Songs of a Dead Dreamer

Dust jacket by Aeron Alfrey

Songs of a Dreamer was Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of supernatural horror stories. When originally published in 1985 by Harry Morris’s Silver Scarab Press, the book was hardly noticed. In 1989, an expanded version appeared that garnered accolades from several quarters. Writing in the Washington Post, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick extolled: “Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.”

The revisions in the present volume of Songs of a Dead Dreamer have been calculated to make its stories into enhanced incarnations of the originals. This edition is and will remain definitive.

For those already familiar with the stories in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, an invitation is extended to return to them in their ultimate state. For those new to the collection, it is submitted to engage them with some of the most extraordinary tales of their kind. In either case, this publication of Songs of a Dead Dreamer offers evidence for why Ligotti has been judged to be among the most important authors in the history of supernatural horror.

Please note: This is just the first in a number of definitive editions of Ligotti’s works we plan to publish.

Limited: 250 signed numbered copies bound in leather
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition

Table of Contents

Dreams for Sleepwalkers

• The Frolic
• Les Fleurs
• Alice’s Last Adventure
• Dream of a Manikin

The Nyctalops Trilogy:

• I. The Chymist
• II. Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes
• III. Eye of the Lynx

Notes on the Writing of Horror

Dreams for Insomniacs

• The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise
• The Lost Art of Twilight
• The Troubles of Dr. Thoss
• Masquerade of a Dead Sword
• Dr. Yoke and Mr. Veech
• Profess or Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror
Dreams for the Dead
•  
  • Dr. Locrian’s Asylum
  • The Sect of the Idiot
  • The Greater Festival of Masks
  • The Music of the Moon…249
  • The Journal of J.P. Drapeau
  • Vastarien

From The Washington Post:
“Songs of a Dead Dreamer is full of inexplicable and alarming delights... Put this volume on the shelf between H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, where it belongs.”

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Thomas Ligotti has had one of the most quietly extraordinary careers in the history of horror fiction. He is a dense, witty, and enormously inventive writer.”

From The New York Review of Science Fiction:
“Ligotti is probably the genre's most committed purist. He perfectly expresses the "disorienting strangeness" that is the hallmark of the weird.”

From Green Man Review:
“It is not an exaggeration to call Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer one of the most important collections within the horror genre in recent memory… And while material from the book has appeared in other Ligotti collections in the interim — The Shadow at the Bottom of the World and the various incarnations of The Nightmare Factory — it wasn’t until this year that the original beast was resurrected. The new edition, courtesy of Subterranean Press, can best be described as “remastered,” a definitive take on the collection… Readers looking for vampires and werewolves will be sadly disappointed; those looking for something other, literally and figuratively, will undoubtedly find this collection to be one of their most treasured reads.”