----
“If all the world’s a stage, as that bard guy and practically everyone else has said, then its playbook overflows with Grand Guignol and grotesquerie. Nor should we overlook that its actors- us, that is- must at some point all star in scenes of ravaging mayhem and boundless nightmare. And everyone dies in the end. Had we not all been born on the very boards of this dreadful playhouse, one can only wonder what idiot would choose to join the company of the doomed.”
-Thomas Ligotti
“I’ve never been tempted to write anything that was not essentially nightmarish.”
-Thomas Ligotti
“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.’”
-Douglas A. Anderson, from the Foreword to the Thomas Ligotti collection The Shadow at the Bottom of the World
Introduction
I purchased the above Ligotti collection sometime in the year 2005 (when it first came out), though it wasn’t until 2008 that I became especially obsessed in Ligotti and began collecting any of his books that I could get my hands on, which wasn’t easy as many of them were out-of-print at that time. Although I haven’t read all that many horror novels, I have read quite a few horror stories, from the supernaturalist ghost stories of the 19th century (such as the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan LeFanu and Arthur Machen) to the writers they inspired in the 20th century (M.R. James) to the “weird fiction” genre of horror as pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft and his followers (such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, and, to use more modern examples, Ramsey Campbell and Matt Cardin). I’ve always preferred the atmospheric and weird horror tale to, say, the more visceral and hyper violent splatterpunk style that became popular in the late 1980’s and flourished in the 1990’s (though I think a few authors who worked in that field, such as Poppy Z. Brite, wrote fiction of credit). After all these years, I still feel that Lovecraft was the greatest writer of horror fiction of all-time… however, I believe that Thomas Ligotti is the greatest living writer of horror, and perhaps one of the greatest living writers period, even though his fictional output has dwindled over the last decade (to the extent that I don’t think he’s had any new stories published since 2002 or 2003). Even though he could hardly be called prolific (his literary output consists mainly of around 65+ short stories, a number of vignettes, a book of poems, two screenplays, and a couple of albums), I think his work is some of the most powerful fiction that I’ve ever come across, and to make a long story short, he’s been a huge inspiration on my own writing endeavors.
One final point (and I should add here that of all the days I’ve assembled for this blog this one has the least amount of original content on my own part, as I believe that Ligotti and his work can speak for itself): it will quickly become apparent that Ligotti is a pessimist, a fatalist, and a supporter of the philosophy of antinatalism (which is a philosophy that assigns a negative moral value judgment to birth and human reproduction). Although I can see many aspects of myself in Ligotti (for example, he suffers from many of the same medical and psychological disorders that I do), and while I myself am something of a pessimist with a dim view of human nature, I also believe in the possibility of redemption, which places my pessimism more along the lines of J.K. Huysmans or Current 93’s David Tibet (or, to use a secular example, the comic book writer Grant Morrison). To quote from an essay that David Tibet wrote about his friendship with Ligotti, “I recall that I told him that I thought he and I shared a similar view of the world and its heart, though we had drawn different conclusions. Both Tom and I saw a fallen world, but I believe in redemption. Tom has gone to that terrible place beyond worlds, beyond redemptions, beyond words, where even the silence was ferocious and painful.” But I won’t bore you to death with my critiques in regards to antinatalism or cosmic pessimism. I will say that while I disagree with Ligotti’s worldview I also must admit that there’s always the strong possibility that he could be correct (as one could say about any worldview, really), and I must also admit that he’s one of the most articulate writers on why consciousness should be seen as a curse. But I digress.
