Horror Literature through History

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by Matt Cardin


  See also: The Monk; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Terror versus Horror.

  Further Reading

  Macdonald, D. L. 2000. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

  Robinson, Daniel. 2013. “Gothic Prosody: Monkish Perversity and the Poetics of Weird Form.” In Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall, 155–171. Surrey: Ashgate.

  Thomson, Douglass H. 2008. “Mingled Measures: Gothic Parody in Tales of Wonder and Tales of Terror.” In Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 50. https://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2008/v/n50/018143ar.html.

  “LIGEIA”

  Edgar Allan Poe seems to have regarded the 1838 story “Ligeia” as one of his best, and to have revised it several times during its publication history. It is one of his stories about the death of a beautiful woman, a subject he claimed to be “the most poetical” in the world, and which he certainly made famous with his poem “Annabel Lee” (Poe 2003, 436).

  “Ligeia” introduces a Poe narrator at his most obsessive and unreliable. The hero cannot even remember where he first met the Lady Ligeia (somewhere in Germany, perhaps), but he goes on for pages describing every aspect of her physical beauty (raven-black hair, marble complexion, high forehead, etc.), intellectual accomplishments, charms, and such. The prose is intense and fervid, not so much because Poe is overwriting but because the narrator’s state of mind is already bordering on madness. Then Ligeia sickens and dies, but not before the narrator has read aloud to her the poem “The Conqueror Worm,” which is actually by Poe, but which the story frames as Ligeia’s own composition. This poem, with its triumph of the bloody grave worm, would seem to contradict the quote from Joseph Glanvill, a seventeenth-century English philosopher, that is both presented at the head of the story and repeated within the text, to the effect that the human will has the power to overcome death: “And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will” (Poe 1984, 262). (This passage has not been found among Glanville’s works and may be Poe’s invention.)

  In the story’s opening lines, the first-person narrator of “Ligeia” is established as one of Poe’s overwrought, high-strung, hyperintelligent, probably unreliable individuals whose perception of events is almost certainly skewed in dark and disturbing ways:

  I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. . . . And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own—a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself—what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it? And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled Romance—if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine.

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Poe, Edgar Allan. 1902. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 3. New York: Fred De Fau & Company. 192–193.

  Having lost one wife, the hero moves to a remote part of England and, being fabulously rich, refurnishes an old abbey, decorating it fantastically, slipping into extreme decadence and aesthetic excess. In this state, now taking opium regularly, he marries the much more conventional (and blonde-haired) Lady Rowena, but soon hates her and longs for Ligeia. Rowena also sickens, and the narrator seems to sense the presence of the ghost of Ligeia in the bedchamber with the two of them. The narrator describes several suspicious red drops that appear in Rowena’s wine, and it is unclear whether he did it himself, or whether the ghost of Ligeia did it, or whether the entire episode is nothing but a hallucination. The climax comes as Rowena, already presumed dead and wrapped for the grave, seems to revive and staggers into the middle of the room, but recoils from the narrator. She falls back on the bed. The grave-wrappings come loose, and her black hair is revealed. It is Ligeia, returned—but it is unclear whether she is alive or just another beautiful corpse.

  Roger Corman filmed this story in 1964 as The Tomb of Ligeia, the last and least successful of his Poe films, but the influence of the story extends far beyond that. The hero’s extreme aesthetic indulgence is more in the spirit of the “decadent” writers of the 1890s and later and it certainly influenced them. Traces of this story are visible in the works of J. K. Huysmans, M. P. Shiel, Oscar Wilde, and Clark Ashton Smith. It depicts the borderline where the pursuit of beauty and the indulgence of the senses overwhelm the senses and shade into horror.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Huysmans, J. K.; “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shiel, M. P.; Smith, Clark Ashton; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Heller, Terry. 1980. “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the Pleasures of Terror.” Gothic 2, no. 2: 39–48.

  Holland-Toll, Linda J. 1997. “Ligeia: The Facts of the Case.” Studies in Weird Fiction 21 (Summer): 10–16.

  Jay, Gregory S. 1983. “Poe: Writing and the Unconscious.” In The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, edited by Harry R. Garvin and Peter C. Carafiol, 144–169. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.

  Kennedy, J. Gerald. 1993. “Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying Women.” In New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, edited by Kenneth Silverman, 119–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984. Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America.

  Poe, Edgar Allan. 2003. “The Philosophy of Composition.” In Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews, edited by David Galloway, 430–442. New York: Penguin.

  Shi, Yaohua. 1991. “The Enigmatic Ligeia/‘Ligeia.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 4: 485–496.

