Nine days after that, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, Michael Calia, wrote admiringly of the parallels between Ligotti’s work and Pizzolatto’s, citing some of the same passages that Padgett has reproduced this week.

In his reply, Pizzolatto didn’t refer to Ligotti by name. 12, and nine days later an interviewer mentioned “Cohle’s Ligottian worldview” in a question.

In addition to highlighting similar ideas and phrases in True Detective and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Padgett also provides a timeline of people noticing those similarities and Pizzolatto acknowledging them. Cohle refers to “seeing straight into the true heart of things,” and Ligotti refers to the “horrible ‘inner Truth’ of things.” Including that as an example of plagiarism seems like wishful thinking.) (It should be noted that some of the similarities cited by Padgett appear purely coincidental and unremarkable. He created a character who thinks much like Ligotti thinks, and he had that character express ideas similar to the ones that Ligotti expounded upon in a work of philosophy-albeit an unusual one, which Padgett says “ morphs into metafiction”-occasionally using phrases similar to Ligotti’s. That is not what Pizzolatto did with Ligotti’s work. But that novel included dozens of passages lifted either verbatim or nearly verbatim from similar novels.

It is of course possible for a writer of fiction to plagiarize: Padgett cites the book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, calling it a “similar” case. But Davis, at least, does not seem to fully grasp that distinction: He explains his charges by quoting a Cambridge University statement on plagiarism that was explicitly provided for people giving and taking written examinations. If True Detective was not a cop show on HBO but a term paper in a philosophy class, then it would indeed be wrong for him to lift such ideas and metaphors from an author without citing him in the work itself.

Consider perhaps their strongest example, these lines from Rust Cohle, the character played by Matthew McConaughey: “I think about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this meat … Force a life into this thresher.” At different points in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Thomas Ligotti refers to people being “stolen from nonexistence,” says “we are meat,” and asks, “Why should generations unborn be spared entry into the human thresher?” It’s clear from these similarities that Pizzolatto has read the Ligotti book and borrowed from it-something he has himself acknowledged, about which more below. The exchange between Padgett and Davis may spur interesting questions about pastiche, homage, attribution, and influence, but a “strong accusation” of plagiarism it isn’t.

Nic pizzolatto book