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Teatro Grottesco
This collection features tormented individuals who play out their doom in various odd little towns, as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics. The cycle of narratives that includes the title work of this collection, for instance, introduces readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that ultimately engulf their lives. These are selected examples of the forbidding array of persons and places that compose the mesmerizing fiction of Thomas Ligotti.
312 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Thomas Ligotti
185 books2,707 followersThomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings, while unique in style, have been noted as major continuations of several literary genres—most prominently Lovecraftian horror—and have overall been described as works of "philosophical horror", often written as philosophical novels with a "darker" undertone which is similar to gothic fiction. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 578 reviews
September 6, 2019
Ligotti is usually classified as a "horror" writer, but this label is much too limiting. Ligotti embodies the eccentricity and loneliness of Poe (minus the romantic sentimentality), the bleak existential inner landscape of Kafka, the lunatic small-town atmosphere of Bruno Schulz and the mordant epigrammatic nihilism of Cioran.
Ligotti is a profoundly disturbing writer, an unclassifiable talent right up there with such unique voices as Borges, Calvino and Lem.
September 13, 2020
Industrious Nihilism
Look not here for meaning. But, upon finding any, do try to restrain your enthusiasm. The meaning of these stories is that there is no meaning. Our instinct is to fight against this, to supply explanations or additions to Ligotti’s prose. We are prone to create meaning out of thin air, as it were. But with Ligotti, don’t. Meaning doesn’t exist ‘out there’. And what’s ‘in here’ is totally arbitrary, including, of course, the absence of meaning. One suspects a limitation with the genre; but given Ligotti’s following, that doesn’t seem to matter.
According to Ligotti, we merely ‘rent’ ideas - a thoughtful and useful metaphor. All ideas are old and withered before they ever get to us: “Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next... We live in a world where every surface, every opinion or passion, everything altogether is tainted by the bodies and minds of strangers. Cooties – intellectual cooties and physical cooties from other people – are crawling all around us and all over us at all times.”
These include big ideas like family, constitutional politics and rational thinking, but also commonplace ideas like the biographical details of one’s life, work (including writing as work), casual relationships or the idea that one can actually choose anything. These are all nonsense. At best they’re all part of a sort of un-billed show business, a pointless entertainment. At worst, and most often it’s worst, we dream this stuff up to avoid awareness of how absurdly pointless it all really is. This leads a number of Ligotti’s characters to consider ending it all. Surprisingly, none do.
The world consists of unreadable prescriptions made out by unnamed physicians and presented to uncaring pharmacists by menacing customers who probably want to do us harm. But then again perhaps this is an hallucination which itself is generated by our inveterate commitment to meaning.
“The attic is not haunting your head – your head is haunting the attic.” This is the central tenet of horror fantasy. Ligotti wants to make sure we know this. This is what makes his fiction interesting. It means absolutely nothing, at least nothing about which to take hemlock. If you ‘get’ anything out of it, you’re a dupe. And I suppose if you get that, you’re a double-dupe. There's only so much 0f this one can take without serious literary indigestion.
I wonder where I might get a prescription.
Look not here for meaning. But, upon finding any, do try to restrain your enthusiasm. The meaning of these stories is that there is no meaning. Our instinct is to fight against this, to supply explanations or additions to Ligotti’s prose. We are prone to create meaning out of thin air, as it were. But with Ligotti, don’t. Meaning doesn’t exist ‘out there’. And what’s ‘in here’ is totally arbitrary, including, of course, the absence of meaning. One suspects a limitation with the genre; but given Ligotti’s following, that doesn’t seem to matter.
According to Ligotti, we merely ‘rent’ ideas - a thoughtful and useful metaphor. All ideas are old and withered before they ever get to us: “Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next... We live in a world where every surface, every opinion or passion, everything altogether is tainted by the bodies and minds of strangers. Cooties – intellectual cooties and physical cooties from other people – are crawling all around us and all over us at all times.”
These include big ideas like family, constitutional politics and rational thinking, but also commonplace ideas like the biographical details of one’s life, work (including writing as work), casual relationships or the idea that one can actually choose anything. These are all nonsense. At best they’re all part of a sort of un-billed show business, a pointless entertainment. At worst, and most often it’s worst, we dream this stuff up to avoid awareness of how absurdly pointless it all really is. This leads a number of Ligotti’s characters to consider ending it all. Surprisingly, none do.
The world consists of unreadable prescriptions made out by unnamed physicians and presented to uncaring pharmacists by menacing customers who probably want to do us harm. But then again perhaps this is an hallucination which itself is generated by our inveterate commitment to meaning.
“The attic is not haunting your head – your head is haunting the attic.” This is the central tenet of horror fantasy. Ligotti wants to make sure we know this. This is what makes his fiction interesting. It means absolutely nothing, at least nothing about which to take hemlock. If you ‘get’ anything out of it, you’re a dupe. And I suppose if you get that, you’re a double-dupe. There's only so much 0f this one can take without serious literary indigestion.
I wonder where I might get a prescription.
August 18, 2018
"His trembling words also invoked an epistimology of 'hope and horror', of exposing once and for all the true nature of this 'great gray ritual of existence' and plunging headlong into an 'enlightenment of inanity'..."
- "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land"
reading the collected tales in Thomas' Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco over the course of a rainy, gray day and the rest of a chilly, glum weekend was an interesting experience. it certainly helped to create a gray, glum, and introspective mood, like moving through a kind of self-induced fog, contemplating my place in the grand scheme of things, watching people move about from my window, ignoring various phone calls, watching a couple Cold War era spy films... FUN! well, my kind of fun.
let's just get this out of the way: Ligotti is an icy, condescending misanthrope. in his worldview, life is a trap and living any kind of life, playing any kind of role, is the worst kind of joke... like a person spending their life wallowing in the mud, then sticking their head out of that mud to stupidly proclaim "Look at me, I'm not truly in the mud, not all of me!" reading this book reminded me of reading Zone One - both authors seem to share the same deterministic, rather wearyingly depressing outlook on poor, deluded humanity.
perhaps this sounds like a bad review. it is not! Ligotti is, in a word, BRILLIANT. his perspective may be rote but the way he expresses that perspective is amazing. he is a beautiful writer. his style has a twisted elegance. his voice is, by turns, wry & overwhelmingly pessimistic & nastily bitchy & serenely contemptuous... it all had me constantly reacting to his stories on different levels. and his ability to create morbidly bleak, phantasmagoric, despair-filled landscapes is superb. he's the real deal.
Ligotti does not write traditional tales of suspense and horror. his stories will not 'scare' you - although their implications are quite fearful. they often exist purely on the level of metaphor and often function as analogies for sad aspects or even the entirety of our existence. they are built for contemplation, not for narrative enjoyment. i'm not sure Ligotti actually knows what the term "enjoyment" even means.
the first section of this collection is entitled Derangements and the stories within exist almost solely as metaphor. they feature stunningly stark towns and brutally grim tableau (including an abandoned factory that once churned out an array of vicious little nic nacs and has a 2nd level basement graveyard for chrissakes). my favorite is the first story Purity, which is almost overloaded with bizarre, beyond-creepy situations and characters... a fatalistic boy drawn to the dark corners of abandoned, junkie-ridden flats in order to contemplate the darkness around him... his father, a mad scientist compelled to drain out the essence of what allows humans to imagine a greater world around and above them... his sister & mother, prone to sinister "vacations" and muttering mysteriously about hermaphrodites... a child-killing, serial killer cop who pays a visit to the wrong house at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. good stuff!
the second section is entitled Deformations and its stories detail the cruelly pointless lives lived in two towns, one south of a border and the other north of that border, both completely ruled by the mysterious and malevolent Quine Organization. this section is perhaps too explicit in showing exactly how pointless Ligotti feels day to day work to be. it is not just drudgery, it is not just being a spoke in the great wheel of business... it is a genuine living death. my favorite story is Our Temporary Supervisor, a cold and cunning allegory for on-the-job performance improvement. the vision of an amorphous, tendrily shadow figure viewed only behind the frosted glass of his office yet slowly able to transform his workers into completely obedient robots was perfectly accomplished.
i found the third section The Damaged and the Diseased to be the weakest. but perhaps this is a personal thing. the stories were fine, more than fine actually, beyond competent - they were genuinely visionary at times. but i suppose i have a natural antipathy to the subject matter: these stories all concern the dangers and lures of art, the pathetic tragedy of artists, the supposedly sad, frail worlds they build for themselves. i've lived a lot of my life surrounded by artists, so i assume my slight disinterest may come from too much experience rolling my eyes at various artistic stances, pretensions, self-absorption, etc. still, i found The Bungalow House - a mordant ouroboros of a tale, one concerned with some exceedingly desolate surroundings that come to obsess our narrator - to be genuinely ingenious.
this last section also encapsulates Ligotti's perspective on how to truly achieve success in the world: simply let your useless mind and spirit go, and allow your body to function as it should... as an unthinking machine, as an unfeeling virus, as a forward-moving, soulless instrument that strikes the same predictable notes time and again. i'm not sure i'll be seeing that advice on any daily calendars anytime soon.
__________
musical accompaniment
Cranes: Self-Non-Self, Wings of Joy
Einsturzende Neubauten: Tabula Rasa
Chris and Cosey: Trance, Songs of Love and Lust
- "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land"
reading the collected tales in Thomas' Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco over the course of a rainy, gray day and the rest of a chilly, glum weekend was an interesting experience. it certainly helped to create a gray, glum, and introspective mood, like moving through a kind of self-induced fog, contemplating my place in the grand scheme of things, watching people move about from my window, ignoring various phone calls, watching a couple Cold War era spy films... FUN! well, my kind of fun.
let's just get this out of the way: Ligotti is an icy, condescending misanthrope. in his worldview, life is a trap and living any kind of life, playing any kind of role, is the worst kind of joke... like a person spending their life wallowing in the mud, then sticking their head out of that mud to stupidly proclaim "Look at me, I'm not truly in the mud, not all of me!" reading this book reminded me of reading Zone One - both authors seem to share the same deterministic, rather wearyingly depressing outlook on poor, deluded humanity.
perhaps this sounds like a bad review. it is not! Ligotti is, in a word, BRILLIANT. his perspective may be rote but the way he expresses that perspective is amazing. he is a beautiful writer. his style has a twisted elegance. his voice is, by turns, wry & overwhelmingly pessimistic & nastily bitchy & serenely contemptuous... it all had me constantly reacting to his stories on different levels. and his ability to create morbidly bleak, phantasmagoric, despair-filled landscapes is superb. he's the real deal.
Ligotti does not write traditional tales of suspense and horror. his stories will not 'scare' you - although their implications are quite fearful. they often exist purely on the level of metaphor and often function as analogies for sad aspects or even the entirety of our existence. they are built for contemplation, not for narrative enjoyment. i'm not sure Ligotti actually knows what the term "enjoyment" even means.
the first section of this collection is entitled Derangements and the stories within exist almost solely as metaphor. they feature stunningly stark towns and brutally grim tableau (including an abandoned factory that once churned out an array of vicious little nic nacs and has a 2nd level basement graveyard for chrissakes). my favorite is the first story Purity, which is almost overloaded with bizarre, beyond-creepy situations and characters... a fatalistic boy drawn to the dark corners of abandoned, junkie-ridden flats in order to contemplate the darkness around him... his father, a mad scientist compelled to drain out the essence of what allows humans to imagine a greater world around and above them... his sister & mother, prone to sinister "vacations" and muttering mysteriously about hermaphrodites... a child-killing, serial killer cop who pays a visit to the wrong house at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. good stuff!
the second section is entitled Deformations and its stories detail the cruelly pointless lives lived in two towns, one south of a border and the other north of that border, both completely ruled by the mysterious and malevolent Quine Organization. this section is perhaps too explicit in showing exactly how pointless Ligotti feels day to day work to be. it is not just drudgery, it is not just being a spoke in the great wheel of business... it is a genuine living death. my favorite story is Our Temporary Supervisor, a cold and cunning allegory for on-the-job performance improvement. the vision of an amorphous, tendrily shadow figure viewed only behind the frosted glass of his office yet slowly able to transform his workers into completely obedient robots was perfectly accomplished.
i found the third section The Damaged and the Diseased to be the weakest. but perhaps this is a personal thing. the stories were fine, more than fine actually, beyond competent - they were genuinely visionary at times. but i suppose i have a natural antipathy to the subject matter: these stories all concern the dangers and lures of art, the pathetic tragedy of artists, the supposedly sad, frail worlds they build for themselves. i've lived a lot of my life surrounded by artists, so i assume my slight disinterest may come from too much experience rolling my eyes at various artistic stances, pretensions, self-absorption, etc. still, i found The Bungalow House - a mordant ouroboros of a tale, one concerned with some exceedingly desolate surroundings that come to obsess our narrator - to be genuinely ingenious.
this last section also encapsulates Ligotti's perspective on how to truly achieve success in the world: simply let your useless mind and spirit go, and allow your body to function as it should... as an unthinking machine, as an unfeeling virus, as a forward-moving, soulless instrument that strikes the same predictable notes time and again. i'm not sure i'll be seeing that advice on any daily calendars anytime soon.
__________
musical accompaniment
Cranes: Self-Non-Self, Wings of Joy
Einsturzende Neubauten: Tabula Rasa
Chris and Cosey: Trance, Songs of Love and Lust
January 15, 2016
This was the collection that made me a Ligotti fan for life. While I'd already owned and read his previous collections -- and for the most part enjoyed them -- it wasn't until I cracked Teatro Grottesco open in 2008 that something unlocked in my brain, allowing me to become fully absorbed in his nightmarish worldview and disorienting prose, both here and when re-reading his earlier collections.
Ligotti had definitely evolved a lot as a writer by this period (mid-90s to early-2000s). Mostly gone is his earlier baroque style, and more accentuated is his unique brand of morose, black humor, as evidenced in stories like "The Town Manager" and his "office horror" stories like "Our Temporary Supervisor" and "My Case for Retributive Action," all of which strike that perfect balance between horror and humor.
"In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land," which consists of four related stories, grew on me over time, and not many stories give me the same eerie feeling of "unreality slowly encroaching" as this. The tale's "town near the border" feels like an actual place that must exist in some distorted, dreamlike reality, so powerful are its images. I love the oddness in the fact that the residents of the town all gather in abandoned buildings and dark alleys at night to discuss the strange goings-on. And the narrator's vision of (Spoiler) being a head on an old lady's walking stick will never leave me. (End Spoiler*)
"Gas Station Carnivals" is another great example of the "unreality slowly encroaching" theme, about two people talking in the weirdly ominous atmosphere of a nightclub late at night, where reality seems to be slowly changing as one of them reminisces about his childhood fear of the run-down, off-highway gas station carnivals he and his family would stop at during road trips, which the other man (the narrator) believes must be made-up memories, until.... There's a lot more to it, but I dare not say more.
"Purity" shows that Ligotti is capable of characterization, and that his protagonists are not always just a means to exploring the nightmare-like environments that surround them. It could almost be considered a piece of straight literature. Almost. It concerns a boy who walks to the poor section of town to get away from his father, who's conducting strange experiments in the basement, where he befriends an old, nearly invalid black woman who's seemingly some sort of drug dealer, though we can't be sure due to the boy's limited worldview, and he decides to show her the results of one of his dad's "experiments." I'm still not convinced I completely understand everything, but it has certainly haunted me ever since.
