Teatro Grottesco
by Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco, a horror masterwork, emerges anew in this sumptuous Chiroptera Press edition. Jonathan Dennison's iconic, original illustrations accompany each tale. Characteristically, the publisher has spared no expense in the book’s presentation, with binding, typography, and paper stock all selected to complement the exquisite darkness of Ligotti's vision—a physical artefact worthy of these thirteen classic excursions into Ligottian pessimism and tremendous storytelling.
Teatro Grottesco contains three sections:
Derangements
A child witnesses his father’s unspeakable basement experiment, and an unseen menace hunts him down in the bowels of an urban wasteland. A town succumbs to increasingly surreal and absurd civic projects orchestrated by a shadowy and malignantly idiotic administrator. Metafictional tales emerge from a storyteller whose narratives collapse into dreamlike horrors. A night clerk is confronted by an omnipotent puppet creature whose nonsensical existence undermines reality itself. A factory that may or may not exist produces novelties that evolve into monstrosities beyond comprehension, and it seems everyone is talking about it (and only about it).
Deformations
A man confronts bodily transformation, terminal illness, and the horror of being trapped within an incomprehensible, sinister corporate system. Factory workers struggle to defy a new supervisor, visible only as a horrendous shape behind frosted glass. In four interconnected stories set in a northern border town, a man erases his existence down to the grave where his body lies; a commercial agent staying in a boarding house finds his life’s ultimate point within a jester’s costume; a winter-obsessed narrator witnesses a crummy parade and a nocturnal visitation that reveals the emptiness within everything; and enigmatic thresholds appear in the northern border town through which people vanish into other realities.
The Damaged and the Diseased
A writer “of nihilistic prose works” seeks the Teatro Grottesco, an artistic troupe that systematically extinguishes all creative impulses. A man's conversation with an art critic unearths disturbing, possibly artificial childhood memories of a bizarre roadside attraction, suggesting nightmarish repercussions for us all. A library employee's obsession with the recorder of dream monologues leads to a revelation that illuminates his melancholic, profound, and tragically personal darkness. A narrator recounts his fascination with a recluse who undergoes disturbing metamorphoses in a shack by a marsh. And finally, an artist's recovery from illness reveals the shadow-like force animating all existence, leading him and his followers to a dead town where they confront the ultimate horror of Being.
Through each of these unforgettable short stories, Ligotti's incomparable prose—equal parts philosophical manifesto and giddy fever dream—guides the reader through weird landscapes that are uniquely his own, where human consciousness is revealed as the ultimate cosmic joke and the ultimate cosmic horror.
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Illustrated by Jonathan Dennison
Hardcover Edition
290 pages. Hardcover bound in black cloth with black foil stamping, and dust jacket. Smyth-sewn binding, black ribbon bookmark, black and white head and tail bands. Offset printed on acid-free archival paper, with thick black endpapers.
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Press, reviews, endorsements
“The best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction.”
Washington Post
“Nothing more or less than the king of weird fiction.”
Jeff VanderMeer, author, editor, and literary critic
“Thomas Ligotti has had one of the most quietly extraordinary careers in the history of horror fiction. He is a dense, witty, and enormously inventive writer.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“He belongs to the most honourable tradition in the field, that of subtlety and awesomeness rather than the relentlessly graphic.”
Ramsey Campbell, horror fiction author, editor, and literary critic
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About the Author
Thomas Ligotti is an American horror author, lay philosopher, and writer. His writings are rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have been described by critics as works of philosophical horror, often formed into short stories and novellas in the tradition of gothic fiction.
