Songs of a Dead Dreamer

Songs of a Dead Dreamer was re-released in an expanded and revised edition in 1989.

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.

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