I know Ligotti gets brought up A LOT in horror threads on /lit/, but I was wondering if anyone else finds his work to be a bit underwhelming? Since Penguin reissued Grimscribe/Songs I've read four of his books (the other two being Noctuary and Teatro) but I feel like he's been writing the same story for the past thirty years or so (Protagonist encounters malevolent force that is usually indescribable/extremely abstract that confirms the absurdity and meaningless of human consciousness to him.) I can appreciate the general atmosphere he conjures in stories like 'In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land', but in terms of actual substance he seems a bit lacking and at times his stories seem borderline devoid of plot. I'm not at all saying that he's awful (I've enjoyed him enough that I've bought/read four of his books), but why has he become such a cult figure in horror fiction, to the extent that he has an entire forum dedicated to discussion of his writing? Am I missing something major here?
I read a bit of Teatro Grosso and gave up midway: was bored as shit by it. Not scary, just ambling atmosphere with figures in the dark.
>>7697363
Pretty much. He sets up a creepy atmosphere but doesn't do anything with it. Also his endings suck. "END THEN A SKELETON POPPED OUT"-tier. He could just end his stories a paragraph or two earlier out of nowhere and they would improve.
I agree. I was a huge Ligotti fan for a while, but after reading Grimscribe/Songs, it does seem like he was a one-trick pony. Before I read them, I thought maybe he had something interesting going on, something that wasn't just an evolved Lovecraft rip-off, but now I realise that his new stuff which I had enjoyed so much was simply built on his Lovecraft imitation. Discovering the missing link made it all so underwhelming.
On the positive side, means it's less work for me to outdo him. Or anyone else.
I liked "Conspiracy" but I'm not into horror. I read one about some workers at a factory where their boss gets replaced with this shadow thing in the bosses office and some guys break down but I thought it was pretty lame, though he established an atmosphere in a nice way.
I have to wonder if part of his status comes from non-literary aspects of him. He's fairly reclusive, comes across as extremely odd in interviews, and until recently most of his books were prohibitively expensive for the average reader. All things that add extra 'cool' points for someone wanting to namedrop him.
That or contemporary horror fiction is so devoid of quality that anyone doing something slightly out of the ordinary can get held in high-esteem.
His worldview that everything is meaningless doesn't really allow for a lot of variation in his storytelling.
>>7697768
Yeah, but he takes a dynamite publicity picture!
>>7697421
>contemporary horror fiction is so devoid of quality that anyone doing something slightly out of the ordinary can get held in high-esteem.
Sadly this, most of what I see in bookstores is King/Koontz inspired shit or yet another "...Of Cthulhu" anthology.
>>7698067
*Oh, and zombies. Mustn't forget zombies.
>>7697792
looks like cocteau
>>7698106
it is