"The Bungalow House" is almost hypnotic, in that Ligotti repeats certain key phrases over and over until they have a mesmerizing effect. It concerns a man who comes across an art installation that consists of nothing more than some spoken-word cassettes -- containing "dream occasions" -- at an art gallery, and they speak to him so completely that he feels he must get more. A brilliant story, and one of the most effective at creating that inexplicable "frisson" within the reader.
The one that stuck with me most on my first read-through (I've read this collection countless times since) was the title story, which takes place in a typical Ligottian Anytown, USA, but it's a reality where artist-types are always on the lookout for the so-called Teatro Grottesco, who are somewhat of a mythical urban legend; a mysterious, sinister traveling theater troupe that you do not want showing up in your town, especially if you're the creative sort. The artsy crowd is divided as to whether or not they actually exist. To say anything more would give too much away of this atmospheric tale of slow-creeping dread. It's very David Lynchian, and I'd love to see what he'd do with the concept.
Overall, this is the collection to start with if you're new to Ligotti, as it's his most accessible and most diverse. All the requisite unsettling and nihilistic traits of his are here, but with unencumbered, witty prose that immediate pulls the reader in, at least if they're a fan of weird fiction. It's the best single-volume representation of Ligotti's uniquely horrifying vision, imo, and no collection is better at making the supernatural seem like a natural part of the universe -- just a part that is yet to be discovered by most.
My highest recommendation.
5.0 Stars
*I'm not sure it's actually possible to "spoil" a Ligotti story, as a mere description does not give the reader the nightmare-like sense of dislocation and unease which, imo, is the main reason to read him, as opposed to the "plot."
Ligotti had definitely evolved a lot as a writer by this period (mid-90s to early-2000s). Mostly gone is his earlier baroque style, and more accentuated is his unique brand of morose, black humor, as evidenced in stories like "The Town Manager" and his "office horror" stories like "Our Temporary Supervisor" and "My Case for Retributive Action," all of which strike that perfect balance between horror and humor.
"In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land," which consists of four related stories, grew on me over time, and not many stories give me the same eerie feeling of "unreality slowly encroaching" as this. The tale's "town near the border" feels like an actual place that must exist in some distorted, dreamlike reality, so powerful are its images. I love the oddness in the fact that the residents of the town all gather in abandoned buildings and dark alleys at night to discuss the strange goings-on. And the narrator's vision of (Spoiler) being a head on an old lady's walking stick will never leave me. (End Spoiler*)
"Gas Station Carnivals" is another great example of the "unreality slowly encroaching" theme, about two people talking in the weirdly ominous atmosphere of a nightclub late at night, where reality seems to be slowly changing as one of them reminisces about his childhood fear of the run-down, off-highway gas station carnivals he and his family would stop at during road trips, which the other man (the narrator) believes must be made-up memories, until.... There's a lot more to it, but I dare not say more.
"Purity" shows that Ligotti is capable of characterization, and that his protagonists are not always just a means to exploring the nightmare-like environments that surround them. It could almost be considered a piece of straight literature. Almost. It concerns a boy who walks to the poor section of town to get away from his father, who's conducting strange experiments in the basement, where he befriends an old, nearly invalid black woman who's seemingly some sort of drug dealer, though we can't be sure due to the boy's limited worldview, and he decides to show her the results of one of his dad's "experiments." I'm still not convinced I completely understand everything, but it has certainly haunted me ever since.
"The Bungalow House" is almost hypnotic, in that Ligotti repeats certain key phrases over and over until they have a mesmerizing effect. It concerns a man who comes across an art installation that consists of nothing more than some spoken-word cassettes -- containing "dream occasions" -- at an art gallery, and they speak to him so completely that he feels he must get more. A brilliant story, and one of the most effective at creating that inexplicable "frisson" within the reader.
The one that stuck with me most on my first read-through (I've read this collection countless times since) was the title story, which takes place in a typical Ligottian Anytown, USA, but it's a reality where artist-types are always on the lookout for the so-called Teatro Grottesco, who are somewhat of a mythical urban legend; a mysterious, sinister traveling theater troupe that you do not want showing up in your town, especially if you're the creative sort. The artsy crowd is divided as to whether or not they actually exist. To say anything more would give too much away of this atmospheric tale of slow-creeping dread. It's very David Lynchian, and I'd love to see what he'd do with the concept.
Overall, this is the collection to start with if you're new to Ligotti, as it's his most accessible and most diverse. All the requisite unsettling and nihilistic traits of his are here, but with unencumbered, witty prose that immediate pulls the reader in, at least if they're a fan of weird fiction. It's the best single-volume representation of Ligotti's uniquely horrifying vision, imo, and no collection is better at making the supernatural seem like a natural part of the universe -- just a part that is yet to be discovered by most.
My highest recommendation.
5.0 Stars
*I'm not sure it's actually possible to "spoil" a Ligotti story, as a mere description does not give the reader the nightmare-like sense of dislocation and unease which, imo, is the main reason to read him, as opposed to the "plot."
Read
November 25, 2021
"No one anticipates the arrival of the Teatro." So voices the tale's narrator, a writer of what he terms nihilistic prose. I wonder if he was familiar with that famous line from Monty Python, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."
Only with Thomas Ligotti, the Teatro means real terror.
One aspect of a Thomas Ligotti tale I especially appreciate: the author leaves room for a reader's imagination - Teatro Grottesco serves as prime example. I'll focus on the title story since I will be writing separate reviews for the other pieces in this collection.
The narrator hangs out with a group of artists, an unstable, precarious bunch since one of their number could drop out at any moment without notice. So it was with a filmmaker, a creator of art films, who disappeared and was eventually spotted watching a porno flick at a crap movie house.
What's going on here? We're given a hint when one of the artists, a woman who always wears purple, says, “His stuff and Teatro stuff,” as she holds up two tightly crossed fingers.
The purple woman then relates a ghastly tale of a self-styled “visceral artist” who worked nights stocking shelves for a suburban supermarket chain. Following an episode of weird, grizzly violence in an alley when he was returning home one winter morning, this artist, Spense by name, sometime thereafter finds himself at the office of Theatre Grottesco where he informs the young female receptionist he would like to enlist the services of Teatro “to utterly destroy someone.” She, in turn, explains that TG Ventures is an “entertainment service” that provides clowns, magicians and novelty performances for things like children's parties.
But don't you believe her. The narrator states, “Whether or not an artist was approached by the Teatro or took the initiative to approach the Teatro himself, it seemed the effect was the same: the end of the artist's work.” The narrator substantiates his statement by recounting that the filmmaker became a full-time dealer in others' porno videos, the visceral artist manages that suburban supermarket and the purple woman makes tons of money selling real estate. All of them now ex-artists
His tale takes a dramatic shift when he remarks, "I must end my list of no-longer artistic persons with myself." Oh, yes, as he tells us, “I feel certain that for an artist to encounter the Teatro there can be only one consequence: the end of that artist's work. Strange, then, that knowing this fact I still acted as I did.”
The narrator can't say if he was approached or if he himself was the one who approached Teatro but from that moment he perceives the Teatro to be "a profoundly anti-artistic phenomenon." He then decides to turn his nihilistic prose writing into "an anti-Teatro phenomenon."
From this point forward, his tale spirals into dimensions of the hyperweird. He contracts an intestinal virus (author's italics) and knows he must develop insights to counter a "company of nightmares." Although he recovers somewhat, at least physically, and proclaims to others that he knows the true nature of the Teatro, it isn't long before he collapses during a meeting of artists and is taken to the emergency room.
What happens after he wakes up at night in a bed in a backstreet hospital is the stuff of nightmares. He shares a dimly lit ward with other damaged bodies and hears a voice over the public address system sounding like a child's sing-song taunting, a mischievous giggling voice repeating paging Dr. Groddeck. Then, as if in a dream, he wanders down the long corridor and eventually arrives at the office of Dr. T. Groddeck.
The narrator's encounter with this seemingly demented man and his unending wheezing laughter proves most unsettling. There's mysterious movements within a glass globe that sits on his desk. The narrator's mind spins with one particular thought recurring: "it was all a fix from the start."
You'll have to read for yourself to learn the fate of the narrator following his encounter with Dr. T Groddeck and Teatro Grottesco. Let me simply remark the ending of this tale will bring to mind themes familiar to fans of the author: a human life as little more than a puppet manipulated by a malevolent hidden power. Also, the invitation to join an organization, a company, with all the diabolical echoes of corporate horror. Thus those masked actors in the photo above.
Author Thomas Ligotti, born 1953
August 9, 2017
I was able to pick up a hardcover edition published by Mythos Books. This first edition originally sold for $35.00.
Some of the stories here are amazingly good. Others are just kind of good. All are interesting and well written. Mr. Ligotti's command of the language is awe inspiring.
The reason for only four stars is due to the "sameness" I felt in some of the stories. They took me to somewhere that I had been taken to previously with in this book.
To be sure there are some exceptional examples of writing here.
Some of the stories here are amazingly good. Others are just kind of good. All are interesting and well written. Mr. Ligotti's command of the language is awe inspiring.
The reason for only four stars is due to the "sameness" I felt in some of the stories. They took me to somewhere that I had been taken to previously with in this book.
To be sure there are some exceptional examples of writing here.
November 8, 2008
Ligotti gets compared to those other masters of the horror short Poe and Lovecraft and he obviously loves their tales of deranged minds, half glimpsed horrors, and nihilism. The opening line of “The Clown Puppet” seems a wonderful parody of a Lovecraft opening. Ligotti’s true muses are actually Bruno Shultz and Thomas Bernhard. Fans of those writers should run not walk to the store/library to snatch up Ligotti before he vanishes into out of print limbo. Using Bernhard’s repetition and comic disgust and Shultz’s warped towns, sinister fathers, experiments, and unearthly shops, Ligotti creates his signature style. Philosophical horror is a good definition of this as Ligotti uses these stories to reveal a nihilistic take on Plato and his cave or an almost Gnostic vision with deranged archons performing the tasks of the rotting demiurge at the source of creation. Using this style crafted from Bernhard’s rants, Borgesian essay/story, and Shultz’s warped memoirs he tells tales or stories (more like emissions from Ligotti land) of grotesque factories, crumbling towns, Kafkaesque corporations, puppets, clowns, and artists. Highlights are “In Foreign Town, in a Foreign Country.” a story suite, “The Red Tower”(about a gothic factory I think Ligotti’s other muse W.S. Burroughs would have loved), and “Teatro Grottesco”( a tale of a conspiracy of an anti-artist guild that reads a little like David Lynch adapting Crying of Lot 49). The corporate horror stories remind of recent work by Mark Samuels and Jeff Vandermeer’s The Situation. The sense of urban despair in this book makes so much sense to me, when I learned that Ligotti lived in Detroit for about twenty years. Connecting that real life horror brings these stories home for me. I wish someone would mail this collection to film director Guy Maddin, who in a recent interview revealed his love for Bruno Shultz(which popped a couple pieces together in my mind), who is one the few contemporary filmmakers who would do Ligotti justice.
November 11, 2015
For reasons unknown to me (or hidden from me? Once can never be sure.) this past year or so has been chock full of existentialist texts. From philosophical surveys to plays to role-playing supplements to novels to novels that were later turned into movies, I seem to be crawling my way up a mountain of stark realizations, worrisome revelations brought forth by prophets of . . . not gloom per-se, at least not in the sense of utter nihilism and hopelessness, but soothsayers of "facing that which you dare not face in order to be enlightened about the severe limitations placed on you because of the cycle of life and death" (and possibly doing something with the limited time you realize you have).
And just as "gloom" doesn't capture the essence of existentialism (though it is a window), "horror" does not do justice to the work of Thomas Ligotti. Not even close. The adjective "horrific" is accurate, but not sufficient. It is merely one contributory factor to the ouvre that Ligotti creates.
"Philosophy" doesn't quite catch it, either, though thought experiments are always in the wings and sometimes right out front in the stories contained in Teatro Grottesco.
No, these are stories. Their plots are sometimes skeletal (no pun intended), as in the story "Our Temporary Supervisor," an unsettling take on the workplace that will cause you to carefully consider who it is you work for and the nature of the relationship between your "personal" life and "personal" time, and that of the company for which you work. Sometimes, the plots are more rigorous, a vital part of the tale. This is the case with "Bungalow House," a deep delve into performance art and madness, with a side swipe at the nature of market economy.
From these two plot assessments, you might think that Ligotti's work is overtly political. Not so! Only insofar as individuals are, at times, at the mercy of the larger social order of which they are a part. His characters are often at the limnal zone between psychology and sociology, the decision point (if one can make a decision) between being utterly alone and being utterly overwhelmed by the tyranny of the masses. This place is uncomfortable, and some of these stories will make the inner pre-teen squirm in the remembered angst and shame of that age. Ligotti is in touch with the inner you, whether you want him to be or not!
But with this discomfort comes a sense of awe, reverence for that-which-is-bigger-than-you. The sense of hopelessness is humbling, putting the reader in a state of mind, a trance-like state, that suddenly sees beauty in ugliness. Ligotti's prose is gorgeous, not baroque for the sake of baroque - Ligotti is very much in control of his language (and I have now begun to be able to see how he does what he does, which is a fascinating thing to a writer) - but his prose is elegant, with a stately cadence behind it that makes chaos feel ordered and makes order feel chaotic, creating a disconcerting sort of music in the reader's brain.
There are many passages that I might use to show what it is I am trying to express. I have settled on a section from the final story, "The Shadow, The Darkness". In this scene, the narrator is speaking with an un-named companion who is, supposedly, the writer of the unpublished book An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race. The two are discussing the artist Grossvogel, who has brought them (and other companions - art snobs, to be precise) to a dilapidated town to reveal his masterpiece, one in a long series of sculptures entitled "Tsalal 1," "Tsalal 2," etc. The author has just spoken to the narrator, explaining how these works of art have proven so successful in the marketplace, despite their crude workmanship and nonsensical representations:
"The mind and all that, the self and all that, are only a cover-up, only a fabrication, as Grossvogel says. They are that which cannot be seen with the body, which cannot be sensed by any organ of physical sensation. This is because they are actually non-existent cover-ups, masks, disguises for the thing that is activating our bodies in the way Grossvogel explained - activating them and using them for what it needs to thrive upon. They are the work, the artworks in fact, of the Tlalal itself. Oh, it's impossible to simply tell you. I wish you could read my Investigation. It would have explained everything, it would have revealed everything. But how could you read what was never written in the first place?"
"Never written?" I inquired. "Why was it never written?"
"Why?" he said, pausing for a moment and grimacing in pain. "the answer to that is exactly what Grossvogel has been preaching in both his pamphlets and his public appearances. His entire doctrine, if it can even be called that, if there could ever be such a thing in any sense whatever, is based on the non-existence, the imaginary nature of everything we believe ourselves to be. Despite his efforts to express what has happened to him, he must know very well that there are no words that are able to explain such a thing. Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race that my treatise might have illuminated. Grossvogel has experienced the essence of this conspiracy first-hand, or at least has claimed to have experienced it. Words are simply a cover-up for this conspiracy. They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness - its ultimate artistic cover-up. Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of soul or self exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up. There is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race - no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book. There is no one at all who can say anything about this most basic fact of existence, no one who can betray this reality. And there is no one to whom it could ever be conveyed."
