So I've been reading selections from Thomas Ligotti's Conspiracy Against The Human Race, since it was cited as a possible influence for S1 of True Detective (which I really liked).

So far, I'm not impressed. I feel like it pulls the same semantic trickery all the other radical pessimists do: when its argument falls short, it just clenches its fist and screams, "Well, you're just too WEAK and NEEDY to understand the AWESOME TRUTH about how awful everything is!"

More to the point, Ligotti privileges dread over every other human emotion, but he never really explains WHY. Everything else is just a meaningless contingent, and yet somehow dread—even where it does not seem to exist—is inherent, inevitable, and objective.

He gives no such consideration to hope, and in the end, it feels like one more arbitrary shell-game of words and values, where terms are stealthily substituted for each other when you're not looking.

So far, he never really shows you his math. He never really proves why one biologically grounded urge, the one to utter resignation and self-negation, is to be taken any more seriously than the others. He seems to just *assume* you're as horrified by the emptiness of the universe as he is—and never acknowledges how that, too, is one of those "values" he keeps denigrating.

Ultimately, it feels less like a cogent philosophical treatise and more like some kind of perverse inverted whodunit. A man has *failed* to kill himself—despite having just made every insistence that we all should—and you, the reader, must puzzle out exactly why.

The solution does not seem to appear in this book. I suppose I'll have to wait for the sequel. In the meantime, I'm not finding anything in this book that I can't find in the first 15 seconds of a Wonder Showzen episode.