"Pizzolatto: Thats tough on the one hand I want to name one of the blue-chip classics, and on the other Id like to give an endorsement to people who may not usually get enough attention. I mean, Id suggest Lovecraft or Poe, but everybody knows them already. More recently, Id point people in the direction of Thomas Ligotti"
When did you first hear of and read Ligotti?
I first heard of Ligotti maybe six years ago, when Laird Barrons first collection alerted me to this whole world of new weird fiction that I hadnt known existed. I started looking around for the best contemporary stuff to read, and in any discussion of that kind, the name Ligotti comes up first. I couldnt find any of his books in print, and their used prices were prohibitive for me at the time. But I located a couple at libraries, and his nightmare lyricism was enthralling and visionary.
What work of his do you find the most influential? Are you more attracted to his fiction or his nonfictional writing? Have you read his nonfiction book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race?
I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster. In episode one [of "True Detective"] there are two lines in particular (and it would have been nothing to re-word them) that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal Ligotti admirers. Which, of course, you got.
The philosophy Cohle promotes in the shows earliest episodes is a kind of anti-natalist nihilism, and in that regard all cats should be unbagged: Confessions of an Antinatalist, Nihil Unbound, In the Dust of this Planet, Better to Have Never Been, and lots of Cioran were all on the reading list. This is before I came out to Hollywood, but I knew that in my next work I would have a detective who was (or thought he was) a nihilist. Id already been reading E.M. Cioran for years and consider him one of my all-time favorite and, oddly, most nourishing writers. As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody Ive read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti.
BOOM, you're welcome. That was back in February