"That all seems impossible to comprehend," I objected.
"It just might be, if only there actually were anything to comprehend, or anyone to comprehend it. But there are no such beings."
"If that's the case," I said, wincing with abdominal discomfort, "then who is having this conversation?"
"Who indeed?" he answered.
As you can probably tell from this passage, Ligotti is also a master of breaking through the fourth wall, not in such a way as to bring the reader and the false construct of the book itself face-to-face, but in such a way as to bring the reader face-to-face with the idea of reality itself. Ligotti breaks through the fourth metaphysical wall, leaving readers to question their own sanity, their own senses, their own interpretation of the world and people around them. You'll never be frightened outright by Ligotti's work, but his fiction will claw your brain in a way that you will never forget. You may not be scared by Teatro Grottesco, but you will be scarred by it.
And just as "gloom" doesn't capture the essence of existentialism (though it is a window), "horror" does not do justice to the work of Thomas Ligotti. Not even close. The adjective "horrific" is accurate, but not sufficient. It is merely one contributory factor to the ouvre that Ligotti creates.
"Philosophy" doesn't quite catch it, either, though thought experiments are always in the wings and sometimes right out front in the stories contained in Teatro Grottesco.
No, these are stories. Their plots are sometimes skeletal (no pun intended), as in the story "Our Temporary Supervisor," an unsettling take on the workplace that will cause you to carefully consider who it is you work for and the nature of the relationship between your "personal" life and "personal" time, and that of the company for which you work. Sometimes, the plots are more rigorous, a vital part of the tale. This is the case with "Bungalow House," a deep delve into performance art and madness, with a side swipe at the nature of market economy.
From these two plot assessments, you might think that Ligotti's work is overtly political. Not so! Only insofar as individuals are, at times, at the mercy of the larger social order of which they are a part. His characters are often at the limnal zone between psychology and sociology, the decision point (if one can make a decision) between being utterly alone and being utterly overwhelmed by the tyranny of the masses. This place is uncomfortable, and some of these stories will make the inner pre-teen squirm in the remembered angst and shame of that age. Ligotti is in touch with the inner you, whether you want him to be or not!
But with this discomfort comes a sense of awe, reverence for that-which-is-bigger-than-you. The sense of hopelessness is humbling, putting the reader in a state of mind, a trance-like state, that suddenly sees beauty in ugliness. Ligotti's prose is gorgeous, not baroque for the sake of baroque - Ligotti is very much in control of his language (and I have now begun to be able to see how he does what he does, which is a fascinating thing to a writer) - but his prose is elegant, with a stately cadence behind it that makes chaos feel ordered and makes order feel chaotic, creating a disconcerting sort of music in the reader's brain.
There are many passages that I might use to show what it is I am trying to express. I have settled on a section from the final story, "The Shadow, The Darkness". In this scene, the narrator is speaking with an un-named companion who is, supposedly, the writer of the unpublished book An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race. The two are discussing the artist Grossvogel, who has brought them (and other companions - art snobs, to be precise) to a dilapidated town to reveal his masterpiece, one in a long series of sculptures entitled "Tsalal 1," "Tsalal 2," etc. The author has just spoken to the narrator, explaining how these works of art have proven so successful in the marketplace, despite their crude workmanship and nonsensical representations:
"The mind and all that, the self and all that, are only a cover-up, only a fabrication, as Grossvogel says. They are that which cannot be seen with the body, which cannot be sensed by any organ of physical sensation. This is because they are actually non-existent cover-ups, masks, disguises for the thing that is activating our bodies in the way Grossvogel explained - activating them and using them for what it needs to thrive upon. They are the work, the artworks in fact, of the Tlalal itself. Oh, it's impossible to simply tell you. I wish you could read my Investigation. It would have explained everything, it would have revealed everything. But how could you read what was never written in the first place?"
"Never written?" I inquired. "Why was it never written?"
"Why?" he said, pausing for a moment and grimacing in pain. "the answer to that is exactly what Grossvogel has been preaching in both his pamphlets and his public appearances. His entire doctrine, if it can even be called that, if there could ever be such a thing in any sense whatever, is based on the non-existence, the imaginary nature of everything we believe ourselves to be. Despite his efforts to express what has happened to him, he must know very well that there are no words that are able to explain such a thing. Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race that my treatise might have illuminated. Grossvogel has experienced the essence of this conspiracy first-hand, or at least has claimed to have experienced it. Words are simply a cover-up for this conspiracy. They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness - its ultimate artistic cover-up. Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of soul or self exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up. There is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race - no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book. There is no one at all who can say anything about this most basic fact of existence, no one who can betray this reality. And there is no one to whom it could ever be conveyed."
"That all seems impossible to comprehend," I objected.
"It just might be, if only there actually were anything to comprehend, or anyone to comprehend it. But there are no such beings."
"If that's the case," I said, wincing with abdominal discomfort, "then who is having this conversation?"
"Who indeed?" he answered.
As you can probably tell from this passage, Ligotti is also a master of breaking through the fourth wall, not in such a way as to bring the reader and the false construct of the book itself face-to-face, but in such a way as to bring the reader face-to-face with the idea of reality itself. Ligotti breaks through the fourth metaphysical wall, leaving readers to question their own sanity, their own senses, their own interpretation of the world and people around them. You'll never be frightened outright by Ligotti's work, but his fiction will claw your brain in a way that you will never forget. You may not be scared by Teatro Grottesco, but you will be scarred by it.
January 21, 2018
Κλείνοντας ένα βιβλίο, έρχεσαι αντιμέτωπος με άλλοτε μικρές και άλλοτε μεγαλύτερες προκλήσεις. Συνήθως είναι μικρές, αδιόρατες, κάνοντας το βιβλίο εύκολο να το χαρακτηρίσεις, να το κατατάξεις. Το θέατρο Γκροτέσκο δεν ήταν τέτοιο. Ήταν ένας κοσμικό τρόμος, επιφανειακά Λαβακραφκικός. Ήταν, όμως, μόνο αυτό; Ήταν ένα βιβλίο τρόμου; Ή μήπως ήταν μια δήλωση; Θα πρέπει να ανησυχούμε για τον Λιγκότι και για την ψυχική του ισορροπία; Μήπως θα πρέπει να ανησυχούμε για τις ��λήθειες που μας αποκαλύπτει;
Με τον Λιγκότι γνωρίστηκα μέσα απο το καταπληκτικό Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe . Περίμενα λοιπόν εν μέρει την έκθεση μου σε αβυσσαλέες εκδοχές της πραγματικότητας, σε αλλόκοτες καταστάσεις και φωνές που το έχουν χάσει από αυτά πουπως είδαν και για τα οποία προσπαθούν να μιλήσουν. Δεν περίμενα, όμως, τα απανωτά χτυπήματα που θα δεχόταν η πραγματικότητά μου από την ψυχρό απολογισμό των διαφόρων χαρακτήρων του Λιγκότι, που μοιάζουν να λένε πως η πραγματικότητα δεν είναι παρά μια φενάκη, ένα παραπέτασμα που κρύβει το απόλυτο, χαώδες τίποτα. Τιτάνιες, άσπλαχνες δυνάμεις λειτουργούν ερήμι μας, όσο εμείς νομίζουμε πως δίνουμε νόημα στην ύπαρξή μας.
Η γραφή του είναι πλήρως εναρμονισμένη με αυτό το συγγραφικό όραμα: οι αφηγητές αφηγούνται αποστασιοποιημένοι, ιστορίες από τις οποίες οι ανθρώπινες επαφές είναι απογυμνωμένες σε έναν εντελώς λειτουργικό ρόλο. Ερωτικά σκιρτήματα, αισθήματα και λαχτάρες απουσιάζουν πλήρως από τον κόσμο του Λιγκότι. Οι χαρακτήρες λειτουργούν μηχανικά, εξιστορούν πολλές φορές σαν φερέφωνα κάποιου άλλο, άγνωστου. Το συγγραφικό σχήμα της επανάληψης, εντείνει αυτήν την αίσθηση της εμμονής ενός μυαλού να επιστήσει την προσοχή της ανθρωπότητας σε κάτι που δεν θα μπορέσει να συλλάβει, ή που αν καταφέρει και συλλάβει θα τρελαθεί.
Αν υπάρχει κάτι πιο ανησυχητικό από τον αναγνωστικό οργασμό που μου δημιουργούν αυτές οι ιστορίες, είναι πως ενστενρίζομαι τον νιχιλισμό, ή ό,τι είναι αυτό που διέπει τους συλλογισμούς του Λιγκότι.
Είναι από τις ελάχιστες φορές που θεωρώ πως ένα βιβλίο είναι ενοχλητικό, "πειραγμένο". Ο Λιγκότι είναι ένα σπάνιο ταλέντο που σε κάνει να νιώθεις πως γράφει γιατί δεν έχει άλλο τρόπο να βρει την γαλήνη μέσα του. Μπορούμε κάτι τέτοιο να το βαφτίσουμε λογοτεχνία τρόμου, υψηλοτάτου επιπέδου και επικινδυνότητας.
Με τον Λιγκότι γνωρίστηκα μέσα απο το καταπληκτικό Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe . Περίμενα λοιπόν εν μέρει την έκθεση μου σε αβυσσαλέες εκδοχές της πραγματικότητας, σε αλλόκοτες καταστάσεις και φωνές που το έχουν χάσει από αυτά πουπως είδαν και για τα οποία προσπαθούν να μιλήσουν. Δεν περίμενα, όμως, τα απανωτά χτυπήματα που θα δεχόταν η πραγματικότητά μου από την ψυχρό απολογισμό των διαφόρων χαρακτήρων του Λιγκότι, που μοιάζουν να λένε πως η πραγματικότητα δεν είναι παρά μια φενάκη, ένα παραπέτασμα που κρύβει το απόλυτο, χαώδες τίποτα. Τιτάνιες, άσπλαχνες δυνάμεις λειτουργούν ερήμι μας, όσο εμείς νομίζουμε πως δίνουμε νόημα στην ύπαρξή μας.
Η γραφή του είναι πλήρως εναρμονισμένη με αυτό το συγγραφικό όραμα: οι αφηγητές αφηγούνται αποστασιοποιημένοι, ιστορίες από τις οποίες οι ανθρώπινες επαφές είναι απογυμνωμένες σε έναν εντελώς λειτουργικό ρόλο. Ερωτικά σκιρτήματα, αισθήματα και λαχτάρες απουσιάζουν πλήρως από τον κόσμο του Λιγκότι. Οι χαρακτήρες λειτουργούν μηχανικά, εξιστορούν πολλές φορές σαν φερέφωνα κάποιου άλλο, άγνωστου. Το συγγραφικό σχήμα της επανάληψης, εντείνει αυτήν την αίσθηση της εμμονής ενός μυαλού να επιστήσει την προσοχή της ανθρωπότητας σε κάτι που δεν θα μπορέσει να συλλάβει, ή που αν καταφέρει και συλλάβει θα τρελαθεί.
Αν υπάρχει κάτι πιο ανησυχητικό από τον αναγνωστικό οργασμό που μου δημιουργούν αυτές οι ιστορίες, είναι πως ενστενρίζομαι τον νιχιλισμό, ή ό,τι είναι αυτό που διέπει τους συλλογισμούς του Λιγκότι.
Είναι από τις ελάχιστες φορές που θεωρώ πως ένα βιβλίο είναι ενοχλητικό, "πειραγμένο". Ο Λιγκότι είναι ένα σπάνιο ταλέντο που σε κάνει να νιώθεις πως γράφει γιατί δεν έχει άλλο τρόπο να βρει την γαλήνη μέσα του. Μπορούμε κάτι τέτοιο να το βαφτίσουμε λογοτεχνία τρόμου, υψηλοτάτου επιπέδου και επικινδυνότητας.
October 31, 2019
Sentivo parlare dell'autore, Thomas Ligotti, come il migliore autore horror/fantastico contemporaneo. Sinceramente all'inizio ne ero scettico, non so perchè, ma avevo la sensazione che potesse essere uno di quegli autori horror splatter/sadici, tipo torture o tipologie di horror che proprio non mi interessano. Ma mi sbagliavo totalmente. Quando ho scoperto, poco tempo fa, che veniva paragonato a H. P. Lovecraft, subito mi si è accesa la lampadina: dovevo provarlo, assolutamente!
Un giorno scarrellando sul sito della biblioteca, metto nella ricerca, Ligotti, così mi decisi e prenotai questo libro, presi proprio questo perchè, oltre al titolo ed alla copertina, mi soffermai su questo perchè erano racconti, così al massimo, se non mi fosse piaciuto, l'avrei tranquillamente riportato in biblioteca e storia chiusa.
Il primo racconto mi ha colpito fin da subito, Ligotti ha un modo di raccontare che mi ha fatto pensare subito a Lovecraft (ma non in modo negativo, nel senso, non da scopiazzatore, si sente l'influenza letteraria, ma è in toto originale, particolare). Quel modo di scrivere ammantato da un sottile strato di nebbiolina, ma persistente e dovunque. Il paesaggio dove vengono ambientati i racconti son sempre desolati, fatiscenti, in degrado permanente, il silenzio è penetrato soltanto dai rumori della natura "morta", insomma ci troviamo immersi in un paesaggio cupo, crepuscolare, desolante.
Continuando con i racconti, questa sensazione di desolazione si fa sempre più opprimente, come se stessimo (noi lettori) in uno stato di dormiveglia ed ogni volta che ci risvegliamo, in uno stato di catatonia, ci ritrovassimo in un luogo oscuro ed apparentemente senza fine, rinchiusi ma anche liberi, tipo come affetti da claustrofobia ed agorafobia insieme... Potrà sembrare pazzesco (o magari lo è?)!!
Una scoperta fenomenale (ringrazio Ellis per il consiglio e per la lettura in contemporanea :-D), penso entrerà tra i miei scrittori preferiti di sempre, per ora mi godo le sensazioni e la scrittura di un lirismo stupefacente, che questa raccolta di racconti ha saputo instillarmi nel profondo!
Capolavoro assoluto, consigliatissimo
DISORDINI
Purezza *****
Il responsabile cittadino *****
Luna park e altre storie ****
Il pagliaccio marionetta ***1/2
La Torre Rossa ****
DEFORMAZIONI
A favore dell’azione punitiva ****
Il nostro supervisore temporaneo *****
In una città straniera, in una terra straniera ****
I GUASTI E I MALATI
Teatro Grottesco ***1/2
I luna park alle stazioni di rifornimento *****
l villino *****
Severini *****
L’ombra, l’oscurità *****
Un giorno scarrellando sul sito della biblioteca, metto nella ricerca, Ligotti, così mi decisi e prenotai questo libro, presi proprio questo perchè, oltre al titolo ed alla copertina, mi soffermai su questo perchè erano racconti, così al massimo, se non mi fosse piaciuto, l'avrei tranquillamente riportato in biblioteca e storia chiusa.
