PICTURES OF APOCALYPSE

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original black cloth with titles in silver to the spine, with tree illustration in silver to the upper board, in the Jonathan Dennison illustrated dustwrapper. Illustrated throughout with black and white illustrations by Jonathan Dennison. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents are clean throughout, and without previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. Complete with original pictorial dustwrapper, which is bright and fresh, with a very small crease to the top left corner of the rear panel, but otherwise without fading, loss, or tears. Without the chapbook present in some copies.

One of two poetry collections Ligotti published in his profilic writing career, 'Pictures of Apocalypse' is a new collection of poems from the author of 'Songs of a Dead Dreamer' (1986), 'My Work is Not Yet Done' (2001), 'Teatro Grottesco' (2006), and 'Death Poems' (2004). Ligotti was notably influenced by other pioneers of the horror writing, weird fiction, and nihilism genres of literature, including Lovecraft, Schopenhauer, Poe, Burroughs, Nabokov,and Machen. In a 2006 interview published in The New York Review of Science Fiction (Issue 218, Vol.19, No. 2), Ligotti's philosophical horror-style and influences were affectionately explained, 'When [Ligotti] says he writes horror, he means he writes from the center of what he knows best as a human being, and this is what elevates him to the status of a true literary artist. [...] In the process of assimilating and responding to all of these [influences], Ligotti has developed a unique style that places him firmly in the "literary" category and, in tandem with the dark vibrancy of his personal vision, makes him one of those transformative writers whose work can explode into a reader's life like an eruption from the collective unconscious' (Cardin, 2006).