happen, but what is reallity and when do dreams and nightmares take over? A lot has been said about "Songs of a dead dreamer", Thomas Ligotti's debut collection of short stories. The comparisons with Poe and Lovecraft seems endless, Kafka and Bruno Schulz are mentioned as well because of their nightmarishness and plotless compositions. You could add the cinema of David Lynch and Roman Polanski if you like, even throw in the animated shorts of the twin brothers Timothy and Stephen Quay, especially their master creation "Streets of crocodiles" (and, why not, their solo feature film "Institute Benjamenta" as well.) And how about some hints at Jan Svankmajer's surreal work like "Faust", "Alice", and surely the suggested perversities of the absurd "Conspirators of pleasure". And yet, with all these big names in a long line, if one author can be called original and being capable of standing completely on his own, it is Mr. Ligotti. One of the reasons why this is a justified statement is because Ligotti has a gift not many writers of the horror genre have: style. Ligotti's prose sings, cries, wanders, but never realy lingers off. Sentences can be long at time, but never tedious, their is a meaning in every word and an underlying motivation for each syllable. It's the horrifying stuff of heavey metal perfectly blend with the otherworldlyness of a choir chant and the bravoura of an opera. You could call Ligotti's prose even autistic because it describes a world of its own in a language that stands on its own and seems to be introverted, no matter how many word-explosions and super nova's of illuminations and imagery it may contain. Its locked in itself, it is both lock and key, and the reader has but one choise, go along with the lyrical flow and enter th

A Classic Work Of Horror Literature

There is something strangely comforting about reading the bad review posted above, from Publisher's Weekly, and knowing that it refers to one of the greatest anthologies of horror literature published in the last fifty years. Just goes to show you that even the best writers in this genre are inevitably misunderstood: Here we have a man in the same league as Blackwood, M. R. James, Lovecraft or Poe--and he's still being dismissed in his own lifetime by TOTAL DUMMIES. But Ligotti is certainly appreciated, at least by some. There is a published THOMAS LIGOTTI READER...despite the fact that almost all his books are out of print. His signed first editions are already priced like horror artifacts, and increasingly hard to come by. Personally, if I had any signed first edition of Ligotti's, it would be SONGS. There is a tangible loneliness to the horror, an emotional dimension. The ending of ALICE'S LAST ADVENTURE, for instance, is simultaneously terrifying AND enormously sad. And a wry sense of humor is also present in this particular collection, though it's not remotely comforting--quite the opposite in fact. Something about the world of Ligotti's stories being so unforgivingly funny just makes it MORE threatening. Like his characters are caught up in a particularly cruel 'cosmic joke'. Now it's also true that something about this first collection is more traditional than Ligotti's later work, and that turns off some of the die-hard Ligottians (who understandably prefer the lyric otherworldiness of his recent collections). But that also means SONGS is the best place to get introduced to this remarkable author. Linguistically complex, structurally virtuosic and just plain brilliant. If you're thinking of reading SONGS, do it right now. You'll become a fan overnight, I promise.

Dreams of a Mad Mutant Borges of the Midwest

This unarguable classic collection of stories appeared at the end of the 1980s. Horror fiction, or what publishers chose to market as horror fiction, was big business. However, there is a large variety of styles under this arbitrary umbrella ("Horror isn't a genre, it's an emotion", editor/author David Hartwell). Authors such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz had become best sellers with novels often using pulp-orientated elements (vampires, ghouls, werewolves, or assorted permutations) that invade our modern society. Others wrote popular horror novels with the villain(s) being psychotic or sociopathic, but an explainable (and real) element in our society. One of my favorite styles of horror, however, could best be described as "hallucinatory nightmare", which is rarer and probably more difficult to pull off. Ligotti succeeds time and time again with a rich lyrical style that is varied, multi-leveled, and often witty as well. There are the former mentioned types of tales here. There's a great vampire story, and you'll meet a few psychos, one for instance who loves flowers, but it's the stories of reality rotting away or perhaps take place entirely in an askew dream fantasy where Ligotti makes his mark. Stories like "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech", or "the Greater Festival of Masks" take place in the landscape of a surreal nightmare. In one of his best stories, "Alice's Last Adventure", a twisted ode to Lewis Carroll, the narrator's reality may have literally turned inside out. Amongst all the vacuous abstract blather about literature and art, good fiction's ultimate goal, along with telling a good story, is to create the mental state in the reader of a "waking dream", as the late John Gardner accurately described it. A world is created in the reader's imagination and he or she, while reading, forgets it's merely words on paper. For myself, good horror fiction, for perhaps a number of reasons, has always produced the most vivid "waking dream" state, and the hallucinatory nightmare style best of all. Probably since the logic is often skewed or hidden as in actual dreams. "Notes On Horror: A Story", which unfortunately does not appear in his later comprehensive collection, "The Nightmare Factory" makes a great litmus test for whether you're a lover of "weird fiction". If you finish it and question what is this Ligotti guy's problem, this type of horror probably isn't for you. On the other hand, it may thrill, delight, and amuse you and you may after all, as Ligotti says, "find it all so easy".

A masterpiece of cryptic dread and dementia.

Here's the biggest compliment I can pay Thomas Ligotti: he writes as though he were completely unaware of any other horror fiction written in his lifetime. There is not a major horror writer today whose work even vaguely resembles Ligotti's. I've heard him compared to Poe and Lovecraft but even these comparisons are misleading. His prose and imagery are far more akin to those of Bruno Schulz, the great Polish fantasist who wrote "Street of Crocodiles." These stories spill over with chilling images, irrational "plots," and a sense of dread that feels less like fiction than it does the kinds of horrible dreams we have while suffering a high fever. If you don't recognize that as high praise, you probably shouldn't read this book. But I love it."Songs of a Dead Dreamer" is his earliest collection, and perhaps because of this, I feel it still packs the biggest wallop. But if you like these stories, I recommend "Grimscribe" and "Noctuary." A personal note: Years ago I had the chance to illustrate Ligotti's story "The Night School" for a small press publication. The editor sent me a copy of the manuscript, full of Ligotti's own notes and corrections. Reading the story in that form, feeling that much closer to the original process that brought the story into being, was an awesome experience. I felt compelled to examine the manuscript, as though somewhere amid its wandering margins and sloppy typing I might detect a sign, however cryptic, a clue as to how to tap into the same chilling dreamworld that Ligotti described so beautifully. It didn't work, of course. But "Night School" did inspire a pretty good illustration and reading Ligotti did provide one of the high points during my own dubious ventures into the realm of horror fiction.

Ligotti is undoubtedly the only living master of terror.

The truth is that Thomas Ligotti has come out of seemingly nowhere in just the last ten years and has, in that time, set a new standard in literature of the supernatural. I picked up _Songs_ in 1992, initially for the Washington Post's declaration, "Put this on the bookshelf between Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft where it belongs." My hopes were more than realized. Ligotti is not only as good as the nineteenth and twentieth century masters of the macabre. For the select few who have read his material, he is simply one of the finest authors of the terrifying and disturbing short story and novella ever to grace the English language. Do I exaggerate? Read this compilation of masterworks and ask yourself afterwards whether Ligotti will be considered the groundbreaking Poe or Lovecraft of the late twentieth century. When the likes of King and Straub are mostly forgotten in a century, it is my firm opinion that Thomas Ligotti's stories, such as the terrifying "Dr. Locrian's Asylum", will still be read by those students of the genre who will still appreciate the authors subtlety, flowing eloquence, and his chilling originality and detail of plot and character