Biography
Thomas Ligotti was born in Detroit, Michigan on July 9th, 1953, but spent most of his childhood living in an upper-class suburb that bordered Detroit (I believe Grosse Pointe is the area he refers to). At the age of 2, he was operated on for an internal rupture. The oldest of three brothers, he was raised as a Catholic but abandoned the religion while in his mid-teens. During his childhood, he watched many horror films at the local movie theater, the first one of which he saw being The Tarantula. Ligotti described himself as a burn-out in the late 1960’s: he would spend a lot of his free time in the ghettoes and dope houses of Detroit’s east side. In August of 1970, at the age of 17, he suffered an emotional breakdown following an intense period of drug use and booze, which led to the start of his life-long anxiety-panic disorder. In 1971, he graduated from Grosse Pointe North High School. That same year, while assisting in a garage sale held by his aunt, he discovered Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House in a box of popular novels. Being a fan of the film, he read it, and this was his discovery of horror fiction (prior to this, the only real fiction he read was Sherlock Holmes stories). He began seeking out similar material. He stumbled across the work of Arthur Machen in a local drugstore, and later on that year, in that same drug store, he discovered the work of H.P. Lovecraft via the collection known as Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Vol. I (interestingly enough, he came across the work of Algernon Blackwood at a K-Mart, which makes me think how truly strange the 1970’s must have been). From 1971-1973 he attended Macomb County Community College, and in 1975, he received a B.A. degree in English from Wayne State University, Detroit.
In 1976, Ligotti began starting to write, after stumbling upon the world of small press horror magazines, and also as an escape from his chronic anxiety. Early influences, besides Lovecraft and Poe, included Vladimir Nabokov and the Symbolist and French Decadent poets and writers of the 19th century. Ligotti wasn’t happy with his early efforts, and years later destroyed all of them (around two dozen stories or so). During this period of his life (from 1976 to 1979) he was severely depressed. In 1979 he joined the Literary Criticism Division of the Gale Research Company in downtown Detroit as an Associate Editor, a job he would work at for 23 years. During this time he also submitted horror tales to the publisher known as Arkham House, which were rejected as “unsuitable.” 1981 saw his first publication when his short story “The Chymist” was featured in that year’s March issue of Nyctalops magazine.
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1985 saw the publication of Ligotti’s first collection of short stories, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Published by Silver Scarab Press, it had a very limited trade paperback run of 300 copies, and featured an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. In 1989, a revised and expanded version of the book was released by Carroll & Graf. In 1991, Ligotti began suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome due to stress and decided to quit writing, choosing to focus on teaching himself the guitar instead. Eventually, however, that also became a source of stress for him and he went back to writing (though he thought about stopping writing again in 1996). In December 1991, Grimscribe, Ligotti’s second collection of short stories was published, again by Carroll & Graf.
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1994 saw the publication of two of Ligotti’s books: first off, Carroll & Graf released Noctuary, his third collection, while Silver Salamander Press released The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales, a collection of short vignettes (this latter book is very hard to come by… even I don’t own a copy of it). Around this point in time the company Ligotti worked for began undergoing a series of reorganizations and Ligotti’s co-workers began worrying that he would “do something” (presumably violent), though Ligotti said he didn’t start getting violent work-related fantasies until around the year 2000.
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In the late 1990’s, Ligotti began working on a script for the X-Files TV show with one of his co-workers, Brandon Trenz. Eventually they adapted this teleplay into a full-length script named “Crampton” which has yet to be filmed. In the latter half of the 1990’s Ligotti also began working with Current 93’s David Tibet. Tibet first discovered Ligotti’s work through Songs of a Dead Dreamer, the first story of which, “The Frolic,” disturbed him to such a great extent that he had to put the book down for a couple of weeks. Tibet ended up sending a letter to Ligotti, along with nearly every album Current 93 had recorded up to that point in time, suggesting that their work had something in common (thematically speaking) and that they should work together. Ligotti agreed, and over the next few years the two would work together on a number of musical projects (such as 1997’s In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land and 2000’s I Have a Special Plan for This World), but seeing as how I detailed this to some extent in my Current 93 Day I won’t repeat myself here. It was a fruitful partnership though as Tibet’s Dutro record label would also end up releasing a number of Ligotti’s books.
