his airless cell, while the other is adding layers of bricks
to keep that world the hell out. But despite the most
sincere efforts of each prisoner, the sentence remains the
same: to stay exactly where they are, which is where the
story is. It’s a condition not unlike the world itself,
except it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t help either, but who
cares?
The question we now must ask is: is Nathan’s the kind
of horror story that demands treatment outside the
conventional realistic or Gothic techniques? Well, it may
be, depending on whom this story occurred to. Since it
occurred to me (and not too many days ago), and since
I’ve pretty much given up on it, I guess there’s no harm
in giving this narrative screw another tum, even if it’s in
the wrong direction. Here’s the way mad Dr. Riggers
would experiment, blasphemously, with his man-made
Nathanstein. The secret of life, my ugly Igors, is time . . .
time . . . time.
The experimental version of this story could actually
be told as two stories happening “simultaneously,” each
narrated in alternating sections which take place in
parallel chronologies. One section begins with the death
of Nathan and moves backward in time, while its
counterpart story begins with the death of the original
owner of the magic pants and moves forward. Needless
to say, the facts in the case of Nathan must be juggled
around so as to be comprehensible from the beginning,
that is to say from the end. (Don’t risk confusing your
worthy readers.) The stories converge at the crossroads
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
423
of the final section where the destinies of their characters
also converge, this being the clothes store where Nathan
purchases the fateful trousers. On his way into the store
he bumps into a woman who is preoccupied with counting a handful of cash, this being the woman who has just returned the trousers.
“Excuse me,” says Nathan.
“Look where you’re going,” says the woman at the
same instant.
Of course at this point we have already seen where
Nathan is going and, in a way too spooky to explain right
now, so has he.
The experimental technique. • It’s easy, now try it
yourself.
A n o th e r S ty le_____________________
All the styles we have just examined have been simplified
for the purposes of instruction, haven’t they? Each is a
purified example of its kind, let’s not kid ourselves. In
the real world of horror fiction, however, the above three
techniques often get entangled with one another in
hopelessly mysterious ways, almost to the point where all
previous talk about them is useless for all practical
purposes. But an ulterior purpose, which I’m saving for
later, may thus be better served. Before we get there,
though, I’d like, briefly, to propose still another style.
The story of Nathan is one very close to my heart and I
hope, in its basic trauma, to the hearts of many others. I
wanted to write this horror tale in such a fashion that its
readers would be distressed not by the personal, individual catastrophe of Nathan but by his very existence in a world, even a fictional one, where a catastrophe of this
type and magnitude is possible. I wanted to employ a
style that would conjure all the primordial powers of the
universe independent of the conventional realities of the
424
Thomas Ligotti
Individual, Society, or Art. I aspired toward nothing less
than a pure style without style, a style having nothing
whatever to do with the normal or abnormal, a style
magic, timeless, and profound . . . and one of great
horror, the horror of a god. The characters of the story
would be Death himself in the flesh, Desire in a new pair
of pants, the pretty eyes of Desiderata and the hideous
orbs of Loss. And linked hand-in-hand with these terrible powers would be the more terrible ones of Luck, Fate, and all the miscellaneous minions of Doom.
I couldn’t do it, my friends. It’s not easy, and I don’t
suggest that you try it yourself.
T he F inal S tyle___________________
Dear horror writers of the future, I ask you: what is the
style of horror? What is its tone, its voice? Is it that of an
old storyteller, keeping eyes wide around the tribal
campfire; is it that of a documentarian of current or
historical happenings, reporting events heard-about and
conversations overheard; is it even that of a yamspinning god who can see the unseeable and reveal, from viewpoint omniscient, the horrific hearts of man and
monster? I have to say that it’s none of these, sorry if it’s
taken so long.
To tell you the truth, I’m not sure myself what the
voice of horror really is. But throughout my career of
eavesdropping on the dead and the damned, I know I’ve
heard it; and Gerry Riggers, you remember him, has
tried to put it on paper. Most often it sounds to me very
simply like a voice calling out in the middle of the night,
a single voice with no particular qualities. Sometimes it’s
muffled, like the voice of a tiny insect crying for help
from inside a sealed coffin; and other times the coffin
shatters, like a brittle exoskeleton, and from within rises
a piercing, crystal shriek that lacerates the midnight
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
425
blackness. These are approximations, of course, but
highly useful in pinning down the sound of the voice of
horror, if one still wants to.
