Reading Thomas Ligotti

I’ve been reading Thomas Ligotti quite a bit. Didn’t really get his fiction works, though some were quite… atmospheric (which I loved). They tended to be really difficult reading though (the words he uses tend to lie outside my standard vocabulary).

More recently I picked up his non-fiction work, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and it’s the stuff of existential nightmares. I suspect I grew up an optimist, but with a pessimistic realism, and throughout most of my young adulthood had parked that realism with a professional optimism. But picking up this book made me recall the years of my reading books on existentialism and thinking that we shouldn’t be bringing kids into this world because what for?

I admit it’s depressing reading, and yet it feels like I found a kindred spirit. Nobody I can think of in my usual circle of friends would agree with my more pessimistic outlook on life. (Though I think my siblings might. We didn’t have a traumatic childhood by any means, but our take on life tends to lay on the edges of what’s socially acceptable.)