Il primo racconto mi ha colpito fin da subito, Ligotti ha un modo di raccontare che mi ha fatto pensare subito a Lovecraft (ma non in modo negativo, nel senso, non da scopiazzatore, si sente l'influenza letteraria, ma è in toto originale, particolare). Quel modo di scrivere ammantato da un sottile strato di nebbiolina, ma persistente e dovunque. Il paesaggio dove vengono ambientati i racconti son sempre desolati, fatiscenti, in degrado permanente, il silenzio è penetrato soltanto dai rumori della natura "morta", insomma ci troviamo immersi in un paesaggio cupo, crepuscolare, desolante.
Continuando con i racconti, questa sensazione di desolazione si fa sempre più opprimente, come se stessimo (noi lettori) in uno stato di dormiveglia ed ogni volta che ci risvegliamo, in uno stato di catatonia, ci ritrovassimo in un luogo oscuro ed apparentemente senza fine, rinchiusi ma anche liberi, tipo come affetti da claustrofobia ed agorafobia insieme... Potrà sembrare pazzesco (o magari lo è?)!!
Una scoperta fenomenale (ringrazio Ellis per il consiglio e per la lettura in contemporanea :-D), penso entrerà tra i miei scrittori preferiti di sempre, per ora mi godo le sensazioni e la scrittura di un lirismo stupefacente, che questa raccolta di racconti ha saputo instillarmi nel profondo!
Capolavoro assoluto, consigliatissimo
DISORDINI
Purezza *****
Il responsabile cittadino *****
Luna park e altre storie ****
Il pagliaccio marionetta ***1/2
La Torre Rossa ****
DEFORMAZIONI
A favore dell’azione punitiva ****
Il nostro supervisore temporaneo *****
In una città straniera, in una terra straniera ****
I GUASTI E I MALATI
Teatro Grottesco ***1/2
I luna park alle stazioni di rifornimento *****
l villino *****
Severini *****
L’ombra, l’oscurità *****
May 28, 2022
[9/10]
In the middle of the night I lay wide awake in bed, listening to the dull black drone of the wind outside my window and the sound of bare branches scraping against the shingles of the roof just above me.
Well, I might as well pick up a book and read some stories to lure me into that blessed repose. I heard good things about this guy Ligotti, so why not give him a spin? He seems very good at setting up a mood...
... picture me a few pages later even wider awake and questioning what am I doing with my life.
Metaphysical horror trumps bug-eyed monsters and demented serial killers on the scare-me-shitless Richter scale. The truly disturbing stuff is not about somebody who jumps at you from a dark alley and says Boo! but the definitive, absolute absence of hope, the absence of any sort of expectations from life. What is left to do in this sort of situation? Sit back and watch the freak show from the sidelines.
And, yes, Thomas Ligotti is freakishly good at what he’s doing.
I was traveling through the mountains with only bottomless gorges on either side of the train tracks and an infinite sky above. In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride.
I didn’t research the author beforehand, relying instead on vague name recognition from other people reviews. A pleasant surprise is not the correct word to use in describing the quality of Thomas Ligotti’s prose – there is nothing pleasant or uplifting in these stories – but comparisons to the memorable vision of classic Lovecraftian horror or to carefully worded phrases from the pen of Ray Bradbury accompanied me on my journey through the the most obscure and idiosyncratic nightmares . Ligotti always presents his stories in a first person narration, as someone who has had direct experience of these desperate, soul draining emotions.
Long before I suspected the existence of the town near the northern border, I believe that I was in some way already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place.
A graveyard on a hilltop near a ghost town, a massive factory built without any doors or windows, a workshop where semi-indentured and heavily medicated drone workers repeat the same obscure task for years, an empty mansion in the middle of nowhere, dingy and poorly lit coffee-shops where nighthawks try to drown their insomnias, a guest-house that doubles as a bordello yet is avoided by all the local people – the list of locations for the stories in the collection is varied yet congruent with the perspective of that first person narrator that always remains nameless, yet always struggles with the same nihilistic worldview.
Sometimes, when I was sitting in the Crimson Cabaret on a rainy night, I thought of myself as occupying a waiting room for the abyss (which of course was exactly what I was doing) and between sips from my glass of wine or cup of coffee I smiled sadly and touched the front pocket of my coat where I kept my imaginary ticket to oblivion.
This is why I have no intentions of speaking about any story in particular, or about any plot device. The episodes merge together as you advance into this silent and secluded world where one existed in a state of abject hypnosis where grotesque discontinuities in the order of things are the business as usual fare that true existential nightmares are made of.
Yes, Ligotti is a stylist who knows how to use repetitions of a given theme and careful underlining of key phrases to get his point across. Even his use of a narrator who as often as not is an artist, a writer of nihilistic prose by his own admission, allows for a metafictional approach that grants the author the power to do a running commentary on how and why he chooses to tell a story in a particular manner.
Even I, a writer of nihilistic prose works, savored the inconsistency and the flamboyant absurdity of what was told to me across a table in a quiet library or a noisy club. In a word, I delighted in the ‘unreality’ of the Teatro stories. The truth they carried, if any, was immaterial.
I was perversively proud to note that a degree of philosophical maturity had now developed among those in the artistic underworld of which I was a part. There is nothing like fear to complicate one’s consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection. Under such stress I began to organize my own thoughts and observations about the Teatro.
The true power of these tales is not in the style, but in the disturbing feeling of recognition they will conjure in the reader. I don’t believe there’s anybody who hasn’t experienced a sleepless night over questions about self and meaning. Most of us deal with these questions by denial and by submerging ourselves in life, in sunshine and in companionship. It takes a stronger will to embrace the darkness and follow the path of nightmares into the nothingness, deeper into that landscape where vanishing winds snatched me up into the void of an ultimate hibernation. . Most artists search for meaning or for the light of reason. Ligotti sees more merit in the voice of madness, for instance, [that]is barely a whisper in the babbling history of art because its realities are themselves too maddening to speak of for very long.
[I saw he named Thomas Bernhardt, Emil Cioran, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka as his influences]
>>><<<>>><<<
‘All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,’ the other man said to me during our initial meeting. ‘Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by – whether it’s religious scriptures or makeshift slogans – all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires – show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there – ‘ he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, ‘show business, show business, show business.’
‘What about dreams?’ I asked.
Teatro Grottesco aspires to the removal of the comforting scriptures and slogans that we use in order to deny the darkness that lies beneath every human endeavour. The Teatro is the intrusion of malevolent chaos into the ordinary lives of damaged and diseased people and/or artists and offers deliriously preposterous events as a catalyst for philosophical maturity, for accepting the inevitable doom of existence. Ligotti makes us hear the voice of the abyss, calling us to join the shadow, the darkness. There is no past, no future in his universe, only a dreary, empty landscape visited randomly by malignant circus figures that laugh at our pitiful lives. Or a secret, distant, crushing presence that waits patiently for the inevitable collapse of our sanity.
Then the ringing stopped, although no voice came on the line. ‘Hello,’ I said. But all I could hear was an indistinct, though highly reverberant, noise – a low roaring sound that alternately faded and swelled as if it were echoing through vast spaces deep within the caverns of the earth or across a clouded sky. This noise, this low and bestial roaring, affected me with a dread I could not name.
The pervasive, sustained nihilism of the worldview espoused by the artist/narrator is undeniable, reiterated in page after page of confessions from the edge of reason [ I was tired and felt the ache of every broken dream I had ever carried within me. ] This in turn raises the question of what’s the point of striving for artistic expression in this world of woe? Who cares when nothing matters, nobody can be saved and we are only bodies without the illusion of minds or imaginations, bodies without the distractions of souls or selves ? Why not do what the narrator usually does and go to a cool and quiet little place where you can wait undisturbed for the apocalypse?
What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment? For every diversion, for every thrill our born nature requires in this carnival world, even to the point of apocalypse, there are risks to be taken. No one is safe, not even art-magicians or esoteric scientists, who are the most deluded among us because they are the most tempted by amusement of an uncanny and unnatural kind, fumbling as any artist or scientist does with the inherent chaos of things.
The answer is not as readily available as the presentation of nightmares in the stories, but I believe the order in which they were included in the collection is not random. I believe the last ones that deal exactly with this question of the artist and the futility of his or her efforts are the attempt by Ligotti to come up with a valid answer.
I wanted to believe that this artist had escaped the dreams and demons of all sentiment in order to explore the foul and crummy delights of a universe where everything had been reduced to three stark principles: first, that there was nowhere for you to go; second, that there was nothing for you to do; and third, that there was no one for you to know.
‘Nevertheless, I would like to continue speaking. Even if this is only nonsense and dreams, I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this moment, when this pain is taking over my mind and my self. Pretty soon none of this will make any difference. No.’ he said in a dead voice. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
>>><<<>>><<<
Shared pain is pain relieved, hopefully, even in a world that denies the very existence of hope as a concept. I’ve read that Thomas Ligotti is indeed speaking from experience, from having to deal with a lifelong medical condition. The fact that he managed to transform his torments into art is admirable.
I will read more from this unique storyteller, but not late at night when I’m trying to get to sleep peacefully.
In the middle of the night I lay wide awake in bed, listening to the dull black drone of the wind outside my window and the sound of bare branches scraping against the shingles of the roof just above me.
Well, I might as well pick up a book and read some stories to lure me into that blessed repose. I heard good things about this guy Ligotti, so why not give him a spin? He seems very good at setting up a mood...
... picture me a few pages later even wider awake and questioning what am I doing with my life.
Metaphysical horror trumps bug-eyed monsters and demented serial killers on the scare-me-shitless Richter scale. The truly disturbing stuff is not about somebody who jumps at you from a dark alley and says Boo! but the definitive, absolute absence of hope, the absence of any sort of expectations from life. What is left to do in this sort of situation? Sit back and watch the freak show from the sidelines.
And, yes, Thomas Ligotti is freakishly good at what he’s doing.
I was traveling through the mountains with only bottomless gorges on either side of the train tracks and an infinite sky above. In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride.
I didn’t research the author beforehand, relying instead on vague name recognition from other people reviews. A pleasant surprise is not the correct word to use in describing the quality of Thomas Ligotti’s prose – there is nothing pleasant or uplifting in these stories – but comparisons to the memorable vision of classic Lovecraftian horror or to carefully worded phrases from the pen of Ray Bradbury accompanied me on my journey through the the most obscure and idiosyncratic nightmares . Ligotti always presents his stories in a first person narration, as someone who has had direct experience of these desperate, soul draining emotions.
Long before I suspected the existence of the town near the northern border, I believe that I was in some way already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place.
A graveyard on a hilltop near a ghost town, a massive factory built without any doors or windows, a workshop where semi-indentured and heavily medicated drone workers repeat the same obscure task for years, an empty mansion in the middle of nowhere, dingy and poorly lit coffee-shops where nighthawks try to drown their insomnias, a guest-house that doubles as a bordello yet is avoided by all the local people – the list of locations for the stories in the collection is varied yet congruent with the perspective of that first person narrator that always remains nameless, yet always struggles with the same nihilistic worldview.
Sometimes, when I was sitting in the Crimson Cabaret on a rainy night, I thought of myself as occupying a waiting room for the abyss (which of course was exactly what I was doing) and between sips from my glass of wine or cup of coffee I smiled sadly and touched the front pocket of my coat where I kept my imaginary ticket to oblivion.
This is why I have no intentions of speaking about any story in particular, or about any plot device. The episodes merge together as you advance into this silent and secluded world where one existed in a state of abject hypnosis where grotesque discontinuities in the order of things are the business as usual fare that true existential nightmares are made of.
Yes, Ligotti is a stylist who knows how to use repetitions of a given theme and careful underlining of key phrases to get his point across. Even his use of a narrator who as often as not is an artist, a writer of nihilistic prose by his own admission, allows for a metafictional approach that grants the author the power to do a running commentary on how and why he chooses to tell a story in a particular manner.
Even I, a writer of nihilistic prose works, savored the inconsistency and the flamboyant absurdity of what was told to me across a table in a quiet library or a noisy club. In a word, I delighted in the ‘unreality’ of the Teatro stories. The truth they carried, if any, was immaterial.
I was perversively proud to note that a degree of philosophical maturity had now developed among those in the artistic underworld of which I was a part. There is nothing like fear to complicate one’s consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection. Under such stress I began to organize my own thoughts and observations about the Teatro.
The true power of these tales is not in the style, but in the disturbing feeling of recognition they will conjure in the reader. I don’t believe there’s anybody who hasn’t experienced a sleepless night over questions about self and meaning. Most of us deal with these questions by denial and by submerging ourselves in life, in sunshine and in companionship. It takes a stronger will to embrace the darkness and follow the path of nightmares into the nothingness, deeper into that landscape where vanishing winds snatched me up into the void of an ultimate hibernation. . Most artists search for meaning or for the light of reason. Ligotti sees more merit in the voice of madness, for instance, [that]is barely a whisper in the babbling history of art because its realities are themselves too maddening to speak of for very long.
[I saw he named Thomas Bernhardt, Emil Cioran, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka as his influences]
>>><<<>>><<<
‘All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,’ the other man said to me during our initial meeting. ‘Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by – whether it’s religious scriptures or makeshift slogans – all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires – show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there – ‘ he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, ‘show business, show business, show business.’
‘What about dreams?’ I asked.
Teatro Grottesco aspires to the removal of the comforting scriptures and slogans that we use in order to deny the darkness that lies beneath every human endeavour. The Teatro is the intrusion of malevolent chaos into the ordinary lives of damaged and diseased people and/or artists and offers deliriously preposterous events as a catalyst for philosophical maturity, for accepting the inevitable doom of existence. Ligotti makes us hear the voice of the abyss, calling us to join the shadow, the darkness. There is no past, no future in his universe, only a dreary, empty landscape visited randomly by malignant circus figures that laugh at our pitiful lives. Or a secret, distant, crushing presence that waits patiently for the inevitable collapse of our sanity.
Then the ringing stopped, although no voice came on the line. ‘Hello,’ I said. But all I could hear was an indistinct, though highly reverberant, noise – a low roaring sound that alternately faded and swelled as if it were echoing through vast spaces deep within the caverns of the earth or across a clouded sky. This noise, this low and bestial roaring, affected me with a dread I could not name.
The pervasive, sustained nihilism of the worldview espoused by the artist/narrator is undeniable, reiterated in page after page of confessions from the edge of reason [ I was tired and felt the ache of every broken dream I had ever carried within me. ] This in turn raises the question of what’s the point of striving for artistic expression in this world of woe? Who cares when nothing matters, nobody can be saved and we are only bodies without the illusion of minds or imaginations, bodies without the distractions of souls or selves ? Why not do what the narrator usually does and go to a cool and quiet little place where you can wait undisturbed for the apocalypse?
What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment? For every diversion, for every thrill our born nature requires in this carnival world, even to the point of apocalypse, there are risks to be taken. No one is safe, not even art-magicians or esoteric scientists, who are the most deluded among us because they are the most tempted by amusement of an uncanny and unnatural kind, fumbling as any artist or scientist does with the inherent chaos of things.
