The ‘Carpe Diem’ cloisonne badge which came with the Durtro first edition of Thomas Ligotti’s Death Poems.
There seems to have been a bit of noise within the weird fiction community recently regarding the philosophical shortcomings of Ligotti’s antinatalism, none of which actually seem to address in a clear or direct manner what the objections are (other than various moralistically fallacious iterations of the statement that ‘obviously antinatalism is a bad thing’, or ill-thought-out out equivocations with the worst kind of eugenics). Personally, the idea that you might want to purposefully bring into a state of sentience a being who, as a consequence of that act, is then going to suffer the day-to-day reality of the ongoing struggle for existence - coupled with the even-worse existential horror they have to confront daily in face of the knowledge of their ultimate, inevitable demise - sounds like an act of utter insanity. There is good reason why Victor Frankenstein actually is the monster.
Whilst not wanting to aggrevate divisions in the weird fiction community, I would argue - specifically in relation to Laird Barron’s claim that Ligotti is turning mental illness into an ideology - that if you are participant in the writing or appreciation of cosmic horror without seriously considering the possibility that the fundamentals of its worldview constitute an absolute ontological reality, that you may be engaging in an act of artistic bad faith.
But then Ligotti himself has stated that horror is nothing if it is not entertainment, so what do I know?
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