“Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty andrigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I’d say he might just be a genius.”
Ramsey Campbell
Copyright 2005 by Thomas Ligotti
To the memory of my uncles Leonard Ligotti and Joseph Mazzo.
Contents
Foreword by Douglas A. Anderson
Introduction: Horror Stories: A Nightmare Scenario by Thomas Ligotti
The Last Feast of Harlequin
Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech
Alice’s Last Adventure
Vastarien
Dr. Locrian’s Asylum
The Mystics of Muelenburg
The Spectacles in the Drawer
The Strange Design of Master Rignolo
The Shadow at the Bottom of the World
Nethescurial
The Cocoons
The Tsalal
The Bungalow House
Teatro Grottesco
The Red Tower
Purity
Foreword
In the historical development of the artistic horror story, there are three major figures. The first is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the father of the modern psychological horror story. The next, chronologically, is H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), who brought cosmicism—an awareness of the vastness of the universe and of the insignificance of the human race— to the weird tale. And now there is Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953), who has extended Lovecraft’s cosmicism by suggesting that an inescapable malignancy and nightmare inheres in all existence, manifesting itself in both the individual psyche and the physical cosmos. Interestingly, these three writers have found the short story rather than the novel to be their ideal vehicle for expression.
For Ligotti, “the short story allows a purer and more intense expression of horror … than do novels.”
Born in Detroit, Ligotti grew up in a nearby suburb and in 1977 graduated from Wayne State University with a B.A. in English. From 1979 to 2001 he worked in the literary criticism division of the Gale Research Company (now Thomson Gale), a publisher of reference books. Ligotti then moved to Florida, where he makes his living as an editorial freelancer.
He began writing horror fiction around 1976, and published his first short story in 1981. His first book, a small press collection entitled Songs of a Dead Dreamer, came out in an edition of 300 copies in 1985. Today it is a highly-prized rarity. An expanded edition appeared from a trade publisher in 1989, followed by further collections: Grimscribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), and the omnibus volume The Nightmare Factory (1996). Since then Ligotti has worked mostly with small publishers, like Durtro Press, which has issued elegant limited editions like In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997), a collection of four interconnected stories; an unproduced screenplay, Crampton (2002), written in collaboration with Brandon Trenz; and some small books of Ligotti’s verse, I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000), This Degenerate Little Town (2001), and Death Poems (2004).
In 1994, Silver Salamander Press collected Ligotti’s vignettes in The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein & Other Gothic Tales. Another small press, Mythos Books, has published My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), whose eponymous story is Ligotti’s lengthiest tale. Forthcoming from Mythos Books is Ligotti’s long essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: On the Horror of Life and the Art of Horror, a kind of personal credo of Ligotti’s views on life and literature. The two main websites devoted to Ligotti’s work are Thomas Ligotti Online (www.ligotti.net) and The Art of Grimscribe (www.ligotti.de.vu). Both websites have a complete Ligotti bibliography, and much else of interest.
The stories in this volume were selected by Ligotti and myself as an introductory sampler of his works. They are arranged in the order in which they were written. Thus, “The Least Feast of Harlequin”— which Ligotti has referred to as the first story he wrote that he thought was good enough not to throw away—opens the collection, and “Purity,” one of his most recent tales, concludes it. The bulk of these stories, however, date from the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ligotti’s most productive period.
Unlike the bulk of horror fiction past and present, Ligotti’s work” is essentially outside the tradition of strict realism in which a neatly demarcated natural world is threatened by a supernatural menace, an aberration in the normal course of things that more often than not maybe combated and conquered.
In the universe of Ligotti’s fiction, the natural and the supernatural merge into the same nightmare; to distinguish them is meaningless and no salvation is to be found in this world or any other. As Ligotti has noted, many of his stories “focus on those anomalous moments in which a character’s perception of his world is shaken and he is forced to confront a frightening and essentially chaotic universe.” Which is, in its way, a realism of the highest order.
—Douglas A. Anderson
Introduction
HORROR STORIES: A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO
Extracted from the forthcoming book, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: On the Horror of Life and the Art of Horror.
For a horror story to be effective, it must both reflect and deform the world we know, the place in which we eat and fight and procreate. This means that it must not intrude on the sacred ground already being worked by established institutions of faith, which at some point inevitably deviate into the unknowable in order to comfort their audience rather than distress them. Should it follow this craven path, the horror story would lose its greatest value—the power to convey truths that have currency with respect to our evolving trepidations rather than perpetuating some primitive lore of the remote past. A literary law that only the greatest writers in the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, have followed in their writings maybe stated as follows: No horror tale shall take advantage of its readers by playing upon their religious beliefs. This is an easy and a vile game that only the lowest form of scribe would perpetrate on those who already have their heads filled with all kinds of fears conditioned into them since they were children in the hands of an angry god. Fortunately, we find that a model for creating horror has been provided for us that has nothing to do with preachers and pulpits and the puppetry of doctrinal compliance. This model is given to us in the form of nightmares, which conform to no orthodoxies except those of our developing fears. No bad dream ever ended with its dreamer finding salvation from his mind’s hell. Such finales are always invented after the fact by storytellers with a redemptive agenda.
As necessity dictates to most of us that we must be conscious of death, disease, damage, and derangement, however reluctantly and infrequently we submit to this knowledge, it also forces us to leave that world on a regular timetable and enter another one where we face horrors beyond the natural, warped realities that are produced simply because our brains have shifted to a different mode of activity and that by the reckoning of our wide-awake selves can only be described as lunatic. An equally apt term would be “supernatural,” since there obtains a tradition of symbolically equating states of mental abnormality with bizarre incidents in the “real” world, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his famous essay “The Uncanny” (1919). This is the basis for the longtime association between the supernatural and horror fiction. When we take a ghost from our dreams and place it in the context of waking consciousness, if only in the pages of a ghost story, we have chosen, as though freely and of our own will, to engage in the metaphysics of the mistake. The point of this act is a tangle of motives we cannot begin to unravel any better than all the other actions in which we engage on this earth. The only thing that is certain is that we do this because we are driven to do it. But such speculation is distracting us from our concern of the moment, which is the plot of a supernatural horror story and its source in the nightmare.