The answer is not as readily available as the presentation of nightmares in the stories, but I believe the order in which they were included in the collection is not random. I believe the last ones that deal exactly with this question of the artist and the futility of his or her efforts are the attempt by Ligotti to come up with a valid answer.
I wanted to believe that this artist had escaped the dreams and demons of all sentiment in order to explore the foul and crummy delights of a universe where everything had been reduced to three stark principles: first, that there was nowhere for you to go; second, that there was nothing for you to do; and third, that there was no one for you to know.
‘Nevertheless, I would like to continue speaking. Even if this is only nonsense and dreams, I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this moment, when this pain is taking over my mind and my self. Pretty soon none of this will make any difference. No.’ he said in a dead voice. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
>>><<<>>><<<
Shared pain is pain relieved, hopefully, even in a world that denies the very existence of hope as a concept. I’ve read that Thomas Ligotti is indeed speaking from experience, from having to deal with a lifelong medical condition. The fact that he managed to transform his torments into art is admirable.
I will read more from this unique storyteller, but not late at night when I’m trying to get to sleep peacefully.
May 17, 2010
The biggest red flag you can ever throw, I think, is to compare someone's writing to another, more prominent writer's. It's more likely to make me suspicious or impatient than anything else; really, is the best thing you can say about Thomas Ligotti's collection of short horror stories "Teatro Grottesco" that his narrative reminds you of Lovecraft's style? Since when is that a selling point? If I wanted to read Lovecraft, I'd read Lovecraft.
I'm not saying you can't do worse than this sleepy little collection of odd tales, but you could do a lot better, too. While there are some clever gems within this slim volume, for the most part, the tales here feel less like complete concepts and more like something jotted down on a cocktail napkin. "Clowns = Scary?? PUPPET clowns? PS: Pick up butter on the way home."
The problem is that while reading, Ligotti's prose is so slippery and soporific that your mind tends to wander. Nothing much ever happens, and the truly interesting bits are over before you know it, or sandwiched in between his pseudo-dreamy prose which has the effect of a turkey dinner and some white noise on my brain. It's not uncommon to turn a page and be surprised that you've reached the end of a particular story. And not in a "Wow, the time just flew by!" sense of surprise, but rather, "Is that it?" Granted, a lot of this can be tacked down to personal taste. I find Ligotti's protagonists to be particularly faceless and unengaging, in part because they seem so unconcerned about everything that happens around them, so it's difficult for me to care about them.
Less a collection of genuinely frightening tales and more a compilation of "Things that make you go 'hmmm'", Teatro Grottesco is an interesting read, if not a particularly compelling one. If you're looking for something blunt and visceral in its horror, you're just going to be disappointed here. But if you enjoy sleepy, subtle narratives, or are looking for something to get you through a long plane ride, Teatro Grottesco could serve your purposes just fine.
I'm not saying you can't do worse than this sleepy little collection of odd tales, but you could do a lot better, too. While there are some clever gems within this slim volume, for the most part, the tales here feel less like complete concepts and more like something jotted down on a cocktail napkin. "Clowns = Scary?? PUPPET clowns? PS: Pick up butter on the way home."
The problem is that while reading, Ligotti's prose is so slippery and soporific that your mind tends to wander. Nothing much ever happens, and the truly interesting bits are over before you know it, or sandwiched in between his pseudo-dreamy prose which has the effect of a turkey dinner and some white noise on my brain. It's not uncommon to turn a page and be surprised that you've reached the end of a particular story. And not in a "Wow, the time just flew by!" sense of surprise, but rather, "Is that it?" Granted, a lot of this can be tacked down to personal taste. I find Ligotti's protagonists to be particularly faceless and unengaging, in part because they seem so unconcerned about everything that happens around them, so it's difficult for me to care about them.
Less a collection of genuinely frightening tales and more a compilation of "Things that make you go 'hmmm'", Teatro Grottesco is an interesting read, if not a particularly compelling one. If you're looking for something blunt and visceral in its horror, you're just going to be disappointed here. But if you enjoy sleepy, subtle narratives, or are looking for something to get you through a long plane ride, Teatro Grottesco could serve your purposes just fine.
December 20, 2015
To be honest, I have no clear idea what to say about this book. It isn't easy to read even if it's not very long. As soon as I started reading it, I realized this won't be one of those anthologies to breeze through. It demands your full attention and, let's be honest, your patience. So I decided not to mark this as 'currently reading' to avoid pressure and to take my time with it one or two stories at a time. It worked well for me.
The thing is, I can't say I loved it. There is nothing to love (except the superb writing and its Lovecraftianess of some stories, of course). All the stories start on one note and then circle back to a beginning so you get to see things, people and events in sometimes new, sometimes different and very often weird light.
I imagine artists will experience Teatro Grottesco a bit differently than I did.
The thing is, I can't say I loved it. There is nothing to love (except the superb writing and its Lovecraftianess of some stories, of course). All the stories start on one note and then circle back to a beginning so you get to see things, people and events in sometimes new, sometimes different and very often weird light.
I imagine artists will experience Teatro Grottesco a bit differently than I did.
October 5, 2018
October Spooky Read #1!
“I’ve even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It’s only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominantly a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsession that you fear you might act upon.”
Thomas Ligotti is one of those authors I kept meaning to read, as his reputation as a writer of wonderfully creepy stories is impossible to ignore: it is no small thing to call someone the heir to Lovecraft, and “the horror writer other horror writers wished they were”. But I was also told that his work wasn’t for everyone… A quick research showed that Mr. Ligotti is not just considered a living literary legend: he is also a man who embraces philosophical pessimism (see quote above), is vocally anti-natalist (i.e. he thinks it is unethical to have children) and basically embodies every stereotype of the nihilistic, reclusive and humanity-hating writer ever conceived. My kind of guy (I jest! Sort of…). My lovely husband clearly also thought I’d be into this sort of stuff, because he got me a copy of “Teatro Grottesco” for my birthday, and I was very excited to start my October readings with this little collection of unsettling and disturbing tales!
There is a pessimism and hopelessness in Ligotti’s writing, which I had been warned about, so I knew what to expect. Weird fiction, from the very beginning, has always included strong elements of nihilism, after all. But there is also an undeniable elegance to his prose, something graceful about the way he weaves a strange, frightening yarn around the reader. It often starts with small details that seem just a bit odd or out of place, characters with eccentricities that are just a bit too acute, and the next thing you know, you are in the middle of a bloodcurdling nightmare. I was afraid it would be overwritten and baroque, but the prose is clearly studied, without a superfluous sentence, or a word out of place.
Like most New Weird/horror short stories, you don’t get all your questions answered, nor do you get neat endings: you are simply left with this sentiment of unease, of wrongness – which is haunting and morbidly fascinating, if you are into that sort of thing. Those stories are not meant for your rational brain to dissect: it doesn’t matter if the creepy thing from “The Clown Puppet” was a hallucination, a projection of the protagonist’s mind and intent, or an actual murderous entity guided by unseen hands. What matters is the feeling of not knowing, which carries much more terrifying implications than a pedestrian explanation ever could.
What I love most about this style of short stories is the author’s refusal to let the readers see behind the curtain. And Ligotti clearly doesn’t think you deserve to see what’s behind the freaking curtain! In fact, his nihilism and disdain for the human condition is basically screaming at you from every page. I am actually amused by how dark his pessimism gets, especially when he conjures stories that could essentially be labelled as “office horror”: the empty senselessness of the daily grind of office drones or factory worker bees, invariably addicted to medication that makes their pointless lives bearable, turned into a vivid tale of crushing hopelessness. His scorn for artists, which is made quite transparent in the final section of the book, also entertained me greatly: I love art, but have limited patience of artistic posturing, a trait Ligotti eviscerates mercilessly in the last few stories of the collection.
“Teatro Grottesco” gets 4 stars because as good as it is, I didn’t enjoy it as viscerally as I have other writers who play in that genre. A touch of sensuality or playfulness would have made it perfect, but as it is, it's basically unrelentingly dark and bleak. I’ll probably try to get my hands on more of Ligotti’s work, but I’d recommend reading this in small doses, and only if you are interested in very cerebral and philosophical horror. And maybe don’t do like me and start your October Spooky Reads with this: it will set quite a standard for the rest of the pile!
“I’ve even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It’s only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominantly a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsession that you fear you might act upon.”
Thomas Ligotti is one of those authors I kept meaning to read, as his reputation as a writer of wonderfully creepy stories is impossible to ignore: it is no small thing to call someone the heir to Lovecraft, and “the horror writer other horror writers wished they were”. But I was also told that his work wasn’t for everyone… A quick research showed that Mr. Ligotti is not just considered a living literary legend: he is also a man who embraces philosophical pessimism (see quote above), is vocally anti-natalist (i.e. he thinks it is unethical to have children) and basically embodies every stereotype of the nihilistic, reclusive and humanity-hating writer ever conceived. My kind of guy (I jest! Sort of…). My lovely husband clearly also thought I’d be into this sort of stuff, because he got me a copy of “Teatro Grottesco” for my birthday, and I was very excited to start my October readings with this little collection of unsettling and disturbing tales!
There is a pessimism and hopelessness in Ligotti’s writing, which I had been warned about, so I knew what to expect. Weird fiction, from the very beginning, has always included strong elements of nihilism, after all. But there is also an undeniable elegance to his prose, something graceful about the way he weaves a strange, frightening yarn around the reader. It often starts with small details that seem just a bit odd or out of place, characters with eccentricities that are just a bit too acute, and the next thing you know, you are in the middle of a bloodcurdling nightmare. I was afraid it would be overwritten and baroque, but the prose is clearly studied, without a superfluous sentence, or a word out of place.
Like most New Weird/horror short stories, you don’t get all your questions answered, nor do you get neat endings: you are simply left with this sentiment of unease, of wrongness – which is haunting and morbidly fascinating, if you are into that sort of thing. Those stories are not meant for your rational brain to dissect: it doesn’t matter if the creepy thing from “The Clown Puppet” was a hallucination, a projection of the protagonist’s mind and intent, or an actual murderous entity guided by unseen hands. What matters is the feeling of not knowing, which carries much more terrifying implications than a pedestrian explanation ever could.
What I love most about this style of short stories is the author’s refusal to let the readers see behind the curtain. And Ligotti clearly doesn’t think you deserve to see what’s behind the freaking curtain! In fact, his nihilism and disdain for the human condition is basically screaming at you from every page. I am actually amused by how dark his pessimism gets, especially when he conjures stories that could essentially be labelled as “office horror”: the empty senselessness of the daily grind of office drones or factory worker bees, invariably addicted to medication that makes their pointless lives bearable, turned into a vivid tale of crushing hopelessness. His scorn for artists, which is made quite transparent in the final section of the book, also entertained me greatly: I love art, but have limited patience of artistic posturing, a trait Ligotti eviscerates mercilessly in the last few stories of the collection.
“Teatro Grottesco” gets 4 stars because as good as it is, I didn’t enjoy it as viscerally as I have other writers who play in that genre. A touch of sensuality or playfulness would have made it perfect, but as it is, it's basically unrelentingly dark and bleak. I’ll probably try to get my hands on more of Ligotti’s work, but I’d recommend reading this in small doses, and only if you are interested in very cerebral and philosophical horror. And maybe don’t do like me and start your October Spooky Reads with this: it will set quite a standard for the rest of the pile!
May 27, 2012
Bizarre, dark and delicious with eau de Lovecraft generously splashed at all the right pulse points. The stories are neatly subdivided and labelled to give a gentle steer: ‘Derangements’, Deformations’ and ‘the Damaged and the Diseased’, just in case I (e.g. the reader) don’t get it. Helping hand appreciated, but not necessary. The delineation of stories based on theme and structure is practically pock-marked.
‘Derangements’ is a powerhouse of the uniquely bizarre: unspecified locales, structured on unrecognisable social set-ups with absolutely mental protagonists. Original and intelligent horror, based on hypothetical worlds of ingenious value.
‘The Damaged and the Deranged’ ventures onto familiar territory: structurally crafted along a realistically portrayed community of artists who inadvertently brush with occult. Faithful to (stereo) type and thus a little disappointing (compared to the earlier stories). Clearly, reference to damage and disease refers to the precarious state of the artistic mind, by definition probably more attune to the vagaries of transcendental media.
And a little world play: In ‘the shadow, the darkness’, the protagonist (always a lone male with no discernible relationships with other people to speak of), makes reference to a guy on ‘his right’ who is the author of an unpulished philosophical treatise called ‘An Investigation into the conspiracy Against the Human Race’. Given that Ligotti himself published a philosophical treatise titled ‘The conspiracy against the human race’ (which was wonderful), I’m left wondering what book within a book (Calvinoooo, I thought you were the only one) we have here.
‘Derangements’ is a powerhouse of the uniquely bizarre: unspecified locales, structured on unrecognisable social set-ups with absolutely mental protagonists. Original and intelligent horror, based on hypothetical worlds of ingenious value.
‘The Damaged and the Deranged’ ventures onto familiar territory: structurally crafted along a realistically portrayed community of artists who inadvertently brush with occult. Faithful to (stereo) type and thus a little disappointing (compared to the earlier stories). Clearly, reference to damage and disease refers to the precarious state of the artistic mind, by definition probably more attune to the vagaries of transcendental media.
And a little world play: In ‘the shadow, the darkness’, the protagonist (always a lone male with no discernible relationships with other people to speak of), makes reference to a guy on ‘his right’ who is the author of an unpulished philosophical treatise called ‘An Investigation into the conspiracy Against the Human Race’. Given that Ligotti himself published a philosophical treatise titled ‘The conspiracy against the human race’ (which was wonderful), I’m left wondering what book within a book (Calvinoooo, I thought you were the only one) we have here.
July 29, 2011
This collection of thirteen tales can be labelled horror, but not in the conventional sense: these reflect an existential horror, in which enigmatic and superficially placid individuals—all suffering from Q-balls interfering with the orderly functioning processes of the mind—find themselves lost and stranded within unfamiliar and nightmarish settings that unfold like the dreams of a rachitic madman. The everyday world in which Ligotti's stories take place—this cramped existence itself—is never less than sterile and dark and austere; however, in combinatory slow and sudden increments, the perceptive lens is subtly shifted and narrowed—and then the universe reveals itself a much more malignant and hostile place for fragile, weak, and susceptible humans to try and eke out a pitiful, mechanical existence. Rote ritual and routine performance occasionally serves to divert one's attention from the macabre quotidian sickness in which the body is decaying; serves, that is, until the threads of an evil demiurgical purpose entwine together and laws are altered, permanence fractured, the occult blossoms, and human bodies diminish into amorphous blobs of putrescence or cat-sized arachnids or shriveled wooden puppets, whilst individual machinery and manufactured apparatus serve as conduits to the raw and furious skittering of the abyss.
