Drink to me only with labyrinthine eyes – Thomas Ligotti

It’s a first-person account of a hypnotist who is putting on a show for a private party. At the centre of his show is his ‘somnambulist’, a woman who he controls completely through hypnosis. The woman, with whom the audience is transfixed – by her beauty as much as by the tricks and contortions he has her do – is entirely under his spell.

The show proceeds as it normally would, ending with a spectacular display of light; a finale. that the narrator feels is entirely under-appreciated by the audience. Rather than the incredible magical acts he provides, they want mere party tricks he complains.

You could be forgiven for thinking the hypnotist is just an illusionist until after the show, whilst the somnambulist circulates to the adoration of the guest, he spies a child watching from the balcony above. As a reader you’re unsure what might happen (this is Thomas Ligotti after all).

But what does happens surprises you – the hypnotist asks the child what do you see when you look at the somnambulist? ‘Yukky’, the child replies, to the hypnotist’s relief. It seems that children, as is often the case in supernatural fiction, can see through the magical facade to the real horror beneath it.

The story ends with the hypnotist, frustrated with the limited imagination and desires of the people at the party, promising to show them the body behind the glamour of a beautiful sleep-walking woman that he’s conjured: the body of a dead woman that he controls; one you assume in a long line of bodies he has repurposed for his own use over the years.

What Ligotti achieves so beautifully in this short story, alongside the power of the plot, is a juxtaposition. On the one hand is a powerful magician, probably a centuries-old supernatural entity himself, who controls the bodies of the dead as if they were puppets.

On the other hand, though, despite this power, he sounds like a sad performer who for some reason earns a living through shows that he feels never get the appreciation they deserve, so narrow are his audiences’ expectations of magic.

At the end, as he says to himself that he he will show them who or what the somnambulist really is, you don’t know if this is the vengeance he’s been waiting to enact for tens or more years, or one more idle threat from a bitter, under-appreciated performer.

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* I listened to rather than read this – on the fantastic Pseudod horror podcast, episode 434.

The greater festival of masks – Thomas Ligotti

A bit of quintessential Ligotti this, a story of less than ten pages that leaves you fumbling for a dark reality that lies beneath the artifice of our world.

*Spolier alert*

It sees a man, Noss, finding himself in a sparsely populated town, apparently toward the dying days of a festival of masks, which appears to be a time when the people of the town put on masks and, well, we don’t know exactly what or why. He visits a mask store where the owner offers him a mask that fits perfectly, and just as Noss agrees to take it, the owner leaves the store, asking Noss to look after for him whilst he’s gone.

Almost immediately there’s a call from outside, from a small group of people by a fire on the far side of a chainlink fence. They’re asking Noss to bring them some masks out. Unsure what to do, Noss takes them masks but the group mock him, and in the darkness and flicker of firelight, he sees that the masks would only have obscured their smooth, featureless faces, their inhumanity. He turns to get away.

This is classical Ligotti in the way he builds up Ness’s feeling of complete disorientation. The town is empty and nondescript, he finds himself in situations he can’t comprehend, and there’s a sense of dread awaiting at every point – as he walks through the desolate place, when he enters the mask shop, when he’s asked to help the faceless group waiting outside.

There’s a sense, too, that this is the end – yes, of the festival of masks, but of more than that too. There are almost no people, it feels like he’s walking through a city after riot or a war, not a festival, there’s little but fire and dark and emptiness until he comes across the shop and the faceless bodies.

And in the end you’re left grasping, fumbling around with a feeling that the festival of masks that this town periodically celebrates is itself a mask, a facade, that allows a far, far deeper truth to surface. When the masks have been worn and then removed, it’s not just the masks that are discarded but also the artifice of the town, of civilisation, of humanity; they are all greater masks that are fitted over the dark and uncontainable real beneath it.

“And it was this feeling of fantastic homelessness amid an alien order of being, that was the source of anxieties I had never before experienced. I was no more than an irrelevant parcel of living tissue caught in a place I should not be, threatened with being caught in some great dredging net of doom… In the most far-reaching import of the phrase, my life was of no matter.”

Existential dread from Thomas Ligotti in The Sect of the Idiot

The Sect of the Idiot – Thomas Ligotti

In just over ten pages this intense short story encapsulates the quintessential weirdness Thomas Ligotti’s writing.