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In 2001, Ligotti quit his job and moved to Florida (despite his hated of the southern hemisphere), where he took up doing freelance copy editing work for his former employer. Around this same time he began work on what was perhaps his most ambitious project, My Work is not yet Done. At 42,000 words, this short novel (Ligotti resists referring to it as a novella) is, to date, his longest work. Initially Ligotti had foreseen it as a film script, then as a 300 page full-length novel, before deciding it worked best when it was pared down. Perhaps his most conventional (and funny in a bleak way) work, it revolves around a disgruntled office worker named Frank Dominio. After being fired from his corporate job, Frank plans to unleash bloody revenge on his detestable co-workers, but a freakish act of fate endows him with demonic and supernatural powers, which he then uses to bump off his co-workers in increasingly creative and ghastly ways. This story was one of the first of what came to be known as Ligotti’s “corporate horror” work, and in 2002 it was published by Mythos Books in the collection My Work is not yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror.
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In 2003 Dutro put out Ligotti’s Crampton screenplay: also included with this product was The Unholy City, a CD featuring 6 songs written and composed by Thomas Ligotti. In 2004 Dutro released a collection of Ligotti’s poetry entitled Death Poems (which I don‘t own and have never read, sadly), and in 2006 they published Ligotti’s fourth (and, in the opinion of many of his fans, finest) collection of short stories, Teatro Grottesco. To date, this has been the final collection of short stories that Ligotti has had published. And in 2007, a 22 minute film entitled The Frolic (based on one of Ligotti’s short stories) was released, though I have never seen this film.
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2010 saw the re-publication of Songs of a Dead Dreamer. That same year Hippocampus Press published Ligotti’s first non-fictional work, a philosophy book that he had been working on for many years entitled The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. Dedicated to the memory of Peter Wessel Zapffe, and opening with perhaps one of the grimmest passages from the Dhammapada of Buddhism (“Look at your body- A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings“), it is perhaps Ligotti’s bleakest work, an extended 246 page treatise which saw him fully expounding on the pessimistic ideas and theories he had been exploring for years in both his fiction and in his interviews. Asking questions such as “Should the human race voluntarily put an end to its existence?”, it explores a vast range of topics (including Zapffe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Gnosticism, Deicide, H.P. Lovecraft, Terror Management Theory, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Nietzsche, Buddhism, U.G. Krishnamurti, and Sweeney Todd). Scattered throughout chapters given such evocative titles as “The Nightmare of Being” and “The Cult of Grinning Martyrs” and “Autopsy on a Puppet” are a number of morbidly fascinating passages and quotes, such as “the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive” and “existence is a state of demonic mania” and “Behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world” and “this toilet of the galaxy” and “human nature may be nothing more than puppet nature” and “the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue” and “our heads were baptized in the font of death” and, my personal favorite, “While we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.” According to Ligotti, the evolution of consciousness is the “parent of all horrors,” the self is a “spectral tapeworm,” and the universe itself is a “jungle of blind mutations,” a “shoddy cosmos,” a “world of cosmic misrule,” and so forth. In the end, Ligotti concludes that life is malignantly useless and that “our only natural birthright is a right to die.” I guess what I’m trying to say here is that for a book full of such bleak and ugly ideas it’s also beautifully written, paradoxically enough. I’d recommend it to anyone seeking out a truly pessimistic reading experience, though I’m aware that it won’t get Ligotti any invitations to record a “It Gets Better” video anytime soon.
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p.s. Hey. Nobody makes posts like d.l. Sypha aka the great writer James Champagne. He put together this amazing post about Thomas Ligotti some years back. Now Ligotti has been 'discovered' and has become a thing and so on, and writers are writing about him and so on, but you will never have a better introduction to his work that what's right up above this. Luxuriate. Thank you again, James!
“If all the world’s a stage, as that bard guy and practically everyone else has said, then its playbook overflows with Grand Guignol and grotesquerie. Nor should we overlook that its actors- us, that is- must at some point all star in scenes of ravaging mayhem and boundless nightmare. And everyone dies in the end. Had we not all been born on the very boards of this dreadful playhouse, one can only wonder what idiot would choose to join the company of the doomed.”