This is beautifully and coldly atmospheric writing, not especially scary or frightening but rather disturbing and discomfiting in its weirdly calm and inexorable onslaught upon the illusionary barriers that life has erected to conceal the ephemerality and emptiness that constitutes reality's gnostic imperfection. Most of the stories linger like an unpleasant sensation, flaring up to unsettle even after its alien presence is no longer immediately noticeable. Ligotti's imagination is potent and his vision is bleak. In the opening set I felt that he bailed with a few of his endings before the story had fully matured, or had just become intensely gripping and pervasively eerie, but in the second and third parts his execution was almost flawless—In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land is a high point here, a work of antarctic abstraction in which the reader can feel himself falling to pieces. As other reviewers have mentioned, Ligotti's tempered and measured narratives combine the bleak circular reasonings of Bernhard with the stochastic existential menace of Kafka, allowing the universal blasphemy of Cioran to guide the way and the occult awfulness of Lovecraft, wedded to the prismatic demiurgy of Schulz, to work its manipulation of matter from the rear. Yet, as with all five of these writers—or arguably four minus the Providence native—the blackest and driest of humor chases the shots of strangeness and grim contingency, its bony laughter both mocking and rebellious and always present—if sometimes only as an unconvincing, wheezy rattle.
This is beautifully and coldly atmospheric writing, not especially scary or frightening but rather disturbing and discomfiting in its weirdly calm and inexorable onslaught upon the illusionary barriers that life has erected to conceal the ephemerality and emptiness that constitutes reality's gnostic imperfection. Most of the stories linger like an unpleasant sensation, flaring up to unsettle even after its alien presence is no longer immediately noticeable. Ligotti's imagination is potent and his vision is bleak. In the opening set I felt that he bailed with a few of his endings before the story had fully matured, or had just become intensely gripping and pervasively eerie, but in the second and third parts his execution was almost flawless—In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land is a high point here, a work of antarctic abstraction in which the reader can feel himself falling to pieces. As other reviewers have mentioned, Ligotti's tempered and measured narratives combine the bleak circular reasonings of Bernhard with the stochastic existential menace of Kafka, allowing the universal blasphemy of Cioran to guide the way and the occult awfulness of Lovecraft, wedded to the prismatic demiurgy of Schulz, to work its manipulation of matter from the rear. Yet, as with all five of these writers—or arguably four minus the Providence native—the blackest and driest of humor chases the shots of strangeness and grim contingency, its bony laughter both mocking and rebellious and always present—if sometimes only as an unconvincing, wheezy rattle.
October 26, 2019
Thomas Ligotti si destreggia più che bene nell’ambito del racconto, ciò si evince dalla facilità con la quale va stemperare appropriatamente il terrore, scongiurando l’uso di anticlimax come accade spesse volte nei romanzi più corposi. Un’antologia che non ha nulla da invidiare a Nottuario - altro corpus che ho apprezzato – è ancora presente quel taglio asettico dello stile peculiare del Ligotti sì sofisticato e apparentemente ampolloso, ma che cela dietro a questa sua raffinatezza delle riflessioni profonde ed esistenzialiste.
Egli è dotato di un’immaginazione “disturbante” e metaforicamente allucinata, della quale si serve per enunciare la sua raggelante verità, quel pessimismo cosmico che pervade tutta la sua produzione: niente ha significato, l’esistenza umana è vuota e sterile.
L’autore è un visionario che vuole sperimentare, divertendosi ad infondere in chi legge un forte straniamento e quel senso del perturbante, a volte, addentrandosi in sentieri troppo astratti e paradossali che potrebbero scivolare nell’incomprensibilità o addirittura farci credere che le sue storie non abbiano trama e siano semplici esercizi di stile. La scelta di ripetere più volte alcuni espedienti stilistici potrebbe non risultare sempre vincente, eppure è palese che il fine ultimo sia quello di porre l’accento su determinati concetti.
I vari “io narrante” che si susseguono – pur avendo dei contorni sfocati - vivono cedimenti, circostanze da incubo a dir poco ansiogene e paradossali laddove non esiste riscatto; le ambientazioni fatiscenti e quelle da “stabilimento industriale” – anche se non geograficamente individuabili – si prestano bene a fare da cornice per il loro essere rarefatte e lugubri, aggiungendo una nota claustrofobica all’intero esposto. Gradevole l’idea di inserire se stesso all’interno di uno dei racconti, una trovata non originalissima ma che funziona.
L’orrore descritto da Ligotti è surreale e sottile, s’insinua viscido e sinuoso sottopelle ed esercita un fascino quasi ipnotico. Leggere i suoi scritti si rivela sempre un’arma a doppio taglio; se da un lato ti appassiona dall’altro, quasi come un boa, ti avviluppa tra le sue spire facendoti venire in contatto con una realtà devastatrice … E fa male, tanto da mozzarti il fiato.
Egli è dotato di un’immaginazione “disturbante” e metaforicamente allucinata, della quale si serve per enunciare la sua raggelante verità, quel pessimismo cosmico che pervade tutta la sua produzione: niente ha significato, l’esistenza umana è vuota e sterile.
L’autore è un visionario che vuole sperimentare, divertendosi ad infondere in chi legge un forte straniamento e quel senso del perturbante, a volte, addentrandosi in sentieri troppo astratti e paradossali che potrebbero scivolare nell’incomprensibilità o addirittura farci credere che le sue storie non abbiano trama e siano semplici esercizi di stile. La scelta di ripetere più volte alcuni espedienti stilistici potrebbe non risultare sempre vincente, eppure è palese che il fine ultimo sia quello di porre l’accento su determinati concetti.
I vari “io narrante” che si susseguono – pur avendo dei contorni sfocati - vivono cedimenti, circostanze da incubo a dir poco ansiogene e paradossali laddove non esiste riscatto; le ambientazioni fatiscenti e quelle da “stabilimento industriale” – anche se non geograficamente individuabili – si prestano bene a fare da cornice per il loro essere rarefatte e lugubri, aggiungendo una nota claustrofobica all’intero esposto. Gradevole l’idea di inserire se stesso all’interno di uno dei racconti, una trovata non originalissima ma che funziona.
L’orrore descritto da Ligotti è surreale e sottile, s’insinua viscido e sinuoso sottopelle ed esercita un fascino quasi ipnotico. Leggere i suoi scritti si rivela sempre un’arma a doppio taglio; se da un lato ti appassiona dall’altro, quasi come un boa, ti avviluppa tra le sue spire facendoti venire in contatto con una realtà devastatrice … E fa male, tanto da mozzarti il fiato.
Pt. 1 - DISORDINI
Purezza = ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Il responsabile cittadino = ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Luna park e altre storie = ⭐⭐⭐ 1/2
Il pagliaccio marionetta = ⭐⭐⭐
La Torre Rossa = ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Pt. 2 - DEFORMAZIONI
A favore dell’azione punitiva = ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Il nostro supervisore temporaneo = ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
In una città straniera, in una terra straniera = ⭐⭐⭐1/2
Pt. 3 - I GUASTI E I MALATI
Teatro Grottesco = ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I luna park alle stazioni di rifornimento = ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1/2
l villino = ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Severini =⭐⭐⭐⭐
L’ombra, l’oscurità = ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
September 15, 2017
One of the weirdest, most unsettling books I've ever read. Very enjoyable.
I'd been pre-warned that Ligotti was something of an anomaly in the world of writing - an author who created strange, horrifying and sometimes incomprehensible stories...all eerily positioned in the everyday, the mundane and the wholly relatable.
Reading through this collection of short stories, it was immediately apparent that I wasn't in for an easy ride, which I welcome from time to time (it's nice to be challenged!). The stories read like someone else's nightmares; sinister, disjointed and occasionally ludicrous. At times, I was reminded of David Lynch... Ligotti has the same knack of creating tales that operate on a subconscious level, leaving you feeling unsettled, without knowing why.
There were a host of images in this book that'll remain with me for a while. The horrible sideshow carnival man with red hair, who refuses to face his audience. The nobby monster, which is some hideous mash up of human and spider. I could go on.
Definitely worth reading if you like your stories weird.
I'd been pre-warned that Ligotti was something of an anomaly in the world of writing - an author who created strange, horrifying and sometimes incomprehensible stories...all eerily positioned in the everyday, the mundane and the wholly relatable.
Reading through this collection of short stories, it was immediately apparent that I wasn't in for an easy ride, which I welcome from time to time (it's nice to be challenged!). The stories read like someone else's nightmares; sinister, disjointed and occasionally ludicrous. At times, I was reminded of David Lynch... Ligotti has the same knack of creating tales that operate on a subconscious level, leaving you feeling unsettled, without knowing why.
There were a host of images in this book that'll remain with me for a while. The horrible sideshow carnival man with red hair, who refuses to face his audience. The nobby monster, which is some hideous mash up of human and spider. I could go on.
Definitely worth reading if you like your stories weird.
January 27, 2013
Το πιο τρομακτικό βιβλίο που διάβασα ποτέ. Δεν έχει σκηνές φρίκης, τρόμου, αιματοχυσίες, φαντάσματα, τέρατα. Έχει όμως έναν αέρα παράνοιας, ψυχικής ασθένειας, που πραγματικά με φρίκαρε. Οι εμμονοληπτικές επαναλήψεις ολόκληρων φράσεων, η φυσικότητα με την οποία αντιμετωπίζει ο εκάστοτε χαρακτήρας/αφηγητής τις αφύσικες καταστάσεις, η λεπτή περιφρόνηση που δείχνει στους διανοούμενους, οι πιτσιλίες από άκρατη φαντασία που συχνά διαρκούν λιγότερο από μια φράση, όλα αυτά μιλάνε για έναν αρρωστημένο κόσμο, μιλάνε για το μυαλό ενός ανθρώπου πλησίον του οποίου δε θα ήθελα να βρίσκομαι.
Είναι ένα βιβλίο τρόμου τόσο καλό, που δε θέλω να ξαναδιαβάσω Λιγκόττι ποτέ. Αλλά δεν είμαι σίγουρη ότι θα κρατήσω την υπόσχεσή μου.
Είναι ένα βιβλίο τρόμου τόσο καλό, που δε θέλω να ξαναδιαβάσω Λιγκόττι ποτέ. Αλλά δεν είμαι σίγουρη ότι θα κρατήσω την υπόσχεσή μου.
February 24, 2013
Now this really isn't bad. Dude can write, and though he's clearly dangerously in thrall to Thomas Bernhard, the substance of his writing is so different from that of the misanthropic Austrian that all is forgiven. At first I'll admit I was unsure, but at some point I accepted his vision - which to my knowledge is unique - and my consciousness of the slightly derivative prose-style all but vanished behind my appreciation of the world it creates. Here's a fairly typical (for Ligotti) decription of some horrific creatures manufactured by something he calls the Red Tower:
That's horror, and Ligotti knows it. He's not ashamed of it either, but he's determined to tell it in the most precise and graceful way possible, so that even as we choke with revulsion at the twisted shit he's conjuring we want to luxuriate in the opulence of the language and the vision. It's a fine line he's walking, using a hyper-accurate, lucid prose style to describe things so vague and without recognisable setting, and occasionally he does seem to be playing for time, just trying to string things out for long enough to make a story out of what is really only an image or an atmosphere. But when he gets it right it's pretty haunting: the blank post-industrial near-wasteland, in which all forward-thinking optomists seem to have moved on and only the bottom-feeders are left to inhabit the husks of what once were monuments to futurity; and the nature of the things that prey on those survivors, the crooked doctors and pharmaceutical companies and shady generic-seeming businesses in the backs of strip-malls and customs officials guarding borders beyond which are only spiders and fog. It's all bracingly contemporary but pushed through the sieve of Ligotti's classicism, so that it's easy to imagine his stories being as much loved in 100 years as they are now. If I have a criticism it's that occasionally I think he overreaches. He's not a prose stylist on a par with Bernhard, and unfortunately there are moments when it can seem the whole tapestry is about to unravel because of a few wooden or poorly chosen or too self-conscious and oft-repeated phrases in its middle. Also don't come looking for twists or shock endings here. Not once does Ligotti leave us with heart palpitating as after one of Poe's best, but nor does he stir us up to expect such revelations and then confound us with ambiguities a la Lovecraft. Instead, with something like the tempo of the death march, he sounds, repeatedly and without histrionics, the song of our collective doom.
Put it down after each tale - put it down for a long while. Let it settle. Then bite off another one. Chew it slowly. Could be it'll take a while to digest, but I'm betting for those who develop the taste there's a peculiar kind of sustenance here. I don't know much about contemporary horror writing (or contemporary writing in general, for that matter) but I doubt there's anyone doing quite what Ligotti does. A new, pertinent and quietly shocking kind of American gothic.
Although we may reasonably presume that such creations were not to be called beautiful, we cannot know for ourselves the mysteries and mechanisms of, for instance, how these creations moved throughout the hazy luminescence of that underground world; what creaky or spasmic gestures they might have been capable of executing, if any; what sounds they might have made or the organs used for making them; how they might have appeared when awkwardly emerging from deep shadows or squatting against those nameless headstones; what trembling stages of mutation they almost certainly would have undergone following the generation of their larvae upon the barren earth of the graveyard; what their bodies might have produced or emitted in the way of fluids or secretions; how they might have responded to the mutilation of their forms for reasons of an experimental or entirely savage nature. Often I picture to myself what frantically clawing efforts these creations probably made to deliver themselves from that confining environment which their malformed or non-existent brains could not begin to understand. They could not have comprehended, any more than can I, for what purpose they were bread from those graves, those incubators of hyper-organisms, minute factories of flesh that existed wholly within and far below the greater factory of the Red Tower.
That's horror, and Ligotti knows it. He's not ashamed of it either, but he's determined to tell it in the most precise and graceful way possible, so that even as we choke with revulsion at the twisted shit he's conjuring we want to luxuriate in the opulence of the language and the vision. It's a fine line he's walking, using a hyper-accurate, lucid prose style to describe things so vague and without recognisable setting, and occasionally he does seem to be playing for time, just trying to string things out for long enough to make a story out of what is really only an image or an atmosphere. But when he gets it right it's pretty haunting: the blank post-industrial near-wasteland, in which all forward-thinking optomists seem to have moved on and only the bottom-feeders are left to inhabit the husks of what once were monuments to futurity; and the nature of the things that prey on those survivors, the crooked doctors and pharmaceutical companies and shady generic-seeming businesses in the backs of strip-malls and customs officials guarding borders beyond which are only spiders and fog. It's all bracingly contemporary but pushed through the sieve of Ligotti's classicism, so that it's easy to imagine his stories being as much loved in 100 years as they are now. If I have a criticism it's that occasionally I think he overreaches. He's not a prose stylist on a par with Bernhard, and unfortunately there are moments when it can seem the whole tapestry is about to unravel because of a few wooden or poorly chosen or too self-conscious and oft-repeated phrases in its middle. Also don't come looking for twists or shock endings here. Not once does Ligotti leave us with heart palpitating as after one of Poe's best, but nor does he stir us up to expect such revelations and then confound us with ambiguities a la Lovecraft. Instead, with something like the tempo of the death march, he sounds, repeatedly and without histrionics, the song of our collective doom.
Put it down after each tale - put it down for a long while. Let it settle. Then bite off another one. Chew it slowly. Could be it'll take a while to digest, but I'm betting for those who develop the taste there's a peculiar kind of sustenance here. I don't know much about contemporary horror writing (or contemporary writing in general, for that matter) but I doubt there's anyone doing quite what Ligotti does. A new, pertinent and quietly shocking kind of American gothic.