In other words, the proper style of horror is really that
of the personal confession, and nothing but: manuscripts
found in lonely places. While some may consider this the
height of comball melodrama, and I grant that it is, it is
also the rawhead and bloody bones of true blue grue. It’s
especially true when the confessing narrator has something he must urgently get off his chest and labors beneath its nightmarish weight all the while he is telling
the tale. Nothing could be more obvious, except perhaps
that the tale teller, ideally, should himself be a writer of
horror fiction by trade. That really is more obvious.
Better. But how can the confessional technique be applied to the story we’ve been working with? Its hero isn’t a horror writer, at least not that I can see. Clearly some
adjustments have to be made.
As the reader may have noticed, Nathan’s character
can be altered to suit a variety of literary styles. He can
lean toward the normal in one and the abnormal in
another. He can be transformed from fully fleshed
person to disembodied fictional abstraction. He can play
any number of basic human and nonhuman roles, representing just about anything a writer could want. Mostly, though, I wanted Nathan, when I first conceived him and
his ordeal, to represent none other than my real life self.
For behind my pseudonymic mask of Gerald Karloff
Riggers, I am no one if not Nathan Jeremy
Stein.
So it’s not too farfetched that in his story Nathan
should be a horror writer, at least an aspiring one.
Perhaps he dreams of achieving Gothic glory by writing
tales that are nothing less than magic, timeless, and you
know what. Perhaps he weald sell his soul in order to
accomplish this fear, I mean feat. But Nathan was not
bom to be a seller of his soul or anything else, that’s why
he became a horror writer rather than going into Dad’s
426
Thomas Ligotti
(and Grandad’s) business. Nathan is, however, a buyer: a
haunter of spectral marketplaces, a visitant of discount
houses of unreality, a bargain hunter in the deepest
basement of the unknown. And in some mysterious way,
he comes to procure his dream of horror without even
realizing what it is he’s bought or with what he has
bought it. Like the other Nathan, this Nathan eventually
finds that what he’s bought is not quite what he bargained for— a pig in a poke rather that a nice pair of pants. What? I’ll explain.
In the confessional version of Nathan’s horror story,
the main character must be provided with something
horrible to confess, something fitting to his persona as a
die-hard horrorist. The solution is quite obvious, which
doesn’t prevent its also being freakish to the core.
Nathan will confess that he’s gone too far into FEAR.
He’s always had a predilection for this particular discipline, but now it’s gotten out of hand, out of control, and out of this world.
The turning point in Nathan’s biography of horrorseeking is, as in previous accounts, an aborted fling with Loma McFickel. In the other versions of the story, the
character known by this name is a personage of shifting
significance, representing at turns the ultra-real or the
super-ideal to her would-be romancer. The confessional
version of “Romance of a Dead Man,” however, gives
her a new identity, namely that of Loma McFickel
herself, who lives across the hall from me in a Gothic
castle of high-rise apartments, twin-towered and honeycombed with newly carpeted passageways. But otherwise there’s not much difference between the female lead in the fictional story and her counterpart in the
factual one. While the storybook Loma will remember
Nathan as the creep who spoiled her evening, who
disappointed her— Real Loma, Normal Loma feels exactly the same way, or rather felt, since I doubt she even thinks about the one she called, and not without good
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
427
reason, the most digusting creature on the face o f the
earth. And although this patent exaggeration was spoken
in the heat of a very hot moment, I believe her attitude
was basically sincere. Even so, I will never reveal the
motivation for this outburst of hers, not even under the
throbbing treat of torture. (I meant, of course, to write
threat. Only a tricky trickle of the pen’s ink, nothing
more.) Such things as motivation are not important to
this horror story anyway, not nearly as important as
what happens to Nathan following Loma’s revelatory
rejection.
For he now knows, as he never knew before, how weird
he really is, how unlike everyone else, how abnormal and
unreal fate has made him. He knows that supernatural
influences have been governing his life all along, that he
is subject only to the rule of demonic forces, which now
want this expatriate from the red void back in their bony
arms. In brief, Nathan should never have been bom a
human being, a truth he must accept. Hard. (The most
painful words are “never again,” or just plain “never!”)
And he knows that someday the demons will come for
him.
