Thomas Ligotti | Conspiracy Against Life: The Pessimist Philosophy You Were Never Meant to Read
Thomas Ligotti's Complete Philosophy
Thomas Ligotti wrote horror fiction as philosophical argument, producing the most uncompromising pessimist literature of the last century. His life ran from a Catholic childhood in Detroit to the crisis at seventeen that broke his inherited sense of the world, through the decades he spent as a reference editor by day and a weird-fiction writer by night. We follow him into the small-press debut that announced a strange new voice, through the mature collections that refined it into something closer to philosophical argument, into the corporate-horror novella about a man pushed out of his job, and into the quieter late stories of decayed towns and malignantly useless factories. We examine the long, obscure tradition of philosophical pessimism that stood behind his fiction, and we turn at last to the treatise in which he finally stated his position in his own voice. A slow journey through the darkest and most carefully written American horror of our time. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