May 25, 2013
It's a solid four-star read. I do not have the faintest idea how to review it, though, because spoilers (in the case of horror fiction) really consist of telling readers what to expect to feel or think about the stories.
So...here it is...if you've read my other reviews, and you find that you agree with me at least 70% of the time, this collection is very much worth your money and your eyeblinks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
So...here it is...if you've read my other reviews, and you find that you agree with me at least 70% of the time, this collection is very much worth your money and your eyeblinks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
March 4, 2023
El cuento Mi defensa de una acción punitiva está más desarrollado en mi podcast Dragones y Replicantes el programa dedicado a los 10 mejores relatos leídos en este 2022: https://go.ivoox.com/rf/103383483
Definir la obra de Thomas Ligotti como oscura sería una falta de respeto. No porque no lo sea, que lo es, y mucho, sino porque el de Detroit es capaz de encontrar y describir nuevos tonos de negro más oscuros. Sus tramas, cuando las hay, son los delirios febriles de un niño que a duras penas comprende el mundo en que vive, un mal viaje de acido que distorsiona realidad y la percepción de algo tan íntimo y que damos tan por sentado como es la identidad, la conciencia del yo. La metacognición en sus cuentos es un proceso alterado y extraño. Ligotti abre las puertas de las percepción tras las que solo hay un agujero negro de nada incognoscible.
¿Tiene sentido algo de lo que estoy diciendo? Pues no esperéis encontrarlo tampoco en sus páginas. Prescindiré de la poesía y buscare palabras más mundanas.
Thomas Ligotti es un autor de terror revolucionario, en el sentido en que nadie había conseguido tratar el terror de una forma tan personal y desasosegante desde Lovecraft. Todo en Ligotti es desagradable y busca generar inquietud: desde su prosa formal, analítica y distante, que busca alejar al máximo al lector de sus tramas, hasta sus personajes, sujetos marginales con trabajos extravagantes y comportamientos erráticos y, por supuesto, sus escenarios feistas poblados por imaginería circense que a priori busca ser ingenua y alegre pero que -seamos sinceros, nada da más miedo que un puto payaso- en el contexto adecuado es inquietante. La lógica que Ligotti aplica a sus tramas, en caso de querer contar una trama convencional, que no siempre es así, es la de los sueños. Si alguna vez os habéis parado a analizar vuestros sueños -no en un plano psicoanalista, por favor-, habréis sentido como los sucesos más delirantes tenían una explicación racional y convincente, como la causalidad, aunque alterada, se aplicaba a la perfección. Esa lógica onírica es la que Ligotti imprime en sus historias, y por eso sus desarrollos tortuosos se materializan en un crescendo acongojante. Hay momentos en que, si te abstraer por completo y entras en su juego, puedes llegar a sentir un malestar casi físico.
Sí, quizá suene muy exagerado; quizá me este excediendo en mis elogios y este vendiendo a Ligotti como la segunda venida de Cristo a la Tierra. Me es difícil ser imparcial con él, en eso os soy sincero. Soy muy consciente de que no gusta a todo el mundo por lo personal de su propuesta, e incluso que ciertas cosas ni siquiera dan miedo bajo el prisma del terror más convencional y visualmente impactante. Pero si que os voy a reconocer, y esto no se lo puede quitar nadie.
Por destacar cuentos que me han gustado muchos -porque reconozco que otros cuentos son un poco demasiado hasta para mí-:
-El gestor de la ciudad: un pueblo anónimo se rige por los designios arbitrarios de un gestor vitalicio. Con cada nuevo gestor, los cambios en la administración del pueblo son cada vez más drásticos e incomprensibles.
-La marioneta payaso: un individuo es acosado de vez en cuando por una marioneta payaso, un ser de propósitos desconocidos que sale de la nada. La aparición de este maldito engendro del mal ES IMPRESIONANTE.
-Mi defensa de una acción punitiva: un asalariado entra a trabajar de archivista en una ciudad fronteriza para cubrir la sustitución del anterior archivista, cuyo destino los empleados desconocen.
-El bungalow: un hombre se obsesiona con una cinta magnetofónica en la que se escucha "una obra artística conceptual".
Definir la obra de Thomas Ligotti como oscura sería una falta de respeto. No porque no lo sea, que lo es, y mucho, sino porque el de Detroit es capaz de encontrar y describir nuevos tonos de negro más oscuros. Sus tramas, cuando las hay, son los delirios febriles de un niño que a duras penas comprende el mundo en que vive, un mal viaje de acido que distorsiona realidad y la percepción de algo tan íntimo y que damos tan por sentado como es la identidad, la conciencia del yo. La metacognición en sus cuentos es un proceso alterado y extraño. Ligotti abre las puertas de las percepción tras las que solo hay un agujero negro de nada incognoscible.
¿Tiene sentido algo de lo que estoy diciendo? Pues no esperéis encontrarlo tampoco en sus páginas. Prescindiré de la poesía y buscare palabras más mundanas.
Thomas Ligotti es un autor de terror revolucionario, en el sentido en que nadie había conseguido tratar el terror de una forma tan personal y desasosegante desde Lovecraft. Todo en Ligotti es desagradable y busca generar inquietud: desde su prosa formal, analítica y distante, que busca alejar al máximo al lector de sus tramas, hasta sus personajes, sujetos marginales con trabajos extravagantes y comportamientos erráticos y, por supuesto, sus escenarios feistas poblados por imaginería circense que a priori busca ser ingenua y alegre pero que -seamos sinceros, nada da más miedo que un puto payaso- en el contexto adecuado es inquietante. La lógica que Ligotti aplica a sus tramas, en caso de querer contar una trama convencional, que no siempre es así, es la de los sueños. Si alguna vez os habéis parado a analizar vuestros sueños -no en un plano psicoanalista, por favor-, habréis sentido como los sucesos más delirantes tenían una explicación racional y convincente, como la causalidad, aunque alterada, se aplicaba a la perfección. Esa lógica onírica es la que Ligotti imprime en sus historias, y por eso sus desarrollos tortuosos se materializan en un crescendo acongojante. Hay momentos en que, si te abstraer por completo y entras en su juego, puedes llegar a sentir un malestar casi físico.
Sí, quizá suene muy exagerado; quizá me este excediendo en mis elogios y este vendiendo a Ligotti como la segunda venida de Cristo a la Tierra. Me es difícil ser imparcial con él, en eso os soy sincero. Soy muy consciente de que no gusta a todo el mundo por lo personal de su propuesta, e incluso que ciertas cosas ni siquiera dan miedo bajo el prisma del terror más convencional y visualmente impactante. Pero si que os voy a reconocer, y esto no se lo puede quitar nadie.
Por destacar cuentos que me han gustado muchos -porque reconozco que otros cuentos son un poco demasiado hasta para mí-:
-El gestor de la ciudad: un pueblo anónimo se rige por los designios arbitrarios de un gestor vitalicio. Con cada nuevo gestor, los cambios en la administración del pueblo son cada vez más drásticos e incomprensibles.
-La marioneta payaso: un individuo es acosado de vez en cuando por una marioneta payaso, un ser de propósitos desconocidos que sale de la nada. La aparición de este maldito engendro del mal ES IMPRESIONANTE.
-Mi defensa de una acción punitiva: un asalariado entra a trabajar de archivista en una ciudad fronteriza para cubrir la sustitución del anterior archivista, cuyo destino los empleados desconocen.
-El bungalow: un hombre se obsesiona con una cinta magnetofónica en la que se escucha "una obra artística conceptual".
June 20, 2011
About a year ago, I made a commitment to read all the H. P. Lovecraft I could find. Finding it all was easy. You can get the entire short stories and poetry, including some essays, all in one volume for your Amazon Kindle for something like ninety-nine cents. Reading it wasn't that difficult either. If you've never read Lovecraft, or even if you have and loved it, I would highly recommend that you read a short story then go over to The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast and listen to the corresponding episode. Chris and Chad, who host the show, are both awesome.
But I digress.
H. P. Lovecraft is a fascinating writer of dark fantasy/science fiction/horror. Where I simply admired the man’s work earlier, he has now become a favorite. But I am now learning of even more fascinating authors; writers who are taking horrific and weird fiction in the vein of Lovecraft in entirely new and refreshing directions.
One of these writers I’m speaking, of course, is Thomas Ligotti.
As an avid reader, I've heard of Ligotti’s fiction for years now. His work has even been recommended to me many times, but for some reason I never got around to it. Such is life. I don’t know how many books I have in my to-be-read mountain, a lot of them from authors I've never read before. Thankfully, however, I recently decided to give Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco a try. It, of course, is brilliant. I somehow knew that it would be, and so I regret not having read this man’s work before this year.
What I like about Ligotti’s work the most is how much it seems to speak to me. Nearly every theme is a topic I have thought of more than once in one way or another. The overall landscape and pure beauty within the stories themselves is almost like opening my ribcage or cracking a hole in my skull and seeing what’s inside. Stories like Purity, The Town Manager, Sideshow and other stories, and The Red Tower were fascinating journeys into nightmares perhaps a little too familiar. Other stories, like My Case for Retributive Action and Our Temporary Supervisor come straight from my life.
These stories are not simply stories. They are art. They are a mirror to any soul with substance. I look forward to reading more from Ligotti, and I can’t recommend him enough.
But I digress.
H. P. Lovecraft is a fascinating writer of dark fantasy/science fiction/horror. Where I simply admired the man’s work earlier, he has now become a favorite. But I am now learning of even more fascinating authors; writers who are taking horrific and weird fiction in the vein of Lovecraft in entirely new and refreshing directions.
One of these writers I’m speaking, of course, is Thomas Ligotti.
As an avid reader, I've heard of Ligotti’s fiction for years now. His work has even been recommended to me many times, but for some reason I never got around to it. Such is life. I don’t know how many books I have in my to-be-read mountain, a lot of them from authors I've never read before. Thankfully, however, I recently decided to give Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco a try. It, of course, is brilliant. I somehow knew that it would be, and so I regret not having read this man’s work before this year.
What I like about Ligotti’s work the most is how much it seems to speak to me. Nearly every theme is a topic I have thought of more than once in one way or another. The overall landscape and pure beauty within the stories themselves is almost like opening my ribcage or cracking a hole in my skull and seeing what’s inside. Stories like Purity, The Town Manager, Sideshow and other stories, and The Red Tower were fascinating journeys into nightmares perhaps a little too familiar. Other stories, like My Case for Retributive Action and Our Temporary Supervisor come straight from my life.
These stories are not simply stories. They are art. They are a mirror to any soul with substance. I look forward to reading more from Ligotti, and I can’t recommend him enough.
September 1, 2016
This is some of the worst writing I've read in a long time. I was only able to stomach the first five stories in this collection before surrendering to the obvious - this man writes like an amateur 14-year-old who is getting a C-minus in English.
First, the stories aren't very imaginative, they are underdeveloped, and unresolved. The writer repeats himself for no discernible reason, repeats descriptions unnecessarily, shows zero sense of rhythm in his prose, uses endless adjectives, uses word combinations that are nonsensical and appears to have no concept of editing.
I don't understand how writing that is this bad and boring can get published.
Note to readers who appreciate good writing: STAY AWAY FROM THIS ONE!!!
First, the stories aren't very imaginative, they are underdeveloped, and unresolved. The writer repeats himself for no discernible reason, repeats descriptions unnecessarily, shows zero sense of rhythm in his prose, uses endless adjectives, uses word combinations that are nonsensical and appears to have no concept of editing.
I don't understand how writing that is this bad and boring can get published.
Note to readers who appreciate good writing: STAY AWAY FROM THIS ONE!!!
March 10, 2019
Thomas Ligotti’s distinctive style maintains an intriguing continuity throughout much of this collection, with varying degrees of success in the choice of narrative vehicle, each of which runs on similar fuel: a stoic acceptance of the futility inherent in everything (excepting for a slight ambivalence toward the art that in turn acknowledges said futility). Having not read Ligotti before nor read about his influences, I was most curious to experience his style firsthand. Rather unexpectedly I discovered more than a few similarities in his prose to that of the writer Thomas Bernhard, who did not write what one typically thinks of as horror fiction, but whose works certainly pulse with a vein of existential horror and share other themes explored by Ligotti, as well. The similarities noted between these two writers include the use of aloof, outsider narrators (who don’t differ much between stories, simply due to their common overbearing life-perspectives); construction of dense monologues composed of long, serpentine sentences; occasional reliance on secondhand narration; italicization of certain words and idiomatic expressions; repetition and reconstitution of phrases, often accompanied by the aggressive use of qualifiers; thematic concerns over pervasive anti-artistic or anti-intellectual sentiments; a recurring suicide fixation; and, more abstractly, the creation of a singular reading experience via total immersion in each narrator’s narrow, oppressive consciousness.
To say I enjoyed these stories would be a mischaracterization of what happened as I read them. I do feel that I fully experienced these stories. Some of them affected me more than others. A few of the set-ups felt a bit too contrived, and I found some of the endings to fall on the weak side. Endings are one point where Ligotti and Bernhard differ in style. Bernhard rarely brings his novels to a definitive close; they often end quite suddenly. And I think Ligotti achieves the most success when he leaves his endings vague like this. Once such a monolithic narrative as these writers create is heaved onto a reader it is difficult for the writer to negotiate a way out, other than to abruptly shut it down. So, when Ligotti tries to add a twist it can be jarring. Not to say it always failed for me, because I really enjoyed some of the endings here, but when it did fail was when the execution felt too much like artifice.
After reading most of the book and writing most of this review I finally succumbed to curiosity and read a few interviews with Ligotti. This actually aided my reading of the final long story, ‘The Shadow The Darkness’ (as well as others, in retrospect), for Ligotti is quite forthcoming in his interviews about his preoccupations and how they are manifested in his fiction. Perhaps more than any of the other stories in the collection, this final story illuminates my occasional disappointment with the direction Ligotti takes in his writing. Sometimes he reaches too far in an attempt to hit on all of his usual themes, which results in a muddied reading experience. ‘The Shadow The Darkness’ reads like satire of the egotistic machinations of artistic and literary circles by way of a perversion of Buddhist philosophy. It gets particularly murky toward the end, where there are simply too many ideological explorations and critiques converging at once to make for a satisfying conclusion. Instead we experience a simultaneous crying out against and resigned embrace of the resulting nullified existence.
Though Ligotti has been described as a nihilist, he has countered that his chronic anhedonia precludes his ‘belief’ in nihilism or any other single philosophy or belief system. At the risk of tangling with intentional fallacy (which in this case I would argue is largely irrelevant, based on Ligotti’s interviews), it is the experience of existing in a state completely devoid of pleasure that so deeply pervades many of the stories in this book.