First there’s the form – big on description, light on character and plot. An unnamed narrator visits a town where, after experiencing a disturbing dream and briefly meeting a stranger who fleetingly appears at his hotel door, he eventually finds himself in an attic amongst a group of hooded demons performing a ritual; after his hand is touched, the narrator gradually slips into this underworld and becomes one too.

That’s really it for the plot and character. But there’s so much going on in this story. As with all of Ligotti’s writing the descriptions are so rich – often kind of overblown and formal in a Lovecraftian way, but intoxicating nonetheless. Whether it’s the Kafka-esque town or the narrator’s sense of the enormity of the universe, Ligotti’s descriptions here are always mesmerising.

It’s the themes that Ligotti explores that do it for me, though, and in The Sect of the Idiot he touches on all of those that I associate with his writing.

First up, existential dread. Not just the sudden realisation that the world is enormous and individuals are tiny and must live without meaning in a kind of Satrean existentialist way. Ligotti puts more emphasis on the dread aspect, so the is Satre x 10: that humans are not just meaningless specks but there are unseen forces governing their lives and existence is pointless. As the narrator says:

“I did not feel myself to be of any consequence in this or any other universe… And it was this feeling of fantastic homelessness amid an alien order of being, that was the source of anxieties I had never before experienced. I was no more than an irrelevant parcel of living tissue caught in a place I should not be, threatened with being caught in some great dredging net of doom… In the most far-reaching import of the phrase, my life was of no matter.”

Then there’s the nature of these unseen forces – an evil supernatural force that controls everything, though what it is, and to what end or purpose, is unspoken, unknown and unknowable. And in this story it’s brilliantly executed. The narrator sees the demons performing a ritual but realises that, though they are controlling humanity, the demons themselves are zombie-like too, making the human race so puppet-like that they are controlled by intermediary zombies, and we never know who or what the real power behind them is. The narrator explains it with shock:

“These cloaked masters, in turn, partook in some measure of godhood, passively presiding as enlightened zombies over the multitudes of the entranced, that frenetic domain of the human.”

And finally there’s what happens when someone glimpses even an aspect of these forces. For most of life, the mysterious power lurking beneath is unseen. But once you do see something of it, even if it’s not the real thing, you can’t walk away. You may be driven to madness, or left a shell. In The Sect of the Idiot, the narrator is corrupted in a very physical way: his hand is infected and transforms into the same tentacle form of the zombie demons. It’s like the reverse of Plato’s forms: the closer you come to glimpsing the actual truth, the real, the worse off you will be.

“Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real” says the narrator towards the end.

And finally all this brings me to the question: what is the sect of the idiot? At first you might assume it’s the demonic intermediaries who are the sect, but I wonder if Ligotti’s really saying that it’s the rest of us who are the sect of the idiots, the zombie-like human race that follows the intermediaries with no knowledge of any of the forces at work, believing we know our reality even as the real exists way beyond our awareness and comprehension, governing everything we do.

Books I’ll never write #5: Philosophy of the weird

Philosophy of the weird: Life and beyond according to Lovecraft, Ligotti and co

Are we always acting at the will of something beyond our understanding? Are humans an insignificant part of an indifferent world? Is there always an unnamable, uncontrollable part of us ready to emerge at any time?

In this book that I’ll never write I’d explore the philosophical ideas in the work of weird fiction writers, especially Thomas Ligotti and his predecessor Lovecraft.

What we find, in the end, is a philosophy for our times: a pessimistic one for sure, but also one that recognises that far from the lies of democracy and liberalism and secularism, life is often hard, sometimes pointless and mostly out of your control.

Topics and chapters:

– Freedom, determinism and mannequins

– The nature of power and the political

– The unknown, the Real and beyond

– Anti-humanism and existentialism

– The Nietchzean super human and dark power

– Slipping off life’s margins beyond reality

My work is not yet done – Thomas Ligotti

This is the closest thing to traditional writing that I’ve read by Ligotti, but it doesn’t disappoint in its dose of supernatural horror and, in fact, humour.

Frank Dominio is a supervisor at a large corporate; he tolerates the mundane work but despises his colleagues, especially, six supervisors of other departments and their boss Richard, which he dubs ‘The Seven.’