  LIGOTTI, THOMAS (1953–)

  Thomas Ligotti is an American pessimist and innovator in weird fiction. Noteworthy for avoiding traditional horror storytelling and for using language in an extremely precise and careful way, Ligotti’s horror is pointedly philosophical; that is, the menace in a Ligotti story is an idea more often than it is a monster or a villain. Specifically, the menacing idea is the notion that existence is meaningless, that reality cannot really be distinguished from nothingness. Ideas such as these are often combined and labeled “nihilism,” which means “belief in nothing.” Nihilism has no institutions, no “rules,” but is a name for a point of view that can be found anywhere, including in literature and philosophy, especially when the topic is a loss of faith in conventional values, or even in conventional ideas of what does or does not exist. This loss of faith is often called “disillusionment,” and it may be said that it is disillusionment that Ligotti imparts to the reader through his fiction.

  During the 1980s Ligotti published his first stories in small press magazines such as Nyctalops, Eldritch Tales, Grimoire, Grue, Fantasy Macabre, Dark Horizons, and Crypt of Cthulhu. His first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was published in a
limited edition by Silver Scarab Press in 1985, expanded and reissued first in England by Robinson Publishing in 1989, and then in the United States in 1990 by Carroll and Graf, which would go on to publish three further collections, Grimscribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), and The Nightmare Factory (1996). Songs of a Dead Dreamer was highly praised for its originality and importance when it was published. The Nightmare Factory was the first mass market paperback of Ligotti’s work, incorporating selections from his earlier collections alongside new material, and it won both the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards for Best Fiction Collection of 1996. During this period, Ligotti also published The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1994) (with an introduction by fellow horror master Michael Shea), a work that shows particularly well Ligotti’s highly self-aware approach to horror as a literary genre.

  Over a period of five years, Ligotti produced a series of four works in collaboration with the English experimental band Current 93, consisting of brief, limited-edition books released along with compact discs of original music inspired by the fiction, as well as readings of the fiction. These works were In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997), I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000), This Degenerate Little Town (2001), and The Unholy City (2002).

  “The Red Tower”: The Universe as a Nightmare Factory

  “The Red Tower” is among the most widely reprinted of Ligotti’s stories, and it won a Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction after it was first published in his collection The Nightmare Factory in 1996. The concluding story of the book, its subject is echoed by the title of, and serves as a coda to, that collection as a whole. More an unnerving prose poem than a plot-driven narrative, it consists of an unnamed first-person narrator’s description of a three-story, ruined factory made of crumbling red brick, known as the Red Tower, that stands in an otherwise blank landscape. This factory, operating like an organism, without owners, employees, or even consumers for its products, industriously churns out a wide variety of grotesque “novelty items,” until it begins to break down and fade from existence.

  This building and its hostile, empty environment, apparently resentful of the factory’s novelties, are the story’s only major characters, for the reader learns nothing of the narrator beyond that he or she is part of a select group of alienated obsessives who share their “hallucinatory accounts” of the Tower’s activities. These accounts inform the narrator’s speculation that the factory’s environs are attempting to return to a state of total vacancy. The narrator admires the factory’s defiant production of absurd artifacts, while anxiously anticipating its inevitable dissolution.

  With its eschewal of traditional plot and character; development of a highly stylized, abstract, and even opaque language; and highly wrought images of disintegration and entropy, the story showcases many of the techniques and themes for which Ligotti’s name has become a sort of shorthand. Its atmosphere of decay is inextricable from its allegorical portrayal of a universe that is intrinsically hostile to creativity, consciousness, and even existence itself.

  Sean Moreland

  In 2002, Ligotti’s collection of stories all related to the idea of “corporate horror,” entitled My Work Is Not Yet Done, won the Stoker and International Horror Guild awards for Best Long Fiction. The following year, he published a screenplay, Crampton, written in collaboration with Brandon Trenz, and originally intended as an episode of The X-Files television program. He remained highly active in publishing during this period, releasing Sideshow and Other Stories (2003), Death Poems (2004), The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (2005), and Teatro Grottesco (2006), all published by small presses instead of mainstream, mass market ones.

  There followed a publishing hiatus of eight years. In 2007, however, a filmed adaptation of Ligotti’s early story “The Frolic” was released, directed by Jacob Cooney, with a screenplay by Ligotti and Brandon Trenz.

  Ligotti returned to publishing in 2014 with a collection of two stories, The Spectral Link, and the same year he was also the subject of a collection of interviews spanning twenty-five years of his career, titled Born to Fear and edited by Matt Cardin. His name and work gained additional prominence in 2014 when the first season of the HBO television series True Detective incorporated distinctively Ligottian elements into its dialogue and dark philosophical worldview, prompting an accusation of plagiarism (not leveled by Ligotti himself) that attained international media attention and brought Ligotti to the awareness of a massive mainstream audience for the first time. Ligotti’s significance has also been acknowledged by the republication of his two earliest collections in one volume by Penguin Books, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, in 2015.

  Ligotti has acknowledged the influence of several philosophers on his work and his thought, most notably Romanian pessimist Emile Cioran and the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Since his stories tend to be more about ideas than about character or plot, except indirectly, the language and imagery Ligotti uses become accordingly more important, since it is the story itself that has to be frightening, rather than what the story is about.

