Thomas Ligotti's "Teatro Grottesco" Re-Release

Mythos Books recently released a new edition of one of Thomas Ligotti's most recent short story collections, Teatro Grottesco. By all accounts, the $35 hardback is selling smoothly, since it is already out of stock at the Mythos Books website. The new release also contains illustrations by the very adept Harry O. Morris, a winner of many horror awards from more than a few prestigious sources in the field. Regrettably, the usual imbalance between supply and demand in weird fiction is hitting this re-release hard. It remains available from Amazon at the time of this writing, but that may change soon. The limited quantity continues to pose the question of how long Thomas Ligotti's work will have to languish in small press circles only, before having at least a few tales picked up by a major publisher. One might only hope "The Nightmare Factory" graphic novel might generate renewed interest somewhere for a major reprinting of Ligotti's work, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Handsome, but scarce small press releases will persist as the norm, including for the publication of Ligotti's non-fiction philosophical work, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, probably sometime next year. This, from the back cover of the new Mythos Books edition of Teatro Grottesco:

Thomas Ligotti is often cited as the most curious and remarkable figure in horror literature since H.P. Lovecraft. Celebrated for his exceptionally grotesque imagination and facility as a prose writer, he is a five-time recipient of the most prestigious awards in horror literature. This fact is unusual in that Ligotti's work does not display the traits which have come to be associated with contemporary horror - sympathetic heroes, settings in the everyday world, and good versus evil scenarios. Instead, he has followed a literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe, portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. The stories collected in Teatro Grottesco, for instance, feature tormented individuals who play out there doom in various odd little towns for which Ligotti is noted as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics. The cycle of narratives that include the title work of this collection introduces the readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that threaten their lives and their sanity. In other tales, characters live in the shadow of menacing forms and forces that ultimately envelop them in the most perverse and deranged destinities. The 'funny town' of 'The Town Manager', the 'medicine shop' of 'The Clown Puppet', and the foggy terrain 'across the border' of 'Our Case for Retributive Action' and 'Our Temporary Supervisor' are among the venues that close in on those fated to exist within their precincts. These are selected examples of the bleak array of persons and places that compose the fiction of Thomas Ligotti. As one critic has written, 'Ligotti is wonderful and original; has a dark vision of a new and special kind, a vision that no one has had before him.

-Grim Blogger