The Best Thomas Ligotti Story You’ve Probably Never Read
An uncollected meditation on existence, nonexistence, and the horror in between
Dear Living Dark readers,
Today, I want to commend to your attention a short story by Thomas Ligotti titled “Ghost Stories for the Dead.” Whether you’re already familiar with Ligotti or have never read his work, this is a powerful piece of fiction that, I predict, you may find deeply arresting.
You won’t find it in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, the combined 2015 Penguin Classics edition of Tom’s first two books, which were originally published separately in 1986 and 1991 and which were collections of stories that had previously appeared in the horror small press. Nor will you find it in any of his other collections—not Teatro Grottesco, and not even 1996’s The Nightmare Factory, which represented a nearly comprehensive omnibus of his fiction up to that time.
“Ghost Stories for the Dead” first appeared in 1982 in the second issue of author/editor Thomas Wiloch’s small press horror magazine Grimoire. It opens with an epigraph drawn from E. M. Cioran, a confirmed influence on Ligotti’s work and worldview: “That faint light in each of us which dates back before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.” It then proceeds to tell a dark and reflective story, partly mournful and partly horrific, about the bliss of nonexistence as contrasted with the nightmarish agony of existence. Rather than unfolding as a conventional narrative, it is structured as a sequence of four short, thematically linked movements, each approaching the same central vision from a different angle:
The New Blackness
The New Silence
The Old Nonsense and the New
Tales of the New Dream
Across these sections, Ligotti contrasts the torments and absurdities of embodied existence with a strange, almost beatific condition of post-existence, where identity, memory, and suffering fall away into a state of absolute negation. But the story does not leave things there. In its final movement, it introduces a quiet but devastating reversal, one that suggests even this annihilating escape may not be secure.
In 1989, seven years after its initial appearance, the story showed up again in the special all-Ligotti 68th issue of Crypt of Cthulhu. Then it was posted at Thomas Ligotti Online from 1998 to 2002.
And after that, it basically disappeared. As I mentioned, it has never been collected in any of Ligotti’s books, though it was included in a “collected short fiction” project—not carried out or authorized by Tom himself—that attempted to bring together all of his stories in chronological order.
I find this omission to be unfortunate and somewhat mystifying, as “Ghost Stories for the Dead” is simply brilliant, and also quite affecting in its signature combination of philosophical perspective, supernatural horror, and depressive gloom. If I were to assemble a list of my eight or ten favorite Ligotti stories, this would be among them. I don’t know why Tom has chosen not to include it in any of his fiction collections. I mentioned the story to him in 2006 when I interviewed him for my Teeming Brain blog (see “Interview with Thomas Ligotti: It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology”), noting that it falls among the subset of his works that take a highly experimental approach and that convey plot only obliquely, opting instead to foreground his signature variety of horrific philosophical speculation. But I didn’t ask why he had chosen to leave it uncollected.
If you find anything enticing in this paean to a Ligottian literary rarity, be advised that you can read the story online, along with that entire issue of Crypt of Cthulhu, thanks to the Internet Archive.
As an accompanying note, I know many of you are interested in Ligotti’s writings, while I also know that some of you probably aren’t. Some of you may not even be familiar with the name, which is of course fine. Wherever you fall on that continuum of possibilities, I think this story will appeal to any reader who appreciates short fiction that arrests and transports.
By the by, I still find Tom’s ascension to the status of mainstream literary author to be somewhat hard to believe, even though it’s now a decade since that combined edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe from Penguin, followed by their publication of his nonfiction opus The Conspiracy against the Human Race three years later in 2018, unofficially promoted him to the rank of canonical American author. And of course the famous (notorious) connection between his work and the pessimist/antinatalist worldview of the character of Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, in the first season of HBO’s True Detective, thrust him into the general public spotlight before either of the Penguin books appeared.
For those of us who had been transfixed for years by the Ligottian opus and personage, feeling it to be a precious and somewhat private personal possession with its combination of cult status and life-changing power—it felt as if his stories, books, and interviews were speaking to each of us individually in the depths of our soul—the transition was a strange one indeed.
For the first dozen or so years of my authorial career, which began when my story “Teeth” was published by Jon Padgett in 1998 at the brand new website Thomas Ligotti Online, I wrote and published in the field of weird, cosmic, and supernatural horror, where Ligotti was and still is a legendary, leading luminary. My innate creative drive led me to produce stories and other writings that explored the dark depths where horror, religion, and art are different facets of the same spiritual jewel. Then my daemon muse began leading me to branch out into writing about creativity itself, and eventually into writing about creativity, spirituality, and nonduality. But that didn’t mean I left horror completely behind. As observed by the classic 1980s horror anthology television series Tales from the Darkside, which I have invoked here before, “the darkside is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us.” It is just as real as anything having to do with the light, of which it is the obverse face or facet, the inseparable alternate aspect.
In parting, here’s a taste of “Ghost Stories for the Dead” to further whet your appetite. This comes from its parting words, which may haunt you, not like a specter that threatens from the outside, but like one that lives inside your own self:
For in the new dream such beings—wrenched from eternity and returned to earth—are capable of anything from indiscretion to atrocity. Those who have suffered most know how to inflict it best—it’s a law of the universe. The suicides, the murdered . . . the unfulfilled, the broken hearted: veterans of extraordinary suffering and mercenaries of its perpetuation.
These are my mind’s eyes, I who have no eyes. These are my mind’s mind, I who am not mind. I am bereft of traits, bankrupt of qualities. The riches of the dead are extravagant next to my destitute estate. I have nothing but my immortality; and now, desiring or not, they will have it too.
And I am glad I cannot know them.
But I am even gladder they cannot know me.
Warm regards,
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