Steven Mace

" 'Out there' is a relative term, it's closer than you might think. Oh my, the great Dark is only as far away as your closet when you kill the light...as your reflection when it thinks you aren't looking." (Laird Barron) My latest post is about an author who is definitely my kind of writer-  Laird Barron, an intriguing practitioner of weird fiction.  Barron has a similar thematic approach to H.P Lovecraft, as he writes in the realms of cosmic supernatural horror. The likes of Lovecraft, Poe, and Arthur Machen are his principal influences. His monsters and antagonists are ancient horrors originating from the primal soup of our planet's past- although these alien, demonic entities tend to exist in other dimensions of existence, and occasionally outside linear time/space (the title story, "The Imago Sequence" from the collection of the same name is a good example of this). However, they have the power to manifest in our own reality, or only t...

I wanted to publish a blog post about one of my favourite authors at the moment: the American author of supernatural/horror/weird fiction, Thomas Ligotti. I should point out at this juncture that so far I've read four volumes of Ligotti's work: the short story collections Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (re-published together in one excellent edition by Penguin Classics recently); another collection of short stories, Teatro Grottesco ; My Work is Not Yet Done (a novella and two short stories); and The Spectral Link (two novellas, 'Metaphysica Morum' and 'The Small People'). So that means that I haven't yet read Noctuary , The Nightmare Factory (two more short story collections), The Conspiracy Against the Human Race or any other little bits and pieces. In fact, Ligotti has published only sparse amounts in the past three decades, since his first collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer was originally published in the mid-1980s. Funnily enoug...