CONSCIOUSNESS—PARENT OF ALL HORRORS.

What I wanted: a thorough text providing arguments for and fielding strong objections to pessimism and antinatalism. So basically what was advertised.

What I got: shallow philosophical voyeurism, brushing over objections, completely avoiding the strongest objections, no structure whatsoever, repetition of the same old points, and the knowledge that just because you can write clever, great sounding sentences, doesn't mean you can craft a great book of nonfiction.

I know I would appreciate Ligotti more as a horror/weird fiction writer, which is what the man made a career out of—and it shows when he draws from Lovecraft etc in the book—and I feel for the guy too. You have to be pretty horribly clinically depressed to tout antinatalism, and boy did he try his best at that. And I did appreciate the wide range of people and ideas and movements he drew from. When I said voyeurism, I meant it. You'll get a good good peek at a motherload of neat, new, and strange ideas you haven't heard of. Put the damn Sam guarantee on that one and take it to the bank.

I would recommend this book to anyone who considers themselves perfectly mentally healthy. Y'all need to get shaken up every once in a while and exposed to the mind of a person who struggles and who is articulate and insanely well-read. I would also recommend this book to people who are interested in the topics but who don't have a lot of experience/interest in reading sourced philosophical texts. Don't want to read Schopenhauer? Shit, me neither. Get the sparknotes from Ligotti.

I would not recommend this book to people with experience reading philosophy, especially analytic philosophy. You'll just be a little frustrated at the pace with which he glosses over ideas. One of the many sins he committed in this book was not giving Camus his due. Absurd