  Ligotti makes his point of view available to others by employing both new and familiar aspects of horror stories; the somewhat exaggerated nature of the dangers and fears in a conventional horror tale are used to make Ligotti’s more subtle uncertainties large enough to see clearly. In stories such as “The Sect of the Idiot,” “The Mystics of Muelenberg,” and “The Voice in the Bones,” rather than present the reader with a disillusioned character passively thinking in a single setting, simply reciting nihilistic ideas, Ligotti instead will introduce characters into situations that cause them to discover, or rediscover, the unreality and emptiness of the world and of themselves. By dramatizing this idea, turning it into a realization for characters, rather than the “message,” Ligotti is able to infuse this idea with the emotions appropriate to it. In Ligotti’s work, the discovery of unreality leads the reader to the possibility that nothing is real.

  The student of horror fiction is familiar with stories revolving around sinister dolls and puppets. E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose story “The Sand-man” includes an “automaton” (robot) character, was one of the most important writers to deal extensively with dolls. The most famous section of the classic English anthology horror film “Dead of Night” (1945) involves a ventriloquist dummy come to life, as does an episode of the original Twilight Zone, “The Dummy” (1962). So does the Anthony Hopkins film Magic (1978). Dolls or dummies occur again and again in Ligotti’s fiction, serving as important images of a kind of falseness in life. The idea that there is really no difference between a human being and a manikin is addressed in “Dream of a Manikin,” for example; the narrator at one point is unable to determine whether or not the figures he sees are people impersonating dolls, or simply dolls. The dolls invite the narrator to become one of them, to “die into” them, but this death is more like the disappearance of the idea of life itself, a loss even greater than the loss of an individual life. As is typical in Ligotti’s work, the question of reality is not treated separately from the question of life itself; if reality is unreal, then life is unreal, and death therefore is the truer reality.

  Ligotti’s stories seldom involve action or violence, although My Work Is Not Yet Done marries an element of supernatural violence to the meditations on emptiness. Heroes and villains are also typically absent from his work; the cosmos, or life itself, is the villain in Ligotti’s fiction, with no hero to vanquish them. Instead, Ligotti’s main characters are often dreamers. Actual dreams have an important place in Ligotti’s work, but the figure of the dreamer is more than just a character who dreams a dream. A dreamer is, in a way, a reality-impaired person; someone who is less solidly connected to what is supposed to be real. The dreamer may or may not have a job, but usually that job will be a meaningless and solitary occupation. He will be isolated, either in real solitude, or so alienated from other people that he might as well be alone even in a
crowd. Since the dreamer is only superficially participating in everyday life, which is all of reality for most people, the dreamer seems to be less real. The point of view of the dreamer, someone who does not see reality as real, is extensively explored in Ligotti’s fiction. Sometimes the dreamer is someone who despises reality as a crude illusion, but more often Ligotti’s dreamers are people who seem unable to manage to believe in reality, or in themselves.

  Seen from this point of view, reality often seems absurd, which means that it seems pointless and silly. The point of view of the dreamer is ironic, that is, the dreamer does not fully believe in reality, but understands that the people around him do. This gives rise to sardonic humor, which means a kind of humor that is painful. Even though they find life to be empty and meaningless, Ligotti’s characters do not want to die and will cling to their dream of life even though they cannot find any meaning in living. In the middle of his 2014 story “Metaphysica Morum,” there is a long letter written in the style of American phantasmagoric author William S. Burroughs, which combines broad humor with the absurd contrast between the tone of the letter and the tone of the rest of the story. Ligotti’s fiction often creates effects in this way, using aspects of style or tone alongside more familiar ways of creating effects using characters and situations. This passage resembles others in earlier stories that involve Hoffmann-like dream characters, unreal persons who are darkly sarcastic avatars of unreality, or agents of it.

  Much of Ligotti’s early work appeared in publications devoted in whole or in part to literary works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, so that, for a time, Ligotti was regarded as a “Lovecraftian” writer. Stories such as “Nethescurial” and “The Prodigy of Dreams” are experiments in a more overtly Lovecraftian vein, both involving the creation of godlike otherworldly entities—Nethescurial itself, and Cynothoglys, respectively. Ligotti also invented his own dream city, “Vastarien,” in the story of the same name. However, Ligotti’s connection to Lovecraft actually redefined for many what “Lovecraftian” meant, as he did not simply ape the more obvious aspects of Lovecraft’s work in his own, but instead adopted Lovecraft’s own point of view. Lovecraft, a strict materialist, felt that existence was fundamentally meaningless, that tradition and stability were the greatest goods a society could possess, and that one should adopt a detached attitude toward reality. Ligotti extends this perspective and makes it less calm and more painful. He is a Lovecraftian in the sense that he writes horror fiction in order to express a philosophy of horror.

 

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