It’s not often that an article I’m writing is pre-empted by the New Yorker, but that’s exactly what happened last week when they reviewed the reissue of horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s first two short story collections. I have to say, I’m delighted to be caught out: it’s about time that Ligotti attracted some mainstream attention.
Ligotti has long been described as a “cult” author, attracting a small but intensely loyal following. That is all set to change; Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe have been reissued by none other than Penguin Classics, a sign of literary recognition that places him firmly within the canon of great American writers. The inclusion of Ligotti makes ten living writers, and he’s the only horror writer on the list. So why did Penguin take it upon themselves to bestow such an honour on a relatively obscure author like Ligotti? Let’s start with the two collections they have reissued.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer is Ligotti’s first collection and initially feels as if it is ticking off horror tropes; there are predatory serial killers (“The Frolic” and “Les Fleurs”); ghosts (“Alice’s Last Adventure”); body horror (“The Nyctalops Trilogy”); an uncanny, weird Christmas story (“The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”); and vampires (“The Lost Art of Twilight”). It is as if Ligotti, before striking out on his own, is determined to prove both his knowledge and mastery of traditional tropes.
Point proven, he sets off in a new direction.
“Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie” is revenge tragedy meets swords and sorcery, run through a Lovecraftian blender. “Notes On the Writing of Horror: A Story” and “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures” introduce us to Ligotti’s dark humour, presenting morbid satires of academia laced with self-deprecation. “Vastarien” is a hypnotic, dreamlike tale concerned with the nature of dreams themselves. “The Sect of The Idiot” and “The Greater Festival of Masks” both concern narrators touching the uncanny that lurks beneath everyday life and being forever changed, a common Ligotti conceit. “Dr. Locrian’s Asylum” is this collection’s masterwork, taking heavy Lovecraftian influence and marrying it to Ligotti’s blossoming obsession with small-town America and the secrets that lurk behind its healthy, happy exterior.
Ligotti’s dark philosophy is now in full flow – we are told that “Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that IT is, in fact, real” – a line that sent shivers up my spine when I first read it.
Grimscribe sees him really open up and come into his own. Although the influence of Lovecraft is still strong (especially in “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” which closes with a dedication to Lovecraft), more and more of Ligotti’s own philosophy and playfulness come through as he finds a voice wholly his own. Small towns are depicted as distinct, separate cultures, hostile to outsiders and full of terrible secrets. In several stories, most notably “Nethescurial” and “The Dreaming in Nortown,” the barriers (or lack thereof) between dream and reality are explored, prodded and poked and played with so often that it is impossible to tell what is real and what is not. Authority figures abuse their power and knowledge to terrible advantage over naive students, and physical forms prove to be as frail and as malleable as smoke.
What both of these collections have in common is Ligotti’s voice; his obsessions, his style, and his philosophy permeate both works, even from his earliest stories. He shares with Poe and Lovecraft, two of his biggest influences, a love of baroque description and a disdain for extended dialogue, along with a fascination with the morbid, the macabre, and the perverse.
This dense, heavy style slows the reader down, immersing them in a scene, an idea, or a feeling. This slowness is wholly deliberate. Ligotti is the anti-Dan Brown – the point here is not breathless page-turning, but deep immersion, a necessity given his subject matter lies beyond the scope of the everyday. This layering of detail upon detail is like a master painter building pictures on canvas, creating a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. It may also be why Ligotti has an undeserved reputation as being “difficult” to read – he writes in a timeless style that pays little mind to modern sensibilities. But Ligotti’s work is not difficult, it just requires paying attention to each and every carefully-placed word.
This idea of Ligotti as “difficult” might also stem from his bleak philosophical leanings. In 2010, he published “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” a full-length work of antinatalist philosophy. Not antenatal, as in after-birth, but antinatal, as in against-being-born. In essence, antinatalists assign a negative value to the idea of birth; for them, the human race would be better off had we never become self-conscious, for self-consciousness is the curse from which all human misery and suffering originates. True Detective‘s iconic character, Rust Cohle, brought these ideas to a wider audience in the first season. In fact, Rust’s monologues mirrored “Conspiracy” so closely that Pizzolatto was accused of plagarism. Pizzolatto has refuted these claims, saying that any resemblance was a deliberate nod to Ligotti, and nothing more.
Personally, I found “Conspiracy” to be a strangely liberating read – yes, life is suffering, but it logically follows that we all suffer in the same way, something that links every human no matter class or creed, uniting us in our misery. I have never had the urge to have children, something that runs counter to mainstream thinking and gets you very odd looks down the pub. Reading it felt as if Ligotti was reaching into my subconscious and pulling out thoughts I had, until then, only been able to half-form.
To solely focus on the darkness is to miss out on a huge part of the joy of reading Ligotti: his dark humour. Unlike his literary forebears, Ligotti is aware of his subject matter in a wry, ironic manner, inviting us to laugh at the pointlessness of it all. Quite often his unnamed, every-man narrators are stunningly un-self-aware, and do terrible things while Ligotti alludes to their cluelessness with a wink and a nod. It was the dark humour and playfulness that lurks beneath the stories’ harsh exteriors that kept me reading through Penguin’s collection.
In “The Night School,” a bemused student studies “lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation.” Who among us has not at one time or another, confused by what we’re supposed to be learning, thought of at least one school subject as a load of shit? The opening of “The Library of Byzantium” is an exercise in euphemism, turning a tale of a priest’s visit to a young artist into one concerning furtive masturbation. The title of “The Spectacles in the Drawer” is a pun, played out over twelve horrific pages.
Perhaps Ligotti might have achieved fame before now had he not limited himself to short stories and a single novella, My Work Is Not Yet Done. Even then he is not prolific, and his output has been hampered by illness and the need – for most of his career – to work a full-time job alongside his writing. Perhaps it is no surprise that Ligotti is now finding fame in the era of the ebook, bringing with it a new audience of readers who are, by all accounts, reading more and more novellas and short stories.
Ligotti’s best stories are like picking at a loose thread – some tiny detail is wrong and investigation quickly causes all of reality to unravel. Reality, for Ligotti, is a shared delusion, and what lies beneath is both transcendent and terrible.
As he says in “The Mystics of Muelenburg,” “If things are not what they seem – and we are forever reminded that this is not the case – then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore the truth to keep the world from collapsing.”
Ligotti appears to have made it his mission to collapse the world. Unlike Lovecraft, this truth does not drive his characters mad, but instead makes them weary and fatalistic; also unlike Lovecraft, he has no greater mythology, no unifying theory regarding reality’s great truths. In Ligotti this greater truth warps and changes from story to story, suggesting that really, deep down, there may not be any truth, anywhere, for us to find. That, I feel, is far more chilling than any aquatic Elder One could ever hope to be.
Horror fans should rejoice – finally, one of our own has infiltrated the literary canon. I heartily recommend picking up this collection of pitch-black literature – it is rare to find horror written with such consistency and purpose. Horror at its best has always existed outside the mainstream, playing on our greatest fears, and in spite of his baroque, timeless style, Ligotti taps into very modern fears: the soul-crushing nature of the working life; the inability to meet our dreams; the dehumanisation of our fellow humans; and our difficulty in finding meaning and purpose in a secular age. This might be outsider fiction, but Ligotti welcomes his readers as if they are joining a secret club – in “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures” he states that “True macabrists are as rare as poets and form a secret society by the bad-standing of their memberships elsewhere, some of their outside affiliations having been cancelled as early as birth.” I am proud to be a member of Ligotti’s society of macabrists, and happy that its days as a secret are reaching their end.
