The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

A longtime Lovecraft devotee, who has extended the weird tale to the next level via the likes of Borges and Burroughs, Thomas Ligotti is usually published as part of a general anthology of horror writers. But now Ligotti has pulled together a collection of his favorite fiction, both old and new, representing his best and most characteristic works. Thomas Ligotti's stories are perhaps best described as dark magical realism. Many of his stories center on the distorted perspective of a frequently doomed narrator. The title story, "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World," reimagines a kind of Bradbury-like small town that encounters the appearance of a kind of existential darkness, written with a sharp imagery like that of William S. Burroughs. In story after story in this collection, Ligotti does not merely present his readers with isolated incidents of supernatural horror - he challenges them to confront nightmares that are entwined in the very fabric of life itself. Ligotti avoids the explicit violence common in some contemporary fiction, preferring instead to establish an intensely disquieting atmosphere through the use of subtlety and repetition. Often compared favourably with Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft, the "New York Times Book Review" wrote "If there were a literary genre called 'philosophical horror' Thomas Ligotti would easily fit within it".