Thomas Ligotti (born 1953 in Detroit) is an American horror writer who emerged with his first collection, "Songs of a Dead Dreamer," in 1986. He works chiefly in the short form, and his prose is famously dreamlike yet airless, leaving the reader no clear way out. He is widely regarded as the foremost living voice of philosophical cosmic horror.
He drew on Lovecraft, Poe, and Kafka, on the pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer, and on fin-de-siecle weird authors such as Blackwood, M.R. James, and Machen. His collection "The Nightmare Factory" won both the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award in 1996; he later took the International Horror Guild Award in 2002 and a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. In 2015 Penguin Classics reissued his first two collections together, and The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."
In his 2010 nonfiction work "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race," Ligotti sets out a worldview of pessimism, nihilism, and antinatalism. For him the true horror is not a shape lurking outside but consciousness turning back on itself. By refusing resolution and sealing the reader inside a closed room, his fiction draws Lovecraft's cosmic indifference inward, which is why he is so often named the intellectual heir to that tradition.