[5] Michael Calia of The Wall Street Journal wrote of the reprint that "Horror writer Thomas Ligotti is about to enter the American literary canon.
Penguin Classics published a volume of Mr. Ligotti’s short stories, making him one of 10 living writers, including Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, among the hundreds the imprint has published in the U.S."[6] Ligotti's work received high praise following the publication from the likes of The New York Times Book Review,[7] the Los Angeles Review of Books,[8] The Washington Post,[9] and The New Yorker.
Additionally, Ligotti played guitar on Current 93's contribution to the compilation album Foxtrot, whose proceeds went to the treatment of musician John Balance's alcoholism.
[11] He has cited Thomas Bernhard, William S. Burroughs, Emil Cioran, Vladimir Nabokov, Edgar Allan Poe, Giacomo Leopardi, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Bruno Schulz as being among his favorite writers.
Also among his avowed influences are Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Arthur Machen, all fin de siècle horror authors known for their subtlety and implications of the cosmic and supernatural in their stories.
[1] Ligotti avoids the explicit violence common in some recent horror fiction, preferring to establish a disquieting, pessimistic atmosphere through the use of subtlety and repetition.
Author Jeff VanderMeer has penned numerous pieces praising Ligotti's writing, including the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe.