That could be the epigraph (but not, one hopes, the epitaph) for this entire enterprise. And speaking of epitaphs, Bill Patterson’s death was announced while I was preparing this review, and I am sorry that he will not be around to join the discussion that his book is sure to generate. His responses to comments, criticisms, corrections on the Heinlein Nexus forum and elsewhere were invariably civil, sensible, and low-key. He would be the first to acknowledge that, as weighty as it is, his two fat volumes are far from the last word on Heinlein’s life, opinions, and work.
Even though this last half of Heinlein’s life is seen from a more partisan viewpoint – the result, one suspects, of Virginia’s love and Patterson’s obvious admiration for his subject – it is possible to read through that skewing to get a sense of a complex, contradictory personality: a man who would send money or a typewriter or a list of story ideas to a friend (or merely a fellow writer) in need; who could also be alpha-male assertive to the point of bullying over points of patriotism, politics, and what he felt to be personal honor or privacy; whose tomcatting did not cancel out his deep attachment and loyalty to his wife (or wives); who designed stories to challenge convention and then took offense when the resulting arguments included him; who spent more than half his life looking toward the future and never completely left his cultural past. As partisan as this account becomes in its second half, it will certainly remain part of the discussion about its subject’s place in SF and those parts of American culture that the genre has touched.
–Russell Letson
Return to In This Issue listing.
REVIEWS BY STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ
The Spectral Link, Thomas Ligotti (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-650-2, $20.00, 96pp, hc) June 2014. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519;
Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti, Matt Cardin, ed. (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-621-2, $40.00, 248pp, hc) June 2014.
The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., ed. (Miskatonic River Press 978-1-937408-01-5, $19.99, 304pp, tp) June 2013. [Order from
Wild Fell, Michael Rowe (ChiZine Publications 978-1-77148-159-5, $16.95, 300pp, tp) December 2013. [Order from
Turn Down the Lights, Richard Chizmar, ed. (Cemetery Dance Publications 978-1-58767-437-2, $35.00, 200pp, hc) December 2013. [Order from Cemetery Dance Publications,132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7, Forest Hill MD 21050;
SHORT TAKES
The Slayer of Souls/The Maker of Moons, Robert W. Chambers (Stark House 978-1-933586-48-9, $19.95, 324 pages, tp) April 2014. [Order from Stark House, 1315 H Street, Eureka CA 95501;
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, Clark Ashton Smith (Penguin 978-0-14-310738-5, $16.00, 400pp, tp) March 2014.
Chiliad: A Meditation, Clive Barker (Subterranean 978-1-59606-595-6, $30.00, 96pp, hc) January 2014.
Back in 2011, Hippocampus Press published Thomas Ligotti’s pessimistic manifesto, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a book that got unexpected media attention earlier this year when Nic Pizzolatto cited its influence on scripts he wrote for HBO’s smash television series True Detective. Ligotti wrote the book after reading ‘‘The Last Messiah’’, a 1933 essay by Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe that corroborated his own feelings regarding the misery of existence. According to Zapffe, consciousness is a curse that apprises human beings of the suffering inherent in existence, but offers no consolation other than the certainty that we will all eventually die. ‘‘In order to cope with our consciousness of these realities, then,’’ Ligotti noted in an interview conducted four years before his book’s publication and reprinted in Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti, ‘‘we must smother our consciousness as best we can by using various tactics. The result is a whole species of beings that have to lie unceasingly to themselves, not always successfully, about what they are and what their lives are really like.’’ Channeling Zapffe, Ligotti – who ‘‘was already predisposed to believe that life was at best worthless and at worst an intolerable nightmare’’ – concluded that it was better not to have been born or given birth to others. Otherwise, ‘‘we’re positively doomed to live and wallow in our own bullshit until we become extinct as a species by one of the many means that have led to the extinction of almost every other species on this planet.’’
Ligotti’s observations bothered some readers, although they shouldn’t have surprised anyone familiar with his horror fiction, which reads like nothing so much as creative elaborations of this personal philosophy. The hermetically sealed settings of his stories are microcosms whose deteriorating landmarks, bizarre inhabitants, and outré experiences crystallize the nightmare of existence. The greatest moment of horror for Ligotti’s protagonist-victims is that moment of heightened awareness or consciousness when they see their world and their lives for what they truly are and come to realize that their personal doom is inescapable.