-Thomas Ligotti
“I’ve never been tempted to write anything that was not essentially nightmarish.”
-Thomas Ligotti
“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.’”
-Douglas A. Anderson, from the Foreword to the Thomas Ligotti collection The Shadow at the Bottom of the World
Introduction
I purchased the above Ligotti collection sometime in the year 2005 (when it first came out), though it wasn’t until 2008 that I became especially obsessed in Ligotti and began collecting any of his books that I could get my hands on, which wasn’t easy as many of them were out-of-print at that time. Although I haven’t read all that many horror novels, I have read quite a few horror stories, from the supernaturalist ghost stories of the 19th century (such as the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan LeFanu and Arthur Machen) to the writers they inspired in the 20th century (M.R. James) to the “weird fiction” genre of horror as pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft and his followers (such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, and, to use more modern examples, Ramsey Campbell and Matt Cardin). I’ve always preferred the atmospheric and weird horror tale to, say, the more visceral and hyper violent splatterpunk style that became popular in the late 1980’s and flourished in the 1990’s (though I think a few authors who worked in that field, such as Poppy Z. Brite, wrote fiction of credit). After all these years, I still feel that Lovecraft was the greatest writer of horror fiction of all-time… however, I believe that Thomas Ligotti is the greatest living writer of horror, and perhaps one of the greatest living writers period, even though his fictional output has dwindled over the last decade (to the extent that I don’t think he’s had any new stories published since 2002 or 2003). Even though he could hardly be called prolific (his literary output consists mainly of around 65+ short stories, a number of vignettes, a book of poems, two screenplays, and a couple of albums), I think his work is some of the most powerful fiction that I’ve ever come across, and to make a long story short, he’s been a huge inspiration on my own writing endeavors.
One final point (and I should add here that of all the days I’ve assembled for this blog this one has the least amount of original content on my own part, as I believe that Ligotti and his work can speak for itself): it will quickly become apparent that Ligotti is a pessimist, a fatalist, and a supporter of the philosophy of antinatalism (which is a philosophy that assigns a negative moral value judgment to birth and human reproduction). Although I can see many aspects of myself in Ligotti (for example, he suffers from many of the same medical and psychological disorders that I do), and while I myself am something of a pessimist with a dim view of human nature, I also believe in the possibility of redemption, which places my pessimism more along the lines of J.K. Huysmans or Current 93’s David Tibet (or, to use a secular example, the comic book writer Grant Morrison). To quote from an essay that David Tibet wrote about his friendship with Ligotti, “I recall that I told him that I thought he and I shared a similar view of the world and its heart, though we had drawn different conclusions. Both Tom and I saw a fallen world, but I believe in redemption. Tom has gone to that terrible place beyond worlds, beyond redemptions, beyond words, where even the silence was ferocious and painful.” But I won’t bore you to death with my critiques in regards to antinatalism or cosmic pessimism. I will say that while I disagree with Ligotti’s worldview I also must admit that there’s always the strong possibility that he could be correct (as one could say about any worldview, really), and I must also admit that he’s one of the most articulate writers on why consciousness should be seen as a curse. But I digress.
Biography
Thomas Ligotti was born in Detroit, Michigan on July 9th, 1953, but spent most of his childhood living in an upper-class suburb that bordered Detroit (I believe Grosse Pointe is the area he refers to). At the age of 2, he was operated on for an internal rupture. The oldest of three brothers, he was raised as a Catholic but abandoned the religion while in his mid-teens. During his childhood, he watched many horror films at the local movie theater, the first one of which he saw being The Tarantula. Ligotti described himself as a burn-out in the late 1960’s: he would spend a lot of his free time in the ghettoes and dope houses of Detroit’s east side. In August of 1970, at the age of 17, he suffered an emotional breakdown following an intense period of drug use and booze, which led to the start of his life-long anxiety-panic disorder. In 1971, he graduated from Grosse Pointe North High School. That same year, while assisting in a garage sale held by his aunt, he discovered Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House in a box of popular novels. Being a fan of the film, he read it, and this was his discovery of horror fiction (prior to this, the only real fiction he read was Sherlock Holmes stories). He began seeking out similar material. He stumbled across the work of Arthur Machen in a local drugstore, and later on that year, in that same drug store, he discovered the work of H.P. Lovecraft via the collection known as Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Vol. I (interestingly enough, he came across the work of Algernon Blackwood at a K-Mart, which makes me think how truly strange the 1970’s must have been). From 1971-1973 he attended Macomb County Community College, and in 1975, he received a B.A. degree in English from Wayne State University, Detroit.
