Thomas Ligotti

« Même chez des personnes à peu près stables au plan émotionnel la soif de revanche peut se révéler une affaire assez accaparante. Chez moi elle était dévorante. » Frank Dominio est un homme asocial, peureux et paranoïaque, parvenu malgré tout à se hisser au poste de chef de service dans une grande entreprise. Il survit tant bien que mal dans cet environnement hostile, au prix de mille lâchetés quotidiennes. Mais quand Frank soumet une idée révolutionnaire à son supérieur, ses collègues se liguent contre lui et le poussent à bout pour le faire licencier et lui voler son idée. La violence de Frank se déchaine, et, aidé par une force mystérieuse qui le dote de pouvoirs quasi illimités, il raffine sa vengeance pour faire payer à chacun de ses bourreaux des années de honte et d’humiliation. Ce court roman (le seul de Ligotti) est suivi de quatre nouvelles avec lesquelles il forme les « Contes d’horreur en entreprise », critique acerbe et hallucinée du monde du travail, l’un des sommets de cette œuvre d’une noirceur sans équivalent. Né en 1953 à Détroit, Thomas Ligotti, est un personnage très secret, voire reclus, qui construit depuis 40 ans une œuvre singulière hantée par la folie, la ruine et le cauchemar. Récipiendaire de quatre prix Bram Stoker, considéré comme le principal héritier de Lovecraft, il fait aussi partie des rares auteurs vivants publiés dans la prestigieuse collection Penguin Classics.

When junior manager Frank Dominio is suddenly demoted and then sacked it seems there was more than a grain of truth to his persecution fantasies. But as he prepares to even the score with those responsible for his demise, he unwittingly finds an ally in a dark and malevolent force that grants him supernatural powers. Frank takes his revenge in the most ghastly ways imaginable - but there will be a terrible price to pay once his work is done.Destined to be a cult classic, this tale of corporate horror and demonic retribution will strike a chord with anyone who has ever been disgruntled at work. Also contains the stories "I Have A Special Plan For This World" and "The Nightmare Network".

Songs of a Dreamer was Thomas Ligotti's first collection of supernatural horror stories. When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris's Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989, an expanded version appeared that garnered accolades from several quarters. Writing in the Washington Post, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick 'Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.'The revisions in the present volume of Songs of a Dead Dreamer have been calculated to make its stories into enhanced incarnations of the originals. This edition is and will remain definitive.For those already familiar with the stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, an invitation is extended to return to them in their ultimate state. For those new to the collection, it is submitted to engage them with some of the most extraordinary tales of their kind. In either case, this publication of Songs of a Dead Dreamer offers evidence for why Ligotti has been judged to be among the most important authors in the history of supernatural horror.

Two terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” (The Washington Post) Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.Ligotti’s stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness of the abyss below.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This collection features tormented individuals who play out their doom in various odd little towns, as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics. The cycle of narratives that includes the title work of this collection, for instance, introduces readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that ultimately engulf their lives. These are selected examples of the forbidding array of persons and places that compose the mesmerizing fiction of Thomas Ligotti.

His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.