Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe at Amazon:
Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.
From the Guardian's 2016 review:
Having laboured for decades in the obscure regions of horror publishing, Ligotti recently joined Morrissey as one of the more surprising living writers to be published as a Penguin Classic. But unlike Morrissey, he may actually deserve the distinction.
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Ligotti’s strange, funny, pessimistic fictions developed a cult reputation when the writer of the HBO series True Detective confessed that many of Matthew McConaughey’s diatribes about the pointlessness of human consciousness were influenced by Ligotti’s book of pessimistic philosophy, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. But for all their dark imaginings, Ligotti’s fictions – like those of Poe and Nabokov, the cruel, brilliant, manipulative writers he most resembles – are absorbingly constructed little works of art.