The height of the crisis comes one evening when the
horror writer’s ego is at low ebb, possibly to ebb all the
way back to the abyss. He has attempted to express his
supernatural tragedy in a short horror story, his last, but
he just can’t reach a climax of suitable intensity and
imagination, one that would do justice to the cosmic
scale of his pain. He has failed to embody in words his
semi-autobiographical sorrow, and all these games with
protective names have only made it more painful. It
hurts to hide his heart within pseudonyms of pseudonyms. Finally, the horror writer sits down at his desk and begins whining like a brat all over the manuscript of his
unfinished story. This goes on for quite some time, until
Nathan’s sole desire is to seek a human oblivion in a
human bed. Whatever its drawbacks, grief is a great
428
Thomas Ligotti
sleeping draught to drug oneself into a noiseless, lightless
paradise far from an agonizing universe. This is so.
Later on there comes a knocking at the door, an
impatient rapping, really. Who is it? One must open it to
find out.
“Here, you forgot these,” a pretty girl said to me,
flinging a woolly bundle into my arms. Just as she was
about to walk away, she turned and scanned the features
of my face a little more scrupulously. I have sometimes
pretended to be other people, the odd Norman and even
a Nathan or two, but I knew I couldn’t get away with it
anymore. Never again! “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought
you were Norman. This is his apartment, right across
and one down the hall from mine.” She pointed to show
me. “Who’re you?”
“I’m a friend of Norman’s,” I answered.
“Oh, I guess I’m sorry then. Well, those’re his pants I
threw at you.”
“Were you mending them or something?” I asked
innocently, checking them as if looking for the scars of
repair.
“No, he just didn’t have time to put them back on the
other night when I threw him out, you know what I
mean? I’m moving out of this creepy dump just to get
away from him, and you can tell him those words.”
“Please come in from that drafty hallWay and you can
tell him yourself.”
I smiled my smile and she, not unresponsively, smiled
hers. I closed the door behind her.
“So, do you have a name?” she asked.
“Penzance,” I replied. “Call me Pete.”
“Well, at least you’re not Harold Wackers, or whatever
the name is on those lousy books of Norman’s.”
“I believe it’s Wickers, H.J. Wickers.”
“Anyway, you don’t seem at all like Norman, or even
someone who’d be a friend of his.”
“I’m sure that was intended as a compliment, from
Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story
429
what I’ve gathered about you and Norm. Actually,
though, I too write books not unlike those of H.J.
Wickers. My apartment across town is being painted,
and Norman was kind enough to take me in, even loan
me his desk for a while.” I manually indicated the
cluttered, weeped-upon object of my last remark. “In
fact, Norman and I sometimes collaborate under a
common pen-name, and
right now we’re working together on a manuscript.” That was an eternity ago, but somehow it seems like the seconds and minutes of those
days are still nipping at our heels. What tricks human
clocks can play, even on us who are no longer subject to
them! But it’s a sort of reverse magic, I suppose, to
enshackle the timeless with grandaddy’s wrist-grips of
tima, just as it is the most negative of miracles to
smother unburdened spirits with the burdensome overcoat of matter.
“That’s nice, I’m sure,” she replied to what I said a few
statements back. “By the way. I’m Laura— ”
“O’Finney,” I finished. “Norman’s spoken quite highly of you.” I didn’t mention that he had also spoken quite lowly of her too.
“Where is the creep, anyway?” she inquired.
“He’s sleeping.” I answered, lifting a vague finger
toward the rear section of the apartment, where a shadowy indention led to bathrooms and bedrooms. “He’s had a hard night of writing.”
The girl’s face assumed a disgusted expression.
“ Forget it,” she said, heading for the door. Then she
turned and very slowly walked a little ways back toward
me. “Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“Anything is possible,” I assured her.
“Just do me a favor and keep Norman away from me,
if you don’t mind.”
“I think I can do that very easily. But you have to do
something for me.”
“What?”
430
Thomas Ligotti
I leaned toward her very confidentially.
“Please die, Desiderata,” I whispered in her ear, while
gripping her neck with both hands, cutting short a
scream along with her life. Then I really went to work.
“Wake up, Norman,” I shouted a little later. I was
standing at the foot of his bed, my hands positioned
behind my back. “You were really dead to the world, you
know that?”
A little drama took place on Norman’s face in which
surprise overcame sleepiness and both were vanquished
by anxiety. He had been through a lot the past couple
nights, struggling with our “Notes” and other things, and
really needed his sleep. I hated to wake him up.
“Who? What do you want?” he said, quickly sitting up
in bed.
“Never mind what I want. Right now we are concerned with what you want, you know what I mean?
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 53