The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  The principal effect of weird fiction is a sense of what might be called macabre unreality: "macabre" because of that skeleton of fate, which points its exposed finger in the direction of doom; "unreal" because of the extraordinary habiliments of that fate, a flapping garb of mystery which will never uncover its secret. The double sense of macabre unreality attains its most piercing intensity in the enigma that is at the center of every great weird story. And it is this quality that forms the focus of one's appreciation of the weird in fiction.

  * * *

  By definition the weird story is based on an enigma that can never be dispelled if it be true to the weird experience—which may occur entirely in an author's imagination—that serves as its only justifiable provenance. While this enigma will definitely exude an ambiance of the graveyard, it menaces as much by its unreal nature, its disorienting strangeness, as by its connections with the great world of death. Such a narrative scheme is usefully contrasted with that of the realistic "suspense" story, in which a character is threatened with a familiar, often purely physical doom. Whatever identifiable manifestations and phenomena are presented in a weird story—from traditional ghosts to the scientific nightmares of the modern age—there remains at the heart of the tale a kind of abyss from which the weird emerges and into which it cannot be pursued for purposes of analysis or resolution. Some enigmatic quality is thereby preserved in these tales of nameless and terrible unknowns. Like the finder of that "valuable" coin, the man who awakes in the night and reaches out for his eyeglasses is brought into proximity with an unknown, on this occasion in the form of a thing without a name. This is an extreme instance, perhaps the purest example, of a plot that recurs throughout the history of weird fiction.

  Another, more distinguished, example of the enigmatic plot of a weird tale is that paradigm of weirdness—H. P. Lovecraft's "The Colour out of Space." In this story a complex of phenomena and events is set off by an intruding force of unknown origin and nature that comes to settle itself in a dark well at the center of the narrative and from there proceeds to rule like a faceless tyrant over every mechanism of the plot. When it finally makes its exit toward the end of the story, neither the characters involved nor the reader knows anything more about this visitor than they did at the beginning. This last statement is not entirely factual: what everyone quite certainly learns about the "colour" is that contact with this apparition from the stars is an introduction to that macabre unreality that is both a commonplace of the weird and yet also an experience to which one never grows accustomed—and with which one is never at ease.

  Still other examples of the all-important enigma on which the great weird stories are founded could be proffered, from E. T. A. Hoffman's "The Sandman" to Ramsey Campbell's "The Scar," but the point is evident by now? what is truly weird in both literature and life only carries a minimum of flesh on its bones—enough to allow certain issues to be raised and evoke the properly gruesome response but never so much that the shredded fingers stretched out to us turn into the customary gladhand of everyday affairs.

  Admittedly, the extraordinary as a shaper of one's fate—that is, one's inevitable death—is a rather ostentatious and, more often than not, vulgar device for representing human existence. However, weird fiction seeks not to place before us the routine procedures most of our kind follow on the way to the grave but to recover some of the amazement we sometimes feel, and should probably feel more often, at existence in its essential aspect. To reclaim this sense of amazement at the monumentally macabre unreality of life is to awaken to the weird—just as the man in the room awakens in the perpetual hell of his brief story, shakes off his sleep-dulled sensibility, and reaches out to that unknown thing in the darkness. Now, even without his eyeglasses, he can truly see. And perhaps, if only for that moment of artificial terror that weird fiction affords, so can the rest of us.

  Foreword To The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World (2005)

  In the historical development of the artistic horror story, there are three major figures. The first is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the father of the modern psychological horror story. The next, chronologically, is H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), who brought cosmicism—an awareness of the vastness of the universe and of the insignificance of the human race— to the weird tale. And now there is Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953), who has extended Lovecraft’s cosmicism by suggesting that an inescapable malignancy and nightmare inheres in all existence, manifesting itself in both the individual psyche and the physical cosmos. Interestingly, these three writers have found the short story rather than the novel to be their ideal vehicle for expression.

  For Ligotti, “the short story allows a purer and more intense expression of horror … than do novels.”

  Born in Detroit, Ligotti grew up in a nearby suburb and in 1977 graduated from Wayne State University with a B.A. in English. From 1979 to 2001 he worked in the literary criticism division of the Gale Research Company (now Thomson Gale), a publisher of reference books. Ligotti then moved to Florida, where he makes his living as an editorial freelancer.

  He began writing horror fiction around 1976, and published his first short story in 1981. His first book, a small press collection entitled Songs of a Dead Dreamer, came out in an edition of 300 copies in 1985. Today it is a highly-prized rarity. An expanded edition appeared from a trade publisher in 1989, followed by further collections: Grimscribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), and the omnibus volume The Nightmare Factory (1996). Since then Ligotti has worked mostly with small publishers, like Durtro Press, which has issued elegant limited editions like In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997), a collection of four interconnected stories; an unproduced screenplay, Crampton (2002), written in collaboration with Brandon Trenz; and some small books of Ligotti’s verse, I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000), This Degenerate Little Town (2001), and Death Poems (2004).