In 1976, Ligotti began starting to write, after stumbling upon the world of small press horror magazines, and also as an escape from his chronic anxiety. Early influences, besides Lovecraft and Poe, included Vladimir Nabokov and the Symbolist and French Decadent poets and writers of the 19th century. Ligotti wasn’t happy with his early efforts, and years later destroyed all of them (around two dozen stories or so). During this period of his life (from 1976 to 1979) he was severely depressed. In 1979 he joined the Literary Criticism Division of the Gale Research Company in downtown Detroit as an Associate Editor, a job he would work at for 23 years. During this time he also submitted horror tales to the publisher known as Arkham House, which were rejected as “unsuitable.” 1981 saw his first publication when his short story “The Chymist” was featured in that year’s March issue of Nyctalops magazine.
1985 saw the publication of Ligotti’s first collection of short stories, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Published by Silver Scarab Press, it had a very limited trade paperback run of 300 copies, and featured an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. In 1989, a revised and expanded version of the book was released by Carroll & Graf. In 1991, Ligotti began suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome due to stress and decided to quit writing, choosing to focus on teaching himself the guitar instead. Eventually, however, that also became a source of stress for him and he went back to writing (though he thought about stopping writing again in 1996). In December 1991, Grimscribe, Ligotti’s second collection of short stories was published, again by Carroll & Graf.
1994 saw the publication of two of Ligotti’s books: first off, Carroll & Graf released Noctuary, his third collection, while Silver Salamander Press released The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales, a collection of short vignettes (this latter book is very hard to come by… even I don’t own a copy of it). Around this point in time the company Ligotti worked for began undergoing a series of reorganizations and Ligotti’s co-workers began worrying that he would “do something” (presumably violent), though Ligotti said he didn’t start getting violent work-related fantasies until around the year 2000.
In the late 1990’s, Ligotti began working on a script for the X-Files TV show with one of his co-workers, Brandon Trenz. Eventually they adapted this teleplay into a full-length script named “Crampton” which has yet to be filmed. In the latter half of the 1990’s Ligotti also began working with Current 93’s David Tibet. Tibet first discovered Ligotti’s work through Songs of a Dead Dreamer, the first story of which, “The Frolic,” disturbed him to such a great extent that he had to put the book down for a couple of weeks. Tibet ended up sending a letter to Ligotti, along with nearly every album Current 93 had recorded up to that point in time, suggesting that their work had something in common (thematically speaking) and that they should work together. Ligotti agreed, and over the next few years the two would work together on a number of musical projects (such as 1997’s In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land and 2000’s I Have a Special Plan for This World), but seeing as how I detailed this to some extent in my Current 93 Day I won’t repeat myself here. It was a fruitful partnership though as Tibet’s Dutro record label would also end up releasing a number of Ligotti’s books.
In 2001, Ligotti quit his job and moved to Florida (despite his hated of the southern hemisphere), where he took up doing freelance copy editing work for his former employer. Around this same time he began work on what was perhaps his most ambitious project, My Work is not yet Done. At 42,000 words, this short novel (Ligotti resists referring to it as a novella) is, to date, his longest work. Initially Ligotti had foreseen it as a film script, then as a 300 page full-length novel, before deciding it worked best when it was pared down. Perhaps his most conventional (and funny in a bleak way) work, it revolves around a disgruntled office worker named Frank Dominio. After being fired from his corporate job, Frank plans to unleash bloody revenge on his detestable co-workers, but a freakish act of fate endows him with demonic and supernatural powers, which he then uses to bump off his co-workers in increasingly creative and ghastly ways. This story was one of the first of what came to be known as Ligotti’s “corporate horror” work, and in 2002 it was published by Mythos Books in the collection My Work is not yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror.
