It may seem like a stretch to say this about the author of works called “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” and “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” but Thomas Ligotti is a funny guy.

The three-time Bram Stoker Award winner specializes in conjuring a nightmare state in his stories. You won’t find much blood or gore, but you will find otherworldly horrors ripping through the thin illusion of everyday reality. There’s humor there, too, but it’s of the dark kind, a reflection of the insanity and absurdity in the worlds Ligotti creates.

Read more: Penguin Classics to Publish Ligotti Stories

In correspondence, Ligotti himself is self-deprecating and wry, especially as he describes the reaction to “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” his 2010 nonfiction work that he views as somewhat of a self-help book, even if it argues that people should stop reproducing. “That may sound idiotic to some people, but I don’t care about them,” Ligotti told Speakeasy in a recent email exchange. “When ‘Conspiracy Against the Human Race’ made its appearance I was informed by a number of such readers that by writing such a book I was obliged on principle to commit suicide. Easier said than done, of course, but the same thing was said about me following a number of interviews I gave years before the publication of ‘Conspiracy,’ so I was already used to that.”

Ligotti, whose first two short-story collections will be published in a new volume by Penguin Classics on Oct. 6, also talked with Speakeasy about his favorite Broadway musical, how Vladimir Nabokov is one of his literary heroes, what he fears, and where curious readers new to his work should start. An abridged version of the Q&A follows.

What scares you?

Not to brag, but there’s not much that doesn’t scare me. Most of it is normal stuff, though sometimes morbidly exaggerated. I can’t tell you how many classes I dropped in college once the prospect of a class presentation arose, but I don’t blanch at the sight of fingernail clippings or anything exotic like that. The first fear that always comes to my mind is arachnophobia. Whenever I’ve seen someone on television demonstrating how neat it is to have a tarantula crawling on you, I think, “There is something not right about that person.”

Of course, I know it’s quite the opposite—that there’s something wrong with me. I suppose that something is out of whack with everyone. In my favorite Broadway musical, which is the only Broadway musical I like at all, a ragged ensemble sings: “Perhaps today you gave a nod . . . to Sweeney Todd . . . the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” You never know who you are brushing shoulders with at any time and in any place. It just might be someone with a collection of masks made of human flesh in his basement. No joke. That’s scary in itself, but it’s so scary that we can’t allow ourselves to contemplate it. A lot of things are too much to let into our consciousness.

What first drove you to write horror stories? Have you attempted other forms of fiction?

I never attempted any writing other than horror in its most generic sense. In a way, I wish I could have done so, but I knew I didn’t belong there. I couldn’t have passed their tests, which are challenging in way I couldn’t handle. While some writers who are considered major literary figures are classified as restricting themselves to the tropes and traditions of horror, they aren’t considered real writers in the highest sense. They exist in a lower realm, underachievers who never challenged themselves with depicting the full extent of lived experience—human relations, the social sphere, even every-day, working-world life. In short, Dickens trumps Poe. In his work, the latter author highlighted, so to speak, only the shadows he saw cast over the business of being and didn’t survey the full spectrum of the world’s population. That’s me. I don’t know much about the world or its goings-on. I have only myself to draw upon for subject matter. My range of emotion is quite narrow. Inwardly, I sidle between the close walls of a dark alley, and, ultimately, that’s okay with me. It really is. Even in the genre of supernatural horror, I don’t aspire to levels and complexity of storytelling that others do. That’s also okay with me.

Your work is compared to that of Lovecraft and Poe. Have you ever felt the so-called anxiety of influence while you worked?

Not at all. I do think the comparisons are fair, at least as far as general preoccupations of subject are concerned. But my real literary heroes would be seen as outside of the horror genre. These include such figures as Bruno Schulz, Thomas Bernhard, and Vladimir Nabokov. Those are the writers I’ve consciously tried to emulate, if only in certain periods and stories I’ve written. And I’ve done so entirely without anxiety but only with aspiration. Those are the really real writers in my estimation and, perhaps self-servingly, I view them as sharing a vision with the greats of horror fiction. There is a pathology in them that was also in Lovecraft and Poe. The difference is one of pure artistic ability and attainment.

I should add that although I’ve frequently mentioned in interviews the same 19th- and 20th-century authors as my favorites and my models, a good percentage of them were foreign writers whose works I couldn’t read in the original. As far as technique was concerned, however, I must mention that I cut my literary teeth on fiction writers like Gaddis, Hawkes, Gass, Elkin, Barth, Barthelme, and other American postmodern writers who were obsessed with linguistic style and structure. I also read nonfiction authors that some of them cited, including the Metaphysical Poets, various seventeenth-century prose writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Browne, and so on, all of whom I read for their niceties of language. I didn’t care about their subject matter, which for the most part was religious.

How have the Internet and e-readers changed the world of horror literature, if at all?

I think they’ve changed the world of horror literature in the same way they’ve changed everything else—by facilitating over-indulgence. And in the words of Alice Cooper, “The over-indulgent machines were their children.” Whatever that precisely means, it does have at least a tone of truth to it. And isn’t that what we feel about so much of our poetry? Coo-coo-ca-choo.

Where would you suggest a curious reader new to your work should start? Which story or stories?

Well, since I made such an issue of it earlier, I’d say start at the beginning—the real beginning—with “The Last Feast of Harlequin” in my collection "Grimscribe," then move on to “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” and finally read everything in between.

Are you hopeful that your work will continue to reach broader audiences?

I’m hopeful that my work will reach the right audiences, what I called “sympathetic organisms” in my story “Severini.” Unfortunately, those individuals did not come to a pleasant end. Who does?