The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  HG: What were your thoughts as you watched this movie of your work for the first time? Did you like the performers they picked to play your characters?

  Thomas Ligotti: I saw the film in several preliminary forms before I saw the final product. Since I was the co-writer of the script with Brandon Trenz, I was intrigued as hell to see how it would come out vis-à-vis its direction, acting, production design, and everything else one looks for in any film. As I watched it for the first time, I thought: "This looks like a real movie." I know that everyone involved in the production put a lot of work into every aspect of it. I talk about this in the interview included in the book that accompanies the DVD. The performances of the actors were terrific. The two principal actors, Michael Reilly Burke and Maury Sterling are pros that anyone who watches TV and movies has seen. I remember watching some episodes of the show 24 in which Michael Reilly Burke played a character who plots to assassinate the President. And Maury Sterling turns up often on cop shows. Sterling has such a unique presence he stands out in any role he plays. In The Frolic, I think he was allowed to pull out all the stops of his abilities as an actor, which is something you have to see to believe. He both embodied and embellished the character of John Doe from my very early story "The Frolic."

  HG: Are any more Ligotti movies in the works?

  Thomas Ligotti: There are some tentative plans, but everything in Hollywood is tentative until an actual movie is released.

  HG: If you could select any of your past works to be turned into a film, with your choice of director and cast -- with no worries about budget! -- which story would you pick, and who would direct it and star in it?

  Thomas Ligotti: My choice of which stories I would like to see adapted as film is skewed toward what I think would make a good movie of the kind that I myself would want to see and that I can imagine would be makeable without transforming it into another creature altogether. From this perspective, the work of mine that I would most want to see made into a film is my short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done. I would want to see a solid, intelligent, and imaginative director go to work on this narrative -- someone like David Fincher, Brad Anderson, or David Cronenberg. Since My Work Is Not Yet Done would demand as much acting and action, these are the first directors that come to mind, since Fincher did The Usual Suspects and Se7en, Brad Anderson did Session 9 -- the best horror movie in recent memory -- and Cronenberg has made the bold statement in an interview that "To me, the ‘talking head’ is the essence of cinema," something that he backs up in both his earlier movies like The Dead Zone and Videodrome, as well as his newer movies like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Regarding actors, I think Johnny Depp would be great, because he can play low-key "normal" characters, as he did in In the Nick of Time, and whack jobs as he did in Sweeney Todd, both of which would be required for the portrayal of Frank Dominio in My Work Is Not Yet Done. Actually, I think that Maury Sterling could also do amazing turn as this character. Oh yeah, Maury Sterling would be great.

  HG: What other literary projects do you have in the works?

  Thomas Ligotti: I’ve been working forever on a nonfiction book called The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short Life of Horror. In Conspiracy I attempt to bind together themes from the works of pessimistic philosophers and horror writers into an exposition on the uncanny nature and ontological fraudulence of the human species.

  HG: Here’s the question I'm sure you get asked all the time: when are we going to see a Ligotti novel?

  Thomas Ligotti: I think it’s safe to say that I will never write a novel. The reason is this: I really don’t like fiction, and novels are what fiction is all about. The only fictional works that I’ve ever admired are those which have their formal basis in essays (Borges), poetry (Bruno Schulz), monologues (Thomas Bernhard), or all three (Poe and Lovecraft). I want to hear a writer speaking, not see a movie in my mind that takes days or weeks to get through rather than 100 minutes or the time it takes to watch a multi-part mini-series. Why would anyone want to read The Silence of the Lambs when they could see the movie? A fair response would be, "There are more good works of fiction -- if you like fiction -- than there are good movies." That’s massively true. Good movies are a happy accident.

  HG: You're a rather daunting personage, you know! What frightens you? What makes you smile?

  Thomas Ligotti: I never knew that I was a daunting person until people with whom I worked at a publishing company told me I was daunting. Of course, they didn’t say that until they got to know me and understood that I was more afraid of them than they were of me. What frightens me? All the ghastly ways in which one can suffer in this world. I think about them all the time and say to myself, "I’ve got to kill myself before something like happens to me." Unfortunately, I’m afraid of dying. Unless I’m in a depressive phase, in which case I’m not afraid of anything. What makes me smile? That brings to might a sentence from E.M. Cioran: "Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes." I think that if I could walk from one end of the world to the other and see nothing but annihilated landscapes, that would make me smile. I’ve always thought that I would make a good last man on earth.

  HG: You rose up through the ranks of the printed small-press. How has the internet changed the way writers earn their stripes?

  Thomas Ligotti: I have no idea. I don’t frequent fiction sites on the internet. Twenty years ago I would have been all over the horror sites on the internet. One thing I’ve noticed from the books and anthologies that people kindly send to me is that horror writers are better today than they were when I started writing. I may not care for their work, but I know that it’s good -- more polished, more imaginative, more everything. Perhaps the internet has had something to do with that because you have a chance to read so many writers and develop a sense of standards that was higher than it was in the past, at least for short stories. The burgeoning of small-press horror publishers no doubt also has something to do with how good horror writers are today.

  HG: How has the internet changed the way you do business as a writer?

  Thomas Ligotti: I’ve never really done business as a writer, unless you mean as a freelance writer and editor. There were a number of jobs I couldn’t have done without the internet.

  HG: Where on the internet can people find out more about your work? How involved are you with these online venues?