  In 1994, Silver Salamander Press collected Ligotti’s vignettes in The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein & Other Gothic Tales. Another small press, Mythos Books, has published My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), whose eponymous story is Ligotti’s lengthiest tale. Forthcoming from Mythos Books is Ligotti’s long essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: On the Horror of Life and the Art of Horror, a kind of personal credo of Ligotti’s views on life and literature. The two main websites devoted to Ligotti’s work are Thomas Ligotti Online (www.ligotti.net) and The Art of Grimscribe (www.ligotti.de.vu). Both websites have a complete Ligotti bibliography, and much else of interest.

  The stories in this volume were selected by Ligotti and myself as an introductory sampler of his works. They are arranged in the order in which they were written. Thus, “The Last Feast of Harlequin”— which Ligotti has referred to as the first story he wrote that he thought was good enough not to throw away—opens the collection, and “Purity,” one of his most recent tales, concludes it. The bulk of these stories, however, date from the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ligotti’s most productive period.

  Unlike the bulk of horror fiction past and present, Ligotti’s work” is essentially outside the tradition of strict realism in which a neatly demarcated natural world is threatened by a supernatural menace, an aberration in the normal course of things that more often than not maybe combated and conquered.

  In the universe of Ligotti’s fiction, the natural and the supernatural merge into the same nightmare; to distinguish them is meaningless and no salvation is to be found in this world or any other. As Ligotti has noted, many of his stories “focus on those anomalous moments in which a character’s perception of his world is shaken and he is forced to confront a frightening and essentially chaotic universe.” Which is, in its way, a realism of the highest order.

  —Douglas A. Anderson

  Horror Stories: A Nightmare Scenario (2005)

  Extracted from the forthcoming book, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: On the Horror of Life and the Art of Horror.

  For a horror story to b
e effective, it must both reflect and deform the world we know, the place in which we eat and fight and procreate. This means that it must not intrude on the sacred ground already being worked by established institutions of faith, which at some point inevitably deviate into the unknowable in order to comfort their audience rather than distress them. Should it follow this craven path, the horror story would lose its greatest value—the power to convey truths that have currency with respect to our evolving trepidations rather than perpetuating some primitive lore of the remote past. A literary law that only the greatest writers in the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, have followed in their writings maybe stated as follows: No horror tale shall take advantage of its readers by playing upon their religious beliefs. This is an easy and a vile game that only the lowest form of scribe would perpetrate on those who already have their heads filled with all kinds of fears conditioned into them since they were children in the hands of an angry god. Fortunately, we find that a model for creating horror has been provided for us that has nothing to do with preachers and pulpits and the puppetry of doctrinal compliance. This model is given to us in the form of nightmares, which conform to no orthodoxies except those of our developing fears. No bad dream ever ended with its dreamer finding salvation from his mind’s hell. Such finales are always invented after the fact by storytellers with a redemptive agenda.

  As necessity dictates to most of us that we must be conscious of death, disease, damage, and derangement, however reluctantly and infrequently we submit to this knowledge, it also forces us to leave that world on a regular timetable and enter another one where we face horrors beyond the natural, warped realities that are produced simply because our brains have shifted to a different mode of activity and that by the reckoning of our wide-awake selves can only be described as lunatic. An equally apt term would be “supernatural,” since there obtains a tradition of symbolically equating states of mental abnormality with bizarre incidents in the “real” world, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his famous essay “The Uncanny” (1919). This is the basis for the longtime association between the supernatural and horror fiction. When we take a ghost from our dreams and place it in the context of waking consciousness, if only in the pages of a ghost story, we have chosen, as though freely and of our own will, to engage in the metaphysics of the mistake. The point of this act is a tangle of motives we cannot begin to unravel any better than all the other actions in which we engage on this earth. The only thing that is certain is that we do this because we are driven to do it. But such speculation is distracting us from our concern of the moment, which is the plot of a supernatural horror story and its source in the nightmare.

  It is usually a long and twisted road between the nightmare and a horror story.

  As far as offering a writer some useful storyline, nightmares are notorious for generating plots that are either wearyingly simple, and therefore unaffecting outside the confines of the dream, or too complicated to sort out for any kind of sense. Of course, the same might be said of our waking existence. On the one hand, its course tends to present a few basic routines that have no interest in themselves once we strip them down to their bare bones. But we must go through these motions if the show is to go on. We eat because we are hungry and will die if we fail to heed that hunger. We work because we need to provide ourselves with food as well as shelter from the elements. We sleep because we are tired and need to recharge ourselves so that we can work, which in turn enables us to feed and shelter ourselves. But these routines, and the kind of sense behind them, are not sufficient fodder for fiction and would make for painful reading.

