The fiction he has created over the past 25 years has surpassed that of predecessors such as Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe in complexity and style, and it compares favorably to the prose of Franz Kafka. Because Ligotti is nothing more or less than the king of weird fiction - his short stories are genius, and the relative lack of attention for that work constitutes a crime. Which is all to good, because the “Who the hell is Thomas Ligotti?” question is the only part of this fuss that we should truly care about. HBO had to issue a statement refuting the claim, and social media raged (and may still be raging) with discussions of “Hey, just what is plagiarism?” Suddenly, too, Subterranean Press’s new Ligotti books - the rather dry metaphysical story collection The Spectral Link and a riveting collection of interviews with the author, Born to Fear - began to receive renewed scrutiny. The media attention spiked sales of the book at the center of the controversy - Ligotti’s nonfiction philosophy tome The Conspiracy Against the Human Race - to the point that it began to outsell Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Who the hell is Thomas Ligotti? That’s the question many people were asking after a spate of articles last week speculated on plagiarism charges leveled against True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto on an H.P.
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