Thoughts to ponder:
How does Ligotti build on Lovecraft's work?
How does Ligotti's style enhance or rather, find its own voice through emulation?
Why did Ligotti go through such painstaking effort to expound upon his nihilistic stance? Is Rust truly a Ligotti condensed?
What do you think about endgame to Ligotti's stories? Do they pack a punch or fizzle away and is that a strength or a capitulation? Is ambiguity a retreat emphasizing a breakup with Lovecraft?
Which lesser writers fall under this tradition apart from Laird Barron?
>>7384889
>gif
Nope, never ever.
>>7385214
Anticipation weighing you down?
I'm reading his Conspiracy.... right now (literally right now) and although it flows well and is very entertaining, I don't really see anything that I haven't already read elsewhere etc. I mean the first quarter is basically a defence and justifcation for Zappfe''s 2000 word argument against procreation. The next quarter is a mockery of reasons to live and a justification of the pessimist worldview. I'm halfway through right now.
>>7385789
I quit after 50ish pages; seems to me that Ligotti either fell under the spell of nihilists' sophistry or his predecessors were as honest as he is in purporting that ridiculous intellectual pose.
It's always funny when an artist confuses his dark streak as nihilism.
I'm reading Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The stories range from genuinely creepy and poetic to edgy horror shit.
That serial killer in the Frolic is like a rejected Stephen King villian. I don't care if he represents the unknown evil of the universe or some shit, having him call the protagonist a "meany" is cheesy as hell.
>>7386231
Have you read King's "N."? Word spewer from Maine managed to dominate even the Lovecraftian genre.
Can someone make a Ligotti chart?
>>7386681
Ligotti is too patrician for a ratings chart. It's words floating as debris in cosmos.
>>7386811
>Ligotti is too patrician
>>7386819
Name a writer more patrician than Thomas L.
>>7386854
I think being infested with memes isn't that far away from Shoggoths wandering around.
>How does Ligotti build on Lovecraft's work?
I wouldn't agree that it's built directly upon it, but where Lovecraft represents the chaos and meaninglessness of the universe as gods and creatures, Ligotti shows them more as simply the state of reality in which his characters are fixed. The nihilism is no longer the Other, but the universe itself with which we are suffused.
>How does Ligotti's style enhance or rather, find its own voice through emulation?
I don't understand the meaning of this question.
>Why did Ligotti go through such painstaking effort to expound upon his nihilistic stance?
Because he's depressed as fuck and he's writing about how he feels.
>Is Rust truly a Ligotti condensed?
No, Rust finds hope, he has a happy ending. This is antithetical to Ligotti's work.
>Do they pack a punch or fizzle away and is that a strength or a capitulation?
Their fizzling into ambiguity underlines their message, the one which Rust is antithetical to.
>>7386872
>I don't understand the meaning of this question.
Because you disagree with the first presumption of him building 'directly upon it'. I'd say that he does exactly that and that's why his prose is post-Lovecraftian where cosmos envelops reality from the get-go. As for the second question, I'd say Lovecraft spent too much time building up his characters, Ligotti's stories represent his disembodied thought wandering around, probing reality.
>>7386886
I don't see why Lovecraft should have the monopoly on that sort of cosmos. If anything, Ligotti's work often has more in common with Poe. Come on; Dream of a Mannikin? Teatro Grotesco?
>And the angels, all pallid and wan,
>Uprising, unveiling, affirm,
>The play is the tragedy 'Man'
>And its hero The Conqueror Worm
>>7386992
Well, he doesn't but I think it's not Poe where you should look, but Blackwood and Machen and Dunsany.
But he carried over their vision writing what's probably sci-fi and not horror.