To say I enjoyed these stories would be a mischaracterization of what happened as I read them. I do feel that I fully experienced these stories. Some of them affected me more than others. A few of the set-ups felt a bit too contrived, and I found some of the endings to fall on the weak side. Endings are one point where Ligotti and Bernhard differ in style. Bernhard rarely brings his novels to a definitive close; they often end quite suddenly. And I think Ligotti achieves the most success when he leaves his endings vague like this. Once such a monolithic narrative as these writers create is heaved onto a reader it is difficult for the writer to negotiate a way out, other than to abruptly shut it down. So, when Ligotti tries to add a twist it can be jarring. Not to say it always failed for me, because I really enjoyed some of the endings here, but when it did fail was when the execution felt too much like artifice.
After reading most of the book and writing most of this review I finally succumbed to curiosity and read a few interviews with Ligotti. This actually aided my reading of the final long story, ‘The Shadow The Darkness’ (as well as others, in retrospect), for Ligotti is quite forthcoming in his interviews about his preoccupations and how they are manifested in his fiction. Perhaps more than any of the other stories in the collection, this final story illuminates my occasional disappointment with the direction Ligotti takes in his writing. Sometimes he reaches too far in an attempt to hit on all of his usual themes, which results in a muddied reading experience. ‘The Shadow The Darkness’ reads like satire of the egotistic machinations of artistic and literary circles by way of a perversion of Buddhist philosophy. It gets particularly murky toward the end, where there are simply too many ideological explorations and critiques converging at once to make for a satisfying conclusion. Instead we experience a simultaneous crying out against and resigned embrace of the resulting nullified existence.
Though Ligotti has been described as a nihilist, he has countered that his chronic anhedonia precludes his ‘belief’ in nihilism or any other single philosophy or belief system. At the risk of tangling with intentional fallacy (which in this case I would argue is largely irrelevant, based on Ligotti’s interviews), it is the experience of existing in a state completely devoid of pleasure that so deeply pervades many of the stories in this book.
But I wanted to believe that the artist who created these dream monologues about the bungalow house and the derelict factory had not set out to break my heart or anyone’s heart. I wanted to believe that this artist had escaped the dreams and demons of all sentiment in order to explore the foul and crummy delights of a universe where everything had been reduced to three stark principles: first, that there was nowhere for you to go; second, that there was nothing for you to do; and third, that there was no one for you to know. Of course I knew that this view was an illusion like any other, but it was also one that had sustained me so long and so well – as long and as well as any other illusion and perhaps longer, perhaps better.
June 14, 2011
It's entirely unsurprising to learn that Thomas Ligotti is from Detroit. His storytelling is suffused in a certain distinctly post-industrial sense of destruction and despair. This context is especially prevalent in the neighborhood descriptions of opening tour-de-force "Purity" which shoves several disquieting philosophical principles through a slalom of screwed-up events, ranging from explicit action to entirely sub-narrative suggestions. All told in the conversational voice of an eerily unfazable child narrator, too used to his family to register what goes on around him, perhaps. It's a fantastic story all around. It's also the least typical. The best aspect of the others is the endless narratorial ruminations which explore Ligotti's unsettling concepts, an excellent literary device aptly likened to Thomas Bernhard. The worst aspect of the other stories is that they seem to largely depend on the sideshow theme encapsulated by the collection title. Why Ligotti feels the need to delve into such horror genre cliches as creepy puppets and carnivals and showmanship seems entirely inexplicable to me, but it's not just a recurring element. It actually seems to be the chosen unifying concept to the collection, like his later "tales of corporate horror". That Ligotti's conceptual goals for these overused devices are so weird and removed from their usual appearances only partly helps. I can think of ways of justifying them, none of which are actually preferable to just not using cliches at all. It's just unneccessary and allows a suggestion of camp into his work that is entirely at odds with the actual content. Of course, Ligotti is often an amazing writer of prodigious imagination, so it's pretty easy to overlook these issues in the enjoyment of individual stories like "The Town Manager", "Severini", and "Gas Station Carnivals". I just can't completely get a read on his goals here.
December 11, 2014
Teatro Grottesco was the first short story collection I read by Ligotti. I must say that I am glad I read it, but happy to unmire myself from the unrelenting, bleak nightmare land of his visions.
Was it a good read? Yes.
Was it all I that it was hyped up to be? Not in my opinion.
I did find many of the stories particularly delightful (The Red Tower, Gas Station Carnivals and Purity) but after several dips in the hopelesness of the collection, I found that it all became a bit repetitive.
A couple of friends have advised me that this isn't Ligotti's most triumphant offering, so I will no doubt revisit his work.
I gave this 3.5 and rounded up because the author's brilliant use of language, and because the darkness these stories live in felt so genuine. It was almost as if the author had tapped into my most depressing thoughts and painted their very somber origins on every page.
Was it a good read? Yes.
Was it all I that it was hyped up to be? Not in my opinion.
I did find many of the stories particularly delightful (The Red Tower, Gas Station Carnivals and Purity) but after several dips in the hopelesness of the collection, I found that it all became a bit repetitive.
A couple of friends have advised me that this isn't Ligotti's most triumphant offering, so I will no doubt revisit his work.
I gave this 3.5 and rounded up because the author's brilliant use of language, and because the darkness these stories live in felt so genuine. It was almost as if the author had tapped into my most depressing thoughts and painted their very somber origins on every page.
February 12, 2023
The litmus test of any form of writing is how vividly believable it is. Thomas Ligotti passes in terrifyingly flying colors. It might be safe to say that not since Nathanial Hawthorne penned the likes of “The Birthmark” and "Rappaccini’s Daughter” has anyone delved so deeply into the essential horror of the human condition. But whereas Hawthorne concerned himself with man at odds with nature thereby inevitably dooming himself, Ligotti concerns himself with nature in all its aspects inevitably at odds with man thereby dooming him.
There are never any psychotic killers, traditional monsters, or reanimated dead in Ligotti’s work. There are no morals, no cheap thrills, no escape from any concrete danger. Theater of the Grotesque as a metaphor for life is subtle, existential, ubiquitous.
In his world, one can be trapped working for an international organization that controls the doctors, who addict the workers, who in turn forever toil in thankless repetitive jobs that eerily worsen as managers and employees alike mutate to increase production, while the doctors experiment with bizarre new meds. There is a decaying town, worthy of a collection of vignettes strung together into a coherent tale in which everything mutates into a spiraling web of the darkest despair while the inhabitants, hysterics or imposters all, gather together in the darkness of abandoned buildings to discuss the implications of the latest madness. There are the innocuous meetings in an all night cafe of two insomniac writers, both suffering from writers block but for very different reasons…
To say the fictions are depressing does them no justice. They are unquestionably haunting, even inspiring. Ligotti often uses a technique of repeating a catch phrase within each telling, like a mantra, that like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” drives the point home, and like Poe, Ligotti’s tales favor the first person. His language is flawless, his images lasting, the words he employs glisten like flecks of paint upon a canvas.
One gets the sense Ligotti himself is plagued by the things of which he writes, that life sapping medications to stave off the darkness are not simply allegory, that man mutating to the demands of his world is something he knows well. He appears to be the quintessential artist suffering for his art. Perhaps that is what makes it so vividly believable.
There are never any psychotic killers, traditional monsters, or reanimated dead in Ligotti’s work. There are no morals, no cheap thrills, no escape from any concrete danger. Theater of the Grotesque as a metaphor for life is subtle, existential, ubiquitous.
In his world, one can be trapped working for an international organization that controls the doctors, who addict the workers, who in turn forever toil in thankless repetitive jobs that eerily worsen as managers and employees alike mutate to increase production, while the doctors experiment with bizarre new meds. There is a decaying town, worthy of a collection of vignettes strung together into a coherent tale in which everything mutates into a spiraling web of the darkest despair while the inhabitants, hysterics or imposters all, gather together in the darkness of abandoned buildings to discuss the implications of the latest madness. There are the innocuous meetings in an all night cafe of two insomniac writers, both suffering from writers block but for very different reasons…
To say the fictions are depressing does them no justice. They are unquestionably haunting, even inspiring. Ligotti often uses a technique of repeating a catch phrase within each telling, like a mantra, that like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” drives the point home, and like Poe, Ligotti’s tales favor the first person. His language is flawless, his images lasting, the words he employs glisten like flecks of paint upon a canvas.
One gets the sense Ligotti himself is plagued by the things of which he writes, that life sapping medications to stave off the darkness are not simply allegory, that man mutating to the demands of his world is something he knows well. He appears to be the quintessential artist suffering for his art. Perhaps that is what makes it so vividly believable.
February 13, 2018
Thomas Ligotti, el creador de un personal mundo lleno de pesadillas, obsesiones y enajenaciones. Este es el último maestro del terror y sus obras, las más originales de las que se pueden leer actualmente.
Tanto Grimscribe como Noctuario mostraban una gran cantidad de relatos desbordantes de creatividad y Teatro Grottesco , Ligotti sigue con sus temas alejados del cánon clásico del terror. Aquí no hay chorros de sangre a tutiplen pero si encontramos el pavor que produce la sociedad industrial y el trabajo asalariado o la aparición de sucesos difícilmente explicables desde la lógica y la razón. Para Ligotti los monstruos somos nosotros mismos y cada relato es una delicia.
A destacar :
El Bungalow, donde un hombre descubre una extraña cinta de cassette en un museo de arte moderno y se obesiona con ella. Escalofriante.
En una ciudad extranjera, en una tierra extranjera, ciclo de pequeños relatos conectados entre sí donde se describe a los habitantes de una oscura ciudad y los oscuros hechos que allí ocurren.
Las ferias de gasolinera Un macabro cuento sobre las atracciones cercanas a las autopistas que se pueden encontrar en algunos pueblos americanos.
Tanto Grimscribe como Noctuario mostraban una gran cantidad de relatos desbordantes de creatividad y Teatro Grottesco , Ligotti sigue con sus temas alejados del cánon clásico del terror. Aquí no hay chorros de sangre a tutiplen pero si encontramos el pavor que produce la sociedad industrial y el trabajo asalariado o la aparición de sucesos difícilmente explicables desde la lógica y la razón. Para Ligotti los monstruos somos nosotros mismos y cada relato es una delicia.
A destacar :
El Bungalow, donde un hombre descubre una extraña cinta de cassette en un museo de arte moderno y se obesiona con ella. Escalofriante.
En una ciudad extranjera, en una tierra extranjera, ciclo de pequeños relatos conectados entre sí donde se describe a los habitantes de una oscura ciudad y los oscuros hechos que allí ocurren.
Las ferias de gasolinera Un macabro cuento sobre las atracciones cercanas a las autopistas que se pueden encontrar en algunos pueblos americanos.
August 23, 2015
Teatro Grottesco makes far less use of the explicitly supernatural, even the explicitly horrific, than earlier Ligotti collections. It’s divided into three sections: ‘Derangements’, ‘Deformations’ (three Kafkan tales about the nefarious practices of the Quine Organisation), and ‘The Damned and the Diseased’ (about mostly failed and small-time artists). The writing style is often deliberately small-minded and finicky, even long-winded in its repeated use of certain descriptive phrases like, ‘the tape-recorded dream monologue’, or ‘the small table with the torn bedsheet draped over it’, which are used in full, every time, as though these stories were being written by a myopic obsessive desperately trying not to see the horror behind it all — or perhaps one constantly and insistently emphasising the essential tawdriness of things. Both interpretations seem to fit.
But this isn’t a criticism. Reading Teatro Grottesco, I began to realise that I find Thomas Ligotti incredibly funny. Not in a laugh-out-loud kind of way (though I did, occasionally, laugh out loud). Rather, it’s as though Ligotti has discovered an entirely new form of utterly negative humour, as dark and dry and gunpowder, which I can only marvel at. There’s something so unrelentingly bleak about the outlook of these stories — a bleakness that is oddly attractive to read, it’s so inventive in constantly finding ways to undermine every possible positive. The constant discovery of an even bleaker, even darker, even more despairing or more tawdry interpretation of things brings out a dark sort of joy at how uniquely downbeat Ligotti is. Every statement, it seems, is no sooner made than it’s undermined by a more tawdry, bland, or despairing alternative, as in: ‘“What am I supposed to do with all this junk?” complained the woman who owned, or perhaps only rented, the storefront building that had been set up as a gallery…” Or “Grossvogel casually hurled his works into the back of the rented, or possibly borrowed, truck…” And somehow this strikes me as funny. It’s like reading serious literature as written by Eeyore, or Marvin the Paranoid Android, and I love it… In short doses, anyway.
This particular collection may not be the best introduction to Ligotti, as here the tales are a lot less pyrotechnically grotesque as many of his earlier stories — there are a lot less mad clowns and meat puppets. What we have instead are tales of weird factories (‘The Red Tower’, which issues ‘a line of quite morbid, quite wonderfully disgusting novelty goods’), oppressive employment regimes, ineffective and fraudulent doctors, failed artists, and dark transformations. The final long story, ‘The Shadow, the Darkness’ contains what may be the essence of Ligotti’s beliefs about the world:
‘There was only this consuming, proliferating blackness whose only true and final success was in merely perpetuating itself as successfully as it could in a world where nothing exists that could ever hope to be anything else except what it needs to thrive upon… until everything is entirely consumed and there is only one thing remaining in all existence and it is an infinite body of blackness activating itself and thriving upon itself with eternal success in the deepest abyss of entity.’
Like I say, hilarious. Or is just me?
But this isn’t a criticism. Reading Teatro Grottesco, I began to realise that I find Thomas Ligotti incredibly funny. Not in a laugh-out-loud kind of way (though I did, occasionally, laugh out loud). Rather, it’s as though Ligotti has discovered an entirely new form of utterly negative humour, as dark and dry and gunpowder, which I can only marvel at. There’s something so unrelentingly bleak about the outlook of these stories — a bleakness that is oddly attractive to read, it’s so inventive in constantly finding ways to undermine every possible positive. The constant discovery of an even bleaker, even darker, even more despairing or more tawdry interpretation of things brings out a dark sort of joy at how uniquely downbeat Ligotti is. Every statement, it seems, is no sooner made than it’s undermined by a more tawdry, bland, or despairing alternative, as in: ‘“What am I supposed to do with all this junk?” complained the woman who owned, or perhaps only rented, the storefront building that had been set up as a gallery…” Or “Grossvogel casually hurled his works into the back of the rented, or possibly borrowed, truck…” And somehow this strikes me as funny. It’s like reading serious literature as written by Eeyore, or Marvin the Paranoid Android, and I love it… In short doses, anyway.
This particular collection may not be the best introduction to Ligotti, as here the tales are a lot less pyrotechnically grotesque as many of his earlier stories — there are a lot less mad clowns and meat puppets. What we have instead are tales of weird factories (‘The Red Tower’, which issues ‘a line of quite morbid, quite wonderfully disgusting novelty goods’), oppressive employment regimes, ineffective and fraudulent doctors, failed artists, and dark transformations. The final long story, ‘The Shadow, the Darkness’ contains what may be the essence of Ligotti’s beliefs about the world:
‘There was only this consuming, proliferating blackness whose only true and final success was in merely perpetuating itself as successfully as it could in a world where nothing exists that could ever hope to be anything else except what it needs to thrive upon… until everything is entirely consumed and there is only one thing remaining in all existence and it is an infinite body of blackness activating itself and thriving upon itself with eternal success in the deepest abyss of entity.’
Like I say, hilarious. Or is just me?
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