After making a proposal for a new product to The Seven, they conspire against him and he is sacked. Frank plans revenge by visiting a gun shop and ordering seven guns. All very Falling Down. But then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, but entail a large black fog and, it seems, a mystical deal, he finds himself in his apartment in possession of supernatural powers.

He uses these to take revenge on each of The Seven, through some bizarre, macabre and disturbing acts. One of the seven finds herself sucked into an oozing substance in a door, for example, while another is trapped inside the body of one of Ligotti’s trademark motifs, a mannequin.

Frank only comes unstuck when it transpires that Richard himself has some supernatural links and that his earlier deal allowed him to kill only seven people; a problem because he had to deal with another office worker during his activities (trapping him in a never-ending series of doors.) To be honest, this results in a slightly weaker ending than I’d have expected, but nevertheless the book remains great regardless.

I love Ligotti’s work – his writing, his ideas, his weirdness – and this book is no exception. In fact, it’s got everything you’d want from a Ligotti story but puts it into a scenario it’s easy to relate to – dissatisfaction with all the bullshit of work – making it in many ways a stronger and perhaps more disturbing read.

The Town Manager – Thomas Ligotti

One of Ligotti’s finest short stories, The Town Manager is a disturbing allegory for urban politics and decay.

In an unnamed town, the protagonist tells of the role of the Town Manager, whose job is to run the town. The last one – the latest in a long line – has disappeared, and a new one comes along.

Their first job is to undo the best work of previous managers, in this case getting residents to destroy the tram service, with the driver found dead. Then they demand everyone in the town change the organisations and businesses they run, creating a bizarre carnivalesque world, in which shop fronts open into distorted or horrific scenes.

The narrator discovers that there are brochures for the town in nearby places, and the town manager has been marketing it as a bizarro-town to visit. It’s a success for a while, but when the tourists die down the town manager disappears.

The narrator leaves the town and travels through nearby no-hope towns until, in a diner, he meets a stranger whose job is to recruit… a town manager.

Like so much of Ligotti’s writing this is a great story and more: an indictment of political power and the willing gullibility of citizens, when there is no hope or wealth in a perhaps once great American city.

Gas Station Carnivals – Thomas Ligotti

I’m not sure this is one of Ligotti’s best stories, but the concept, the image it conjures up, is one that stays with you as much as anything he’s written.

In fact I’ve read this before and the story has been with me for over a year, urging me to have another look, so I did.

An unnamed narrator is in the Crimson Cabaret bar, and meets Stuart Quisser, an art critic he knows. The narrator reminds Quisser that he’s been rash by offending the crimson lady who owns the bar, a powerful women, and Quisser then begins an odd reminisce about when he was younger. He explains he used to go on long journeys with his parents and stop off at gas stations in the middle of nowhere where, hidden round the back, were broken down carnivals with shows by odd performers like the ‘human spider’ and the ‘showman’.

Quisser leaves the narrator to his drink (mint tea to settle his stomach for some reason), but then it transpires first that Quisser was never at the cabaret, then that it was the narrator not Quisser who offended the crimson lady, and then that actually the crimson lady is powerless in the face of a waitress working there.

It’s classic Ligotti: uncanny occurrences, obscurity around everyone’s intentions, odd interactions between characters, a series of unexplained events, and some strange and eerie images all the way through.

“All of us had problems, it seemed, whose sources were untraceable, crossing over like the trajectories of countless raindrops in a storm, blending to create a fog of delusion and counter-delusion. Powerful connections and forces were undoubtedly at play, yet they seemed to have no faces and no names.”

Thomas Ligotti, Gas Station Carnivals

The Glamour – Thomas Ligotti

In classic Ligotti fashion, this short story – just ten pages long – takes us into a dark alternative world that exists within and alongside our own.

The narrator is out in the city looking for a late night cinema – something he often does, though whether that’s significant or not, Ligotti doesn’t tell us – when he stumbles across an intriguingly old-fashioned cinema. Suddenly it appears all the streets he’s walking through have become old-fashioned and uncanny, and he is drawn to enter the cinema.