The Spectral Link is Ligotti’s first book of new fiction since the publication of Conspiracy, and its two stories approach the philosophy of that volume from two different perspectives. Ligotti establishes a context for both tales in a brief preface that diagnoses the frustration and desperation felt by those out of step with the status quo of their world. ‘‘Metaphysica Morum’’, the more abstract of the two stories, focuses on a patient/therapist relationship, a recurring motif in many of Ligotti’s tales, notably ‘‘Dream of a Mannikin, or the Third Person’’, collected in his first short fiction collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The profoundly demoralized patient-narrator of this tale seeks professional help from the somewhat shady Dr. O because ‘‘I still felt at some level a totally idiotic need to exhaust every speck of interest left to me in being alive.’’ Nevertheless, he’s of the opinion that Dr. O’s treatment is of little benefit because it’s based on lies and distractions that he has already seen through. ‘‘The whole pitiful drama between us was such that there were no surprises, or none that indicated any progress in my condition. There were only confirmations that everything was just what it seemed – birth, the business of living, and death. This was simple enough for most, but quite intolerable for a moral and even sometimes phenomenal nihilist like myself.’’ Ligotti stories of this type tend to end in one of two ways: either with the patient’s discovery that the therapist is a manipulative puppet-master and that any paranoid feelings toward him have been justified, or with the therapist coming to the horrifying realization that there is more truth about existence in the patient’s pathology than in any reassurances medical or psychological treatment can offer. This story’s turning point comes when the Dealer, a salesman of sorts who awakens the patient in a dream to his status as ‘‘a metaphysical mutant,’’ proves to have an existence that transcends the dreams of a single individual.
Early in second story, ‘‘The Small People’’, the patient-narrator tells his doctor, ‘‘I know you must be aware of the torment an individual suffers when he begins to wonder if he is the one on the wrong side of reality.’’ Since childhood, the narrator has felt an aversion to the ‘‘small people,’’ a species of small doll-like beings whose diminutive communities are tolerated by most persons as regular-sized as he is. He is repulsed by their shiny non-expressive features, by the swiveling movements of their joints, and, when he touches one, by the fleshiness of their substance where a hard plastic texture was expected. The narrator indulges his belief that the small people are something other than human until he spies on their community one evening and sees in the rhythms and patterns of their way of life the same rhythms and patterns in the lives of regular-sized people. ‘‘In a way they were a mirror of us – of what we wanted for ourselves. They marked time and nothing else.’’ Eventually, the narrator is horrified to realize that he is seeing small-person behavior in regular-sized people whom he begins to think of as ‘‘half-smalls.’’ Disturbed by the slapdash construction of the superfic
ially attractive buildings that the small people build – a discovery that suggests an even more profound instability of perceived reality – he thinks,
I could see the same thing in people that I did in the flimsy material world, and this junkyard of cast-off ectoplasm. They didn’t meet expectations either, though, as I said, no one yet has been able to say definitively who or what we are. And I don’t think anyone will ever be able to do so. I don’t think they want to. What I do think they want is to say that humans, real humans, are this and that and the other thing – that there are millions of qualities humans have that nothing else has, and they say all this to keep us confused about what humans really are, except that they’re not small people.
Ultimately, the narrator’s realization that there may be no difference between persons of his type and the loathed small people drives him mad.
•
As the foregoing should suggest, Ligotti’s fiction is a creative outgrowth of his personal philosophy and world-view, much like that of H.P. Lovecraft, the writer whose work convinced Ligotti to start putting pen to paper. Lovecraft expounded the same philosophical views he condensed in his fiction in thousands of personal letters, and in his introduction to Born to Fear, a collection of sixteen interviews spanning the years 1988 to 2013, editor Matt Cardin asks us to consider that ‘‘Thomas Ligotti is to his interviews as H.P. Lovecraft is to his letters.’’ In his remarkably candid answers to interviewer questions, Ligotti comes across as impressively well read, erudite, reflective, and – for all of his fatalism – possessed of a very good sense of humor. ‘‘Misery is my muse,’’ he half-jokes.
Many of his remarks on the art of horror fiction are astute tutorials on horror craft. Describing what attracted him to Lovecraft’s fiction, he observes, ‘‘Lovecraft dreamed the great dream of supernatural literature – to convey with the greatest possible intensity a vision of the universe as a kind of enchanting nightmare. While his materialist brain would not allow him the solutions offered by supernaturalism his deepest feelings demanded an answer or outlet in transcendent terms.’’ The frequent interplay of dream and perceived reality in Ligotti’s stories relates in part to his conception of the ideal horror story, which ‘‘is something that would be almost total nonsense to read but would have all the impact of that total nonsense that goes on while you’re asleep, and that causes you to wake up screaming with no explanation why.’’ Asked about the popularity of horror fiction and why people read stories calculated to bring unease, he says, ‘‘I’m content to view a taste for supernatural literature as precisely what it appears to be: a means for damaged psyches to express their experience in a damaged universe, or to find a reflection of this experience in the writings of others.’’ And in his advice to aspiring horror writers, he speaks to the totality of effect, all of a horror story’s elements should have when he notes ‘‘if a horror story is spoiled by knowing its ending, that story is not worth reading in the first place.’’
