To this list I would also add Thomas Ligotti. Out of all the authors mentioned as well as Lovecraft to who he is often compared and Barker who comes closest, Ligotti is the single most unsettling writer I have read and I mean this in the best of ways. As I mentioned I picked up his book at 14 and it was immediately apparent that this was a much different sort of story than I was used to from Koontz and King that for the most part filled the staple of my diet at that point. Despite the relative brevity of Grimscribe it took me quite sometime to finish. The stories were simply to unnerving and genuinely creepy to be read one after the other. In fact, the first three stories are still the ones that are the most vivid in my memory and surfaced more regularly than any of his other stories. There is no way to say for certain if it is because they were the first stories of his I was exposed to (and by default the first sort of this kind of story making the impact more permanent) or if they really are prime examples of his work but I will say it was completely new to me and while Stephen King was shelved under horror right along with the collections of Ligotti's stories the two authors and the stories they told were miles apart in terms of atmosphere and environment.

“The Last Feast of the Harlequin”, “The Spectacles in the Drawer” and “Flowers of the Abyss” still draw me in completely and fill me with a sort of awe-filled dread that I entirely love feeling. Of the three, “The Spectacles in the Drawer” is probably the one I liked the most and its conceit while relatively simple unfolds in such an inventively horrific manner that I still cheer Ligotti when I read it.

I am sure many critics have compared Ligotti to Lovecraft and if I remember correctly “The Last Feast of the Harlequin” was dedicated and written in homage of Lovecraft but while I always enjoyed the sense of ancient evils, of gods long since gone insane and their malignant followers and occult forces lurking ever so near the surface of our world straining to escape, I honestly find Ligotti to be superior. While some of this may be due to the saturation of Lovecraft's mythos or to the fact Ligotti succeeded Lovecraft, the stories in “Grimscribe” and later in the compilation of his work in “The Nightmare Factory” stand out more clearly and resonate on a more base level than other still compelling and great books of short stories such as “At the Mountains of Madness” by Lovecraft and “The Books of Blood.”

K, as is typical for me what was to be a simple post has grown and grown as I have sat here writing for the last hour and a half. So I will steer myself and my diatribe toward my initial reason for posting.

There are short stories out there that will forever be total and absolute inspirations to me, stories like “The Spectacles in the Drawer” and other stories from “Grimscribe; “The Function of Dream Sleep”, “Semicolons”, “Paladin of the Lost Hour” and “The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison; “Between the Conceits” and “Inclusion®” by Will Self; “In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker and several others by authors like Philip K. Dick and Stephen Jobyna. Yet, despite these stories and how much I enjoy them I am at heart not a true fan of short stories in general, or even novellas. I like to spend time with a story and specifically with the characters in them. I would say the primary reason I have not read as much of Ligotti's works as I should (nor even very many stories by Lovecraft despite the facts some are considered classics and proved to be the inspiration for so many other writers) is simply for the fact he seems only to write short stories. I haven't found any works by him of real substance (in this case I refer to length rather than worth) and when I read any story I tend to take a break as I mull it over for a few days and absorb what stood out to me. This tendency almost makes reading collections of stories problematic as there have been more than one occasion that I have read only a third or so of the stories in a given collection simply because of the time it takes to do so.

Don't get me wrong, I will read many books in one sitting but these sittings are rarely the half an hour it takes to read a short story of average length. I will often read 300-400 page books in a single night when sleep appears to be AWOL.

It is not that I am incapable of reading things not a hundred pages or longer, in fact I am also a poet and read poetry which for the most part is shorter than most 'short stories'. It is just that I have a ... tendency toward something approaching hyperactivity but not in a physical sense but rather in a mental one. I will often pause a movie for no good reason to go and browse the Internet even if I am enjoying it up to that point and other similar quirks. When it comes to books though, I will likely leave a book untouched even if I was eager to buy it on release until I get into that mind set I know will keep me reading the book to its end. I have left several books unfinished simply because I tried to read them when I wasn't in this particular mindset. This may sound like a mild psychosis to some but it is really just a quirk (I can force myself to read a book without interruption but doing so decreases my enjoyment of it if I was not in the mindset to do so in the first place.) This of course makes short stories more difficult because usually by the time I have 'settled in' the story is coming to a close and I have to start again with the next often completely different story. One of the few collections I was able to read cover to cover was the “Angry Candy” compilation of stories by Harlan Ellison because thematically all of the stories were similar and in lieu of returning characters and environments this let me absorb myself in the book by focusing more on the shared messages of the stories.

So now that I have completely written a post much to long, I would leave you (who has come this far with me and my thoughts) with a question. Does Mr. Ligotti have any novels or even novellas currently available? I searched for myself online but was redirected to many times to the same collections of short stories and eventually gave up, but if any of you are familiar with his works know of a longer work written by him I would love to know about it and hear your opinions of its worth in regard to the general quality of his short stories.

Of course, I would love to hear opinions or retorts to anything I have said so please feel free to post your thoughts in reply.