Born to Fear

Nominated for the World Fantasy Award

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About the book

This book collects seventeen interviews with Thomas Ligotti, the modern master of pessimistic weird and supernatural horror fiction, spanning a quarter century.

Considered in sequence, the interviews both complement and extend statements Ligotti has offered in other formats, including his essays and his nonfiction book The Conspiracy against the Human Race. While the running themes in this volume are not unlike those proffered by most authors—including compositional practices, sources of inspiration, and biographical revelations—Ligotti manages for the most part to reveal how idiosyncratic he is as an interview subject and as a writer of supernatural or weird horror tales. In both genres, the very title Born to Fear condenses the provenance of his personal experiences and insights.

Praise

“These interviews range across the years and bring an interesting insight into how [Ligotti] views himself, his panic attacks, writing style, and what he thinks of modern horror writing.”
— San Francisco Book Review

“In the 25 years that the interviews span, Ligotti’s take on life has remained constant. If for Shakespeare life is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, for Ligotti ‘it’s a tragedy that consumes us and makes the world what it is—an inane and grotesque puppet show,’ and he would disabuse us of any notion that it might possibly be otherwise. . . . [E]ven in interviews, Ligotti’s strengths as a thinker, and especially as a literary critic, stand out when he points to subtleties in various authors’ writings and distinguishes between ‘the weird’ and ‘horror.’ ”
— PopMatters

“I found this to be an excellent companion to Ligotti’s The Conspiracy against the Human Race. I’d even recommend that first-time readers of Conspiracy go through Born to Fear first.”
— Goodreads reviewer