Teatro Grottesco

Teatro Grottesco is the latest collection of Thomas Ligotti short stories and represents the mature phase of his fiction. In this mature phase, Ligotti's style has shed much of the baroqueness of his earlier style, which made him seem an obvious heir to Poe and Lovecraft. However, Ligotti's sparser style, which often emphasizes the banality of places and people, is probably even more potent in capturing the sense of existence as nightmare, which is one of the main cruxes of the Ligottian tale. If, as appears quite possible, Ligotti does not return to writing fiction, this collection will serve as a brilliant summing up of his thematic and narrative interests.