  Thomas Ligotti: There’s a site called Thomas Ligotti Online, but it’s not a personal site in which I have much involvement. It was developed by a gentleman named Brian Edward Poe. Seriously. There’s not only stuff about me on the site but tons of music, art, and writing by TLO members. I can actually find out more about myself as a horror writer on that site than I can on my own. If I want to find out what I’ve published, when, and how many times, I refer to Doug Anderson’s up-to-date bibliography on TLO.

  HG: Society and technology are evolving at a frantic pace -- how is horror, as a genre, evolving to match those changes?

  Thomas Ligotti: I don’t think that horror is a genre that evolves or has ever evolved. I think it "develops" in a way that parallels the "Great Man" theory of history. Every so often a writer comes along who changes the way other writers in the horror genre write. Examples: Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King.

  HG: Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with the readers of Horror Garage. I’ll make your final question an easy one! What are you having for dinner tonight?

  Thomas Ligotti: Leftovers. I like leftovers better than first-times. I think that there should be restaurants than serve food made the day before. Like roast beef. Who wants to eat roast beef and potatoes and all that when you can have roast beef hash with everything all mixed together? And how about day-old pizza?

  Source: http://www.horrorgarage.com/horror/interview-thomas-ligotti.php

  Index Of Stories

  Struck-through links are currently missing from this collection. 'The' and 'A/An' are ignored for alphabetical ordering
purposes, i.e. The Mystics Of Muelenburg is to be found, quite rightly, amongst Mad Night Of Atonement and The Medusa.

  The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, Citizen of Geneva

  Alice's Last Adventure

  Allen and Adelaide: An Arabesque

  Autumnal

  The Bells Will Sound Forever

  The Blasphemous Enlightenment of Prof. Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston, Providence, and the Human Race

  The Bungalow House

  The Career of Nightmares

  Charnelhouse of the Moon

  The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe

  The Chymist

  The Clown Puppet

  The Cocoons

  Crampton

  Conversations in a Dead Language

  Death without End

  This Degenerate Little Town

  The Demon Man

  Dr. Locrian's Asylum

  Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech

  Dream of a Mannikin

  The Dreaming in Nortown

  Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes

  The Eternal Devotion of the Governess to the Residents of Bly

  The Eternal Mirage

  The Ever-Vigilant Guardians of Secluded Estates

  The Excruciating Final Days of Dr. Henry Jekyll, Englishman

  Eye of the Lynx

  The Fabulous Alienation of the Outsider, Being of No Fixed Abode

  Flowers of the Abyss

  The Frolic

  Gas Station Carnivals

  Ghost Stories for the Dead

  The Glamour

  The Greater Festival of Masks

  The Heart of Count Dracula, Descendant of Attila, Scourge of God

  His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House

  I Have a Special Plan for This World

  In the Shadow of Another World

  The Insufferable Salvation of Lawrence Talbot the Wolfman

  The Interminable Equation

  The Interminable Residence of the Friends of the House of Usher

  An Interview With Louis Miguel Riaz

  The Intolerable Lesson of the Phantom of the Opera

  Invocation to the Void

  The Journal of J.P. Drapeau

  The Last Feast Of Harlequin

  Les Fleurs

  The Library of Byzantium

  The Lost Art of Twilight

  Mad Night of Atonement

  Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie

  The Master's Eyes Shining with Secrets

  The Mechanical Museum

  The Medusa

  Miss Plarr

  The Mocking Mystery

  Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel

  The Music of the Moon

  My Case for Retributive Action

  My Work Is Not Yet Done

  The Mystics of Muelenburg

  The Nameless Horror

  Nethescurial

  New Faces in the City

  The Night School

  The Nightmare Network

  Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story

  One May Be Dreaming

  One Thousand Painful Variations Performed Upon Divers Creatures Undergoing the Treatment of Dr. Moreau, Humanist

  The Order of Illusion

  Our Temporary Supervisor

  The Perilous Legacy of Emily St. Aubert, Inheritress of Udolpho

  The Physic

  The Premature Death of H. P. Lovecraft, Oldest Man in New England

  Primordial Loathing

  The Prodigy of Dreams

  Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror

  The Puppet Masters

  Purity

  The Real Wolf

  The Red Tower

  Salvation by Doom

  Sardonic Mundane (as Charles Miguel Riaz)

  The Scream: from 1800 to the Present

  The Sect of the Idiot

  Selections of Lovecraft

  Severini

  The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

  The Shadow, The Darkness

  Sideshow and Other Stories

  A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing

  The Spectacles in the Drawer

  The Spectral Estate

  The Strange Design of Master Rignolo

  Studies in Horror

  The Superb Companion of André de V., Anti-Pygmalion

  Teatro Grottesco

  Ten Steps to Thin Mountain

  The Town Manager

  The Transparent Alias of William Wilson, Sportsman and Scoundrel

  The Troubles of Dr. Thoss

  The Tsalal

  The Unbearable Rebirth of the Phantom of the Wax Museum

  The Unfamiliar

  The Unholy City

  The Unnatural Persecution, by a Vampire, of Mr. Jacob J.

  Vastarien

  The Voice in the Bones

  We Can Hide From Horror Only In The Heart Of Horror: Notes And Aphorisms

  When You Hear The Singing, You Will Know It Is Time

  The Worthy Inmate of the Will of the Lady Ligeia