Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
by Thomas Ligotti
Penguin Classics, 2015
464 pages / $13.60 Buy from Amazon
There’s a certain thrill in loving out-of-print authors. There’s the feeling of being in on a great secret, plus the hunt for their books in used bookstores is intoxicating. But it sure is nice to be able to easily get what you want, too. That’s why I’m so thrilled that Penguin Classics has reprinted Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe in one easy-to-obtain paperback.
Ligotti’s prose is wonderfully byzantine, like Lovecraft or Poe, but his work has a contemporary, postmodern feel, too. His stories “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” and “The Library of Byzantium” are absolutely fantastic in their stimulating intellectuality, on top of being creepy, and now easy-to-locate can be added to his stories’ descriptors, too.