What does /lit/ think of Thomas Ligotti?

CRAWLING IN MY SKIN-tier

>>9718485
Elaborate please

>>9718512
he's fake deep

>>9718483
Really does have much to say other than life is fucking terrible.

some men just want to watch the world earn

>>9718483
Ligotti can be a bit melodramatic and theatrical, although he has plenty of heart. Benatar is calmer and better for anyone looking to get into antinatalism.

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Extremely hit-or-miss. His good stories are probably the highest achievement in contemporary horror, and can be genuinely frightening, but a lot of his stuff is intellectually lazy and 'sp0000ky.'

Please try not to post photographs of him.

He is technically skilled. I enjoy his writing very much, but dislike his philosophical ranting which is built from a base i don't understand, and makes me cringe when it's included in his story collections.

>anything can be broken down with skepticism
>therefore it should be
lolno

I only read Conspiracy Against the Human Race and I thought it was a nice collection of philosophical arguments. Very bleak, but I don't mind it, it was a nice thought experiment. I actually found it quite freeing and cathartic to take a moment and look at life the way it is described in that book. If this bleak outlook on life is what people call cringy, then I don't agree.

>>9719963
Should carlify in >>9719911 that i didn't mean CATHR in particular. It's the way he frames it when doing it in 3-5 pages that bothers me.

>be Thomas Ligotti
>age 4
>you're at home and hear your mom rummaging around in the study
>nows your chance
>you stealthily creep to her room
>open her closet
>take out the first red dress you see and spread it out on the carpet
>you walk to the door and look down the hall to see if your mom is coming
>coast is clear
>you close the door, but leave a little crack so you can hear if shes coming
>you strip completely naked
>you are getting excited
>you walk over to the dress, and you straighten out the wrinkles so its completely flat on the floor
>you turn and face the door
>placing one foot on each side of the dress, you squat over it and start to push
>you hear footsteps, but its too late to stop
>"Thomas? Thomas, where are you?"
>its coming out
>the door opens
>your mom sees you
>she screams
>"THOMAS WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"
>shes frozen in horror
>the turd is long and hard because she only feeds you meaty dinners
>right before the end of it is pinched off and it flops loudly onto the dress, you scream out...
>"LIGOTTI LIGGOTI HE LIKES TO POTTY"

Seems like hes had a pretty interesting life.

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>>9718562
That is something that needs to be said more often tho

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>>9718483

>>9720063
I feel this deserves some sort of reply yet I...let's just leave it to this.

>>9719891
what are his good stories?

He's a master at crafting unsettling, dreamlike situations and atmospheres. In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land is probably my favorite thing he's written.

He's the perfect contemporary horror / weird tales writer. Why? Because whereas Lovecraft capitalized on the subjects of space, unexplored territories (the sea, exotic lands) etc, Ligotti instead looks around and wonders where might the source of modern horror / weirdness be? Koji Suzuki wrote The Ring (1991) because he saw it in modern television. I'm sure somebody I'm not aware of has written something spooky about the internet. But Ligotti realized that distant lands either in earth or in space just aren't that creepy any more. We know life is mundane and depressing wherever we go. At the bottom of the ocean there's no giant monster, just some obscure fish that may at best be good material for a clickbait article. So Ligotti looks around his own life and sees the horror and weirdness in the corporate landscape, in the Kafkaesque nightmare of lengthy meetings scheduled apparently for sadistic purposes, at the mysterious workplace hierarchy which decides who is to stay at the company ("Oh thank ye master!") and who is going to be "cut". He finds the source of his inner turmoil not, as Lovecraft discovered it, in having been forced - as a sensitive individual - into a city full of blacks and what Lovecraft deemed "Italo-Semitic Mongrels" (or "sweaty apes") but in being forced to suffer in silence in a cubicle-packed office wherein absurd rules, nauseous formalities and so on are the norm, and where someone like Ligotti can only allow the grudge he bears to become more intense and all-consuming by the way. And this is the "Progress" he is apparently a part of. Much like Houellebecq in that respect, Ligotti is a dissenter among the Last Men of the contemporary western middle-class. Like Houellebecq he comprehends the basic fact that progress and modernity are largely hollow mantras to which many people, including the dreaded Co-Workers (often the malevolent characters in Ligotti's work) subscribe, as they thrive and proliferate in the hellish grey flannel officeworld governed by that mysterious shadowy figure lurking behind the stained glass floor-to-ceiling Head Office window. And that, my friends, is why I am a virgin.

Not sure why but I have his picture saved on my laptop.

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>>9720063
>>the turd is long and hard because she only feeds you meaty dinners
>>right before the end of it is pinched off and it flops loudly onto the dress, you scream out...
>>"LIGOTTI LIGGOTI HE LIKES TO POTTY"

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>>9718483

>What does /lit/ think of Thomas Ligotti?

Genre fic for edgy brainlets who'd rather mope than git gud.