The cinema itself is like something from another world; the screen alive, the dark room occupied by strange sensations and noises, with little life otherwise. It’s a ghost world. When he eventually exits the streets are back to normal, the entrance to the macabre theatre gone.

As is often the case in Ligotti’s stories, there is no explanation to why this happens – it’s because this underworld is simply part of our world, somewhere that you can easily slip into.

The Glamour is part of Ligotti’s story collection, Grimscribe.

“there are things that look like people dressed as dolls, or else dolls made up to look like people. I remember being confused about which it was… When I emerge from the bedroom, I see their eyes are shining in the white darkness, and their heads are turned in all directions. Paralysed – yes! – with terror, I merely return a fixed gaze, wondering if my eyes are shining the same as theirs. Then one of the doll people, slouching against the wall on my left, turns it’s head haltingly upon a stiff little neck and looks straight at me. Worse, it talks. And its voice is a horrible parody of human speech. Even more horrible are its words.”

Thomas Ligotti, Dream of a Manikin

The Nightmare Factory, vol. 2 – Thomas Ligotti

The Nightmare Factory is a graphic novel version of four of Thomas Ligotti’s chilling stories, an approach that I think both adds and takes away from their telling.

The four stories are ‘The Gas Station Carnivals,’ ‘The Clown Puppet,’ ‘The Chymist’ and ‘The Sect of the Idiot.’ The strongest of these is the ‘Gas Station Carnivals’, a story I’d read before a couple of times – and had stayed with me – about a man’s *possible* memories of visiting gas stations across the US and finding in the back terrifying shows featuring supernatural creatures.

The graphic style adds to Ligotti’s original short stories by helping them feel more contemporary and giving them a visual flair that helps you to picture some of the most obscure and terrifying parts of the story. The creatures the character (Quisser) sees at the gas stations for example are stranger for seeing them illustrated.

The graphic style does take away a little though, mostly in that Ligotti’s stories are complex and rich with detail, but the comic book necessarily pares it down to a minimum, meaning some of the depth of character or setting, and explanations of the twisting plot, are missing. And part of the appeal of reading horror like Ligotti’s is letting your imagination do the work because so much is left to your mind, and to some extent seeing it illustrated gives you a particular image that you can’t shake afterwards.

“I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written in embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble race is mine.”

Thomas Ligotti, The Lost Art of Twilight

The Frolic – Thomas Ligotti

One of the most chilling of Ligotti’s stories, The Frolic packs a deceptively large amount of peril into its few pages.

David is a psychiatrist who has recently moved his wife, Leslie, and young daughter, Norleen, to a small town where he has become the psychiatrist to what appears to be a prison for the criminally insane. The whole story is set over one evening, when he returns from work and begins to explain to Leslie that he thinks they (or he) made the wrong choice in moving because, he says, the inmates are so terrifying and beyond the help he idealistically thought he could give them.

One inmate with whom he has a long therapy session has him particularly worked up – known only as John Doe, because he refuses to give a single name, he has a long long history of abducting children and doing who-knows-what with them, which he calls frolicking.

As David conveys his worries about the frolicker he admits his fear is that, despite being behind prison walls, the frolicker will somehow do something to Norleen. And as they talk a sense of concern gradually builds. David goes to check on Norleen, finds her asleep with some kind of comforter. They talk some more and agree they should move quickly. David mentions the comforter Norleen was cuddling. Leslie says she’s never heard of it and didn’t have it when she went to bed. David runs upstairs to find Norleen gone and a sinister note from the frolicker.

There is something quite conventional about this story, compared to others of Ligotti’s, but I think he does three things brilliantly in it.

First, he builds tension, claustrophobia and fear all the way through – from the stilted dialogue to the small town where Leslie feels trapped. He gradually reveals the sinister ending, surprising us despite it being the only way the story could end in retrospect.

Second, he paints an excellent picture of a conventional and difficult family scenario – the traditional family roles, the husband moving his wife and child for a job, the wife supporting his career and moral aspirations, the wife’s unspoken sense that they shouldn’t have moved, the evidence (that he didn’t put Norleen to bed, that he didn’t know what she takes to bed) that he is at work more than home, his gradual realisation he’s put his family in danger….

And third, what makes this story – as with all of Ligotti’s writing – so much more than one about a nuclear family threatened by an external threat, is that he puts ambiguity everywhere.