Although Ligotti says that his stories are not autobiographical, he is forthright in discussing his mood at the time he wrote certain tales, notably My Work is Not Yet Done, a collection of three absurdist horror stories set in the modern workplace that read as the comic strip Dilbert might, were it scripted by Franz Kafka. Suffice to say, the demoralization its characters feel from the dehumanizing policies and politics of the office, and the responses they plan to redress it, are not far off the mark of Ligotti’s own experience at the time. Ligotti responds in depth to questions about specific stories and what he was trying to achieve in them, with remarks that will be useful for future critical studies of his writing. A certain amount of repetition is inevitable, since many of the interviewers ask Ligotti the same question or about the same story. Nevertheless, Ligotti always manages to find refreshing new ways to state what he has said before. The final interview question in the book is ‘‘Why do you write,’’ and you couldn’t ask for a better answer than Ligotti’s: ‘‘Words and what they express have the best chance of returning the baneful stare of life.’’
•
Tribute anthologies are all the rage these days, and it was only a matter of time before an editor got the idea to put together a compilation of original stories inspired by Ligotti’s fiction. The title of Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.’s The Grimscribe’s Puppets refers both to Grimscribe, the titular entity whose many voices the stories of Ligotti’s second short fiction collection were supposed to represent, and the puppet image so rampant in Ligotti’s stories as a symbol of human beings bereft of free will and at the mercy of forces that are impossible to overcome.
Just as no one expects to read Cthulhu Mythos stories that quite measure up to the achievement of the Lovecraft originals that inspired them, no one should come to this volume expecting works that replicate the nightmarish intensity of Ligotti’s unique works of fiction. But several of these homages convey the sense of a malignant, off-kilter reality that powers much of Ligotti’s best writing. Gemma Files’s ‘‘Oubliette’’ is an eerie paranoid fantasy about a doctor/patient relationship in which it’s never clear who is in control of whom. Simon Strantzas, in ‘‘By Visible Hands’’, takes Ligotti’s puppet/puppet-master imagery into very dark territory. Cody Goodfellow’s ‘‘The Man Who Escaped This Story’’ and John Langan’s ‘‘Into the Darkness, Fearlessly’’ are darkly funny stories about protagonists who discover that they are nothing more than characters trapped in works of fiction. Both Richard Gavin, in ‘‘After the Final’’, and Robert M. Price, in ‘‘The Holiness of Desolation’’, riff on Ligotti’s stories and their titles, with Price even going so far as to make one of Ligotti’s own texts a transgressive, forbidden book in the universe of his story. Few of the contributors attempt to write slavish pastiches of Ligotti’s writing, and the result is a compilation of greatly varied stories that show how Ligotti’s work has touched writers of greatly differing temperaments and predispositions.
•
In the first chapter of his new novel, Wild Fell, Michael Rowe promises to tell a ghost story that is ‘‘not a ghost story like any ghost story you’ve ever heard.’’ By the end of the story, he has succeeded admirably. Though set mostly in the present, the tale Rowe tells is rooted in events that occurred a century earlier, and that emerge gradually through the contemporary events. ‘‘Like any ghost story,’’ he writes, ‘‘it involves bridges between the past and the present,’’ and the two-way-street nature of that bridge allows Rowe to take his plot in some refreshingly unpredictable directions.
At first, Wild Fell seems far from unconventional. It opens with a prologue, set in Alvina, Ontario in 1960. Two dating teenagers decide to picnic one evening on the shore of Devil’s Lake, across from Blackmore Island, named for the family that settled it in the 1800s and built a sprawling mansion, Fell House, on its promontory. Long abandoned, the island and house have generated their share of spooky legends. As the kids soon discover, the haunts of those legends are far from imaginary. Typical of many contemporary horror novels and movies, the prologue is a teaser that introduces plot elements that figure later in the story. It also provides an early jolt of horror to let the reader know where the story is headed. Though the prologue does its job, it’s the one part of the novel that doesn’t seem to jibe completely with the events that follow.
The story proper is the first-person narrative of Jameson Browning, a middle-aged man who is recalling the events of his life. In 1971, Jameson – or Jamie, as everyone calls him – is a nine-year-old, living with his mother and father in suburban Ottawa. Mom is a shrewish woman concerned with maintaining appearances, while Dad is warm and understanding. Jamie is an introvert with only one close friend, a neighborhood tomboy who calls herself Hank. He has made an imaginary confidante, whom he calls ‘‘Mirror Pal,’’ out of his reflection in the mirror in his room. One day, when he seeks consolation from Mirror Pal following the theft of his bike by a neighborhood bully, he finds his reflection inexplicably replaced by that of a young girl who calls
herself Amanda and who is quite different in temperament from the passive mirror image that she has supplanted. After Jamie vents his feelings to her, the bully is struck down the next day by a fatal swarm of wasps. Later that summer, Amanda takes possession of Jamie during a bullying incident at summer camp and gives him the strength he needs to severely bloody his opponent. In his young heart, Jamie knows that there is something very wrong about Amanda, who becomes increasingly clingy and jealous of anyone to whom Jamie shows attention. When she threatens to kill his parents, Jamie breaks his mirror, severing his connection with Amanda and traumatically erasing the memory of her from his mind. (It turns out that Jamie has mercifully forgotten some other things about his childhood, but those don’t come to light until much later in the novel.)
Locus, July 2014 Page 14