The Shadow at The Bottom of The World
Thomas Ligotti
Cold Spring Press
This is first time the best works of master horror writer Thomas Ligotti have been brought together in a single volume. The title story "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World" is the tale of a small town that is gripped by a kind of existential darkness. 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".