The frolicker is in the prison, but he denies his past and any names, and appears to be ageless, timeless, supernatural, such that the prison walls ultimately mean nothing. What the frolicker does with the children is never said, leaving that knowledge unknown, tantalisingly unresolved. David has the feeling that the frolicker knows his daughter’s name but this is always dressed up in riddles and it’s quite unclear as to whether he does or how he could. And, indeed, there is ambiguity about where culpability lies – with the frolicker or with David who brought the situation upon them.

Horror works well when it plants seeds of fear in the most normal of situations – what Ligotti does brilliantly here is take a traditional family set up and inject the fear of a sinister, unknowable and supernatural threat that is both inside and outside the family.

The Last Feast of the Harlequin – Thomas Ligotti

Classic Ligotti, this short story is an eerie and macabre comment on contemporary society, told through a supernatural town and terrifying clowns.

The plot is relatively simple. The narrator, an academic fascinated with traditional clown festivals visits the town of Mirocaw to experience its annual festival. On arrival the place is unnatural and the festival, far from a celebration, seems to be an opportunity for the established part of the town to attack an underclass who are forced to dress up as clowns and endure jeering, abuse and violence.

Nothing in the story is clear, not the festival, not even the motives of the protagonist. There’s a striking moment when he gets swept up by the festival’s atmosphere and pushes a clown to the ground, but his actions are ignored and he instantly feels he has violated a code he didn’t know existed. And we never find out.

Equally there’s a moment when the protagonist is told that the clowns are chosen for the festival from across the town’s population so it could be anyone next. But this again isn’t clarified and elsewhere the clowns are described as picked from the underclass.

It ends with a mysterious and underground ritual, in which the protagonist is spared, and he drives away leaving the terrifying figures behind.

Apart from the sense of dread the story conjures up – like a cross between Stephen King and Kafka – what is striking about this story is the comment on the symbiotic relationship between a group and its other, where one can only exist because of the suppression of the second:

Towards the end of the story the protagonist reflects in his journal on what he’s seeing, where this is made clear:

“One thing that seems certain, however, is the division of Mirocaw into two very distinctive types of citizenry, resulting in two festivals and the appearance of similar clowns – a term now used in an extremely loose sense. But there is a connection, and I believe I have some idea of what it is. I said before that the normal residents of the town regard those from the ghetto, and especially the clown figures, with superstition. Yet it’s more than that: there is fear, perhaps hatred – the particular kind of hatred resulting from some powerful and irrational memory.”

“As I wobbled from street to street tonight, watching those oval-mouthed clowns, I could not help feeling that all the merrymaking in Mirocaw was somehow allowed by their sufferance.”

Teatro Grottesco – Thomas Ligotti

I don’t read a lot of horror which may or may not explain why I was captivated by Ligotti’s book of short stories.

There are around twenty stories, each telling an eerie and disconcerting tale of strange occurrences in a world devoid of hope. It is horror (or perhaps what seems to be referred to as speculative or weird fiction) with a focus on creating an atmosphere or creeping terror rather than any recourse to violence or gore. Each story is written in a flowing but formal matter of fact tone, which adds to the distance the reader feels.

Take The Town Manager, which tells the odd story of a town which has a manager who runs it. There has been a succession of managers, each bringing in new and stranger decisions, with the latest boosting tourism by forcing all the shopkeepers to turn their stores into bizarre carnival-like attractions. As always the town manager eventually disappears. The protagonist leaves the town, only to be approached and asked to be the next town manager.

Our Temporary Supervisor is perhaps the most powerful in the collection. Written in the first person it describes a factory where the supervisor is replaced by a dark phantom like presence and, more strangely still, where a new worker appears who is faster and works harder than everyone else. Not to be seen to be lazy or inefficient, everyone else starts to work longer and longer hours until their lives are spent working in the factory, rarely leaving or stopping.

Many of the stories are driven by themes of determinism, of dark forces – both supernatural and the very material power of capital – driving everyone’s behaviour, of our lives being the plaything of others. The books are full of despair and almost entirely lacking in warmth or character. Yet they are absolutely compelling reading, as if you are being forced to read on by powers beyond your control ….