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Rating: Personally, I discovered Thomas Ligotti thanks to Current 93. The first book I purchased was this "The Songs of a Dead Dreamer," a cult volume that unfortunately cannot be found in bookstores.
A preamble is necessary for anyone wishing to embrace this volume: the index of the "Songs" was shaped, modeled for the Italian edition, under the very hand of the creator Ligotti. The idea was to give an overview of the essential Ligotti that appeared in the early years of activity, those, for instance, of publications in amateur magazines. In the "Songs" besides "The Mystics of Muelenburg," taken from “The Grim Scribe” ("Grimscribe") and included because it is considered very significant for certain “Ligottian” visions, there are also "Autumnal" ("Autumnal"), "The Puppet Masters" ("The Puppet Masters"), "The Voice in the Bones" ("The voice in the bones"), "The Career of Nightmares" ("The Career of Nightmares") and "New Faces in the City" ("New faces in the city") which were originally published in “Noctuary” ("Noctuary"). At the time, Corridore thought publishing Ligotti was a gamble, and, while being sure it would succeed, he wanted to create an anthology of "the best Ligotti by his judgment that must be read" in case the public did not appreciate him. Strangely, "Les Fleurs" was omitted, probably because it had already appeared in Italian, given that the story is also present in the definitive Subterranean Press edition (2010) and the subsequent Penguin Classics (2015). In the subsequent 2011 paperback reprint, "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is added, which had already appeared in n. 78 of the anthology "Nova Sf*" by Elara Libri but is not part of the original book.
"The Songs of a Dead Dreamer," born in 1985 in only three hundred copies, is the very embodiment of Ligotti's singular vision on storytelling. The plot dissolves, giving way to an atmosphere that envelops the reader in a surreal world, inhabited by puppets and masks, governed by a mad reality hidden behind the facade of everyday life. The thematic sections, "Dreams for Sleepwalkers," "Dreams for Insomniacs," and "Dreams for the Dead," open portals to dark dreamlike dimensions. The protagonists, unwitting victims, succumb to the allure of horror, recognizing in it the true essence of reality, reality revealed only in dreams.
Stories such as "The Lost Art of Twilight," a masterful treatment of vampire lore, and "The Lunatic of the Dead: A Tragedy," are dark gems that reveal Ligotti's theatrical art, a parade of masks and mannequins that lead into the darkness. In "The Music of the Moon," the protagonist listens to unsettling notes, evoked by musicians of the shadows in an abandoned building, a cosmic harmony reminiscent of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
For those who have not yet met the craftsman of American Horror, "The Songs of a Dead Dreamer" remains the best gateway to this literary dimension, a threshold to the eternal Darkness of Thomas Ligotti.
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By caesar666
The plot often gives way to atmosphere, thus projecting the reader into a surreal world populated by puppets and masks.
Considered by critics as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, in reality, his art lives with a life of its own and evokes nightmares.
