Thomas Ligotti is one of my all-time favorite writers. To call him a genre fiction author is far too limiting; to label him a horror scribe is plain insulting. To be sure, Ligotti is the natural heir to HP Lovecraft, but the scalpel-sharp ruthlessness of his prose places him, in my opinion, above the Weirdo from Providence.
Ligotti is also something of a literary recluse. He rarely gives interviews, and the idea has been floated that he may not even really exist at all. You can learn more about him at the semi-official online repository for all things TL, Thomas Ligotti Online.
Recently it was announced that Ligotti’s long-awaited nonfiction work, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race will be published by Hippocampus Press in 2010. Grim Reviews has the scoop:
In the case of Ligotti’s Conspiracy, the wait has been a long and somewhat anxious one over the past five years as the treatise changed publishers, tentative dates, and undoubtedly underwent waves of intense editing. During this time, Thomas Ligotti expanded his essay into a book length monument to philosophical pessimism and horror. Today, the virtually finalized version probably bares little resemblance to the rough draft temporarily published on Thomas Ligotti Online in 2007. The finished product will reportedly be a hardcover with an illustrated dust jacket in a print run of about a thousand copies. . .
I also came across another description claiming that the soon-to be released tome is intended for “those for whom philosophical and literary works of pessimism, nihilism, and defeatism are essential to their being.” Say, that’s me!
You know what I’d really love? If somehow Ligotti and the only other contemporary fiction writer I follow, French romantic nihilist Michel Houellebecq, would begin a correspondence and then publish their letters. Now that would be a deliciously bleak read.
You clearly lack some essential text-based apprehension skills. But you don’t see me leaving obnoxious comments on your site. Mostly because the design hurts my eyes. But also because that wouldn’t be very Buddha-like of me.
Sigh.
have you read Houllebecq’s book about HPL?
It’s been in the stack for at least one calendar year. I actually have TWO copies!
I don’t read as fast as some people. 
I struggled through it in French a half decade ago. Haven’t read any Houllebecq since The Elementar Particles because I wanted to read them in French instead of English, and now my skills are too deteriorated. Sigh.
[...] last time I posted about contemporary weird scribe Thomas Ligotti, some deranged dipshit who claims on Twitter to be “doing the Buddha’s work” came [...]
I have never seen a more information-free blog post in ten thousand kalpas – the longest of which is 4.32 billion years.
“Do not speak, except to improve upon silence.”