Thomas Ligotti's The Small People 2XLP set now on sale

Cadabra Records has just released their first vinyl offering of 2021 with Thomas Ligotti’s The Small People as a 2XLP set! Ligotti’s outstanding and deeply intense story has once again been given phenomenal treatment on all fronts thanks to Cadabra founder Jonathan Dennison.

Jon Padgett gives an unforgettable reading of The Small People that haunts the mind. I can’t wait for people to experience Padgett’s performance.

My soundtrack for this release is centered around assorted synthesizer pulsations, pads, electronic harp, organ, piano and string arrangements. Barry Knob beautifully produced the score and also played some fantastic additional keyboards, electronic bass and Mellotron.

Jason Barnett created all of the terrifying art for this release which absolutely captures Ligotti’s immensely creepy nightmare vision of The Small People.

Thomas Ligotti has written an introductory essay that makes up the central part of the booklet that comes with this spectacular release.

I couldn’t be more grateful to be a part of this incredibly special vinyl set and a massive thanks to Jonathan Dennison for putting together another Ligotti release for the ages!

Here are more details from the Cadabra Records press release:

Thomas Ligotti, The Small People 2x LP set - Read by Jon Padgett, Score by Chris Bozzone

Package includes:

* 150 gram vinyl 

* Deluxe heavy weight tip-on gatefold jacket.

* 4 page booklet with new foreword by Thomas Ligotti

* Liner notes by composer Chris Bozzone

* 24" x 36" promotional poster.

* Newly commissioned art by Jason Barnett.

From the very outset, the audio adaptation of Thomas Ligotti's The Small People is astonishingly distressing. Jon Padgett takes on the first person role of the narrator, relating the story of how, as a young boy, he discovered his fear of “them,” and how the epiphenomenal terror turned into something with brutal results. With music by Chris Bozzone, the audio version of this novella begins at a level which is uncomfortable, and only becomes more frightening as it goes on.

Padgett's reading, as the narrator relates how he came to fear, dislike, and then outright hate the titular small people, is rife with emotional heft. There is, early on, a shudder in the narrator's voice when describing the titular small people which makes the thing vile, cruel description he offers up almost understandable.

It's the sound of a man – or, really, a man telling the story of a child – spinning downward and out of control of his own mind, giving in to a deep, abiding, obsessive hatred. However, given that this is something the narrator felt “deep inside,” in contrast with his opinion that the “smalls” were “hollow, empty things,” one nearly begins to sympathize with the otherwise execrable youth. As the listener, you too begin to understand what it's like to be “alone but still feel the presence of something unimaginably awful that might appear all of a sudden – that is, until the end, when Padgett's unhinged performance during The Small People's waning moments is so superbly mad that there is no question as to what is going on here.

Chris Bozzone's score begins as a soaring klaxon, triumphant, upon the narrator's first glimpse of the "smalls," when in confrontation with his parents, while at other points, Fred Mollin's theme for Friday the 13th: The Series comes to mind when Bozzone's music strays from the heartbeat pulse to which it most closely hews. The plucking of a harp, augmented with a dark array of lengthy synthesizer chords, “adds to the disorienting unreality of the situation,” as Ligotti so evocatively writes. Strings find their way into Bozzone's score, but never does the musical throb dissipate. The strings can be thought of as the twitching nervous system of our narrator, as the electronic backbeat is its coronary pulse. A Mellotron-like moaning can occasionally be heard in moments of thoughtful pause, but never does the music ever cease emotionally reflecting the inner workings of our narrator's ever-increasingly disturbed monologue. As The Small People goes along, Bozzone moves into piano pieces, a strangely beautiful accompaniment to a terrifying realization that the "smalls" are slowly taking over our world with their colonies. When the narrator's ranting reaches its highest peaks and is at its most strident, the music is its most gorgeous, even going so far as to add a melodic string section. It's as perfect a counterpoint as Bozzone has thus far created.

About Thomas Ligotti:

Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953) is an American author who is widely considered to be one of the most important living writers of horror fiction. His work is characterized by a distinctively bleak and dark philosophical vision, pitching over into outright nihilism, that remains strikingly original even as it draws on a rich set of literary influences that includes the likes of H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Bruno Schulz, William Burroughs, E. M. Cioran, and Vladimir Nabokov. His short fiction collections include Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, Noctuary, The Nightmare Factory, and Teatro Grottesco. He is also the author of the short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done and the nonfiction work The Conspiracy against the Human Race. He has won multiple Bram Stoker Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2015 Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe were published in a single-volume Penguin Classics edition, making Ligotti one of ten living authors to be included in that distinguished series.