  On the other hand, things can get so involved and mysterious in our lives that we are hard pressed to determine what is happening or why. One day we are just punching the clock at the biological factory, and the next day we find ourselves embroiled in the strangest situation because we saw a pretty face or got wind of some words that set off a conflagration of rage that may last only a matter of hours or could drag on for years. At first we may take a stab at explanations, but ultimately we are at a loss to name the mechanism of our initial impulse, to follow its developments and counter-developments, and to know what happened in the end. This is one of the reasons we engage in such activities as reading fiction in the first place: we are unsatisfied or frustrated by the both the basic tedium and the inconclusive, strung-along complexity of our lives. They lack something we desire—meaning … or, in other words, a plot. No other creature in this world requires anything in the way of meaning, but we appear to be burdened with this desire. This is why the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe regarded human beings as a mistake in the world of nature. We have a desire that can never be satisfied, a need that is not natural, or at least one that is not found elsewhere in nature’s kingdom. Nevertheless, we will persist in chasing the impossible and ultimately die trying. This is the tragedy of human existence that Zapffe concluded we do our best to cover up in order to tolerate an existence that holds terrors for us at every turn. Hence, we make up narratives that are rich with meaning, conspiring among ourselves to tell lies in order to create the coherence that both our waking and dreaming lives withhold from us. Thus, there are the mythologies, the religions, and even scientific scenarios that open with a big bang, continue until some characters come along, and then end in entropy. At this stage in history, it may seem unnecessary and more than a little trite to go over this ground upon which so many have trod before us. But we are here concerned with fictional plots— specifically, with plotting a course between the nightmare and the horror story. If we have again wandered off the topic, this should be no surprise. Indeed, we may profit from wandering a bit further.

  Part of our inheritance as conscious organisms—creatures who are aware of being alive and know about the inescapability of death— is that we are subject to having nightmares. Every move we make in our lives entails risk. What we risk each time we lie down to sleep is that our minds will drift off like a balloon into a sky freaked with clouds and shadows and be battered about in misadventures of unimaginable madness. While our bodies are held in paralysis, unless we are sleepwalkers, our consciousness is distorted to the point of the psychotic, roaming through the backstreets of our brains… until the moment when the intensity of our horror becomes too much to allow our slumber to persist, and we are jarred back into wakefulness.

  Yet if the nightmare has sufficiently shaken us, it may take some time before we are fully awake. We are alert enough to reach for the lamp and scramble from our bed, rubbing our eyes as if to wipe away the visions to which we have been victim and pressing our hands to our temples to feel our way back to the familiar ground of flesh. But the world of the nightmare has not yet been left behind. So we evacuate that room which has become a chamber of horrors and seek out some other place in our residence—somewhere that is not infected by the insanity we have just endured, somewhere that will accommodate our bodies in an upright position so that we are not prone to sink back into that insane darkness from which we are trying to emerge. Once seated, we may moan and curse in the aftermath of the frightening ordeal through which our consciousness has taken us. The residue of things we never believed we would suffer still plagues our heads with images that keep popping up in the darkness inside us and inner scenarios are played over and over like a tune we cannot rid from our thoughts.

  Our bodies continue to shiver with fever of an immaterial disease and its lingering symptoms, its ravages and confusions. No longer entrapped in the dream, we are not yet fully free from its clutches. And the worst part about occupying this transitional zone, the most awful revelation that occurs in this state, is not the nightmare that has just slithered into our skull and nested there for awhile. That particular trauma is complete and the house lights are now up around us, even while we remain in a delirium that might otherwise signal some serious mental disorder, some damage to the system that functions to give us a sense that we are a real person, a normal and continuous self. The
worst part of this limbo between two worlds is not the memory of the nightmare that has already passed, receding into some slime-streaked and cobwebbed cavern of memory, but the idea of all those nightmares that have yet to come in our lives and are as sure as anything to do so. In those interstitial moments between the deformations of a sick dream and a full recovery that sends our minds home from the hospital, we find the prospect of further episodes of this kind, of relapses into the frenzies of the sleeping mind, to be absolutely intolerable. How could we ever again bring ourselves to take the risk of going back to that bed and descending into dreams. What a monstrous destiny we must helplessly face, each night standing on the precipice of sleep and not knowing what waits below.

  However, as previously observed, every move we make in our lives entails risk.

  This statement could be truthfully extended to declare not merely risk but, based on facts and figures, the certainty of pain and grief that encompasses us like barbed wire into which, sooner or later, we will run headlong. Few of us vow not to enter an automobile because some of the most grotesque disfigurements and deaths have resulted from this decision. On the other hand, many are dissuaded from knowing the exhilaration offered by riding a motorcycle, whether or not they have heard that surgeons refer to these vehicles as “donorcycles.”

  But even the most incautious among us weigh the risks, gauging what prospective harm they find acceptable in light of the rewards involved. Many believe that they have a fair choice in the matter of which doom ultimately overtakes them, and sometimes their lives indeed come to an end approximately as they envisioned. Of course, this is not exactly how they explain their predicament to themselves. They usually remain as oblivious as humanly possible to any nastiness that could waylay their life-plan. While they may have had a close brush with severe physical damage or their own demise, they usually recover from these experiences and, like those who have had a good share of nightmares in their time, eventually go back to sleep … because it is in their sleep that they are looking to die after a long and healthy life. Neither waking nightmares nor non-waking ones have given the human species any pause in its progress. It is not as if a person, once born, or a society, once formed, has ever had any appealing choice except to carry on as if everything will be all right in the short run and to think about the end of things as little as possible.