In 2003 Dutro put out Ligotti’s Crampton screenplay: also included with this product was The Unholy City, a CD featuring 6 songs written and composed by Thomas Ligotti. In 2004 Dutro released a collection of Ligotti’s poetry entitled Death Poems (which I don‘t own and have never read, sadly), and in 2006 they published Ligotti’s fourth (and, in the opinion of many of his fans, finest) collection of short stories, Teatro Grottesco. To date, this has been the final collection of short stories that Ligotti has had published. And in 2007, a 22 minute film entitled The Frolic (based on one of Ligotti’s short stories) was released, though I have never seen this film.
2010 saw the re-publication of Songs of a Dead Dreamer. That same year Hippocampus Press published Ligotti’s first non-fictional work, a philosophy book that he had been working on for many years entitled The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. Dedicated to the memory of Peter Wessel Zapffe, and opening with perhaps one of the grimmest passages from the Dhammapada of Buddhism (“Look at your body- A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings“), it is perhaps Ligotti’s bleakest work, an extended 246 page treatise which saw him fully expounding on the pessimistic ideas and theories he had been exploring for years in both his fiction and in his interviews. Asking questions such as “Should the human race voluntarily put an end to its existence?”, it explores a vast range of topics (including Zapffe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Gnosticism, Deicide, H.P. Lovecraft, Terror Management Theory, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Nietzsche, Buddhism, U.G. Krishnamurti, and Sweeney Todd). Scattered throughout chapters given such evocative titles as “The Nightmare of Being” and “The Cult of Grinning Martyrs” and “Autopsy on a Puppet” are a number of morbidly fascinating passages and quotes, such as “the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive” and “existence is a state of demonic mania” and “Behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world” and “this toilet of the galaxy” and “human nature may be nothing more than puppet nature” and “the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue” and “our heads were baptized in the font of death” and, my personal favorite, “While we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.” According to Ligotti, the evolution of consciousness is the “parent of all horrors,” the self is a “spectral tapeworm,” and the universe itself is a “jungle of blind mutations,” a “shoddy cosmos,” a “world of cosmic misrule,” and so forth. In the end, Ligotti concludes that life is malignantly useless and that “our only natural birthright is a right to die.” I guess what I’m trying to say here is that for a book full of such bleak and ugly ideas it’s also beautifully written, paradoxically enough. I’d recommend it to anyone seeking out a truly pessimistic reading experience, though I’m aware that it won’t get Ligotti any invitations to record a “It Gets Better” video anytime soon.
Some Ligotti trivia:
Ligotti’s favorite writers include the following: H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, William S. Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, Bruno Schulz, Raymond Chandler, Philip Larkin, Dino Buzzati, Hagiwara Sakutaro, Thomas Bernhard, Jorge Luis Borges, E. M. Cioran, Sadeq Hedeyat, S. I. Witkiewicz, and Roland Topor.
Ligotti’s favorite actor of all-time is Christopher Walken (who he imagines could play the lead role of Frank Dominio in My Work is not yet Done), though he’s also expressed admiration towards Udo Kier. In a 2006 interview, he claimed that the 2005 French film Caché was the worst film he had ever seen. Interestingly enough, he also prefers political thrillers, courtroom dramas and caper films to horror movies.
In terms of music, Ligotti mainly likes guitar instrumentals (mainly from the 1960s) and surf-guitar music. Other bands he has been said to like include The Shadows, My Bloody Valentine, The Moody Blues, Iron Butterfly, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and King Crimson (in fact, he’s claimed that King Crimson’s song “In the Court of the Crimson King” is his favorite piece of music, and on the rare occasions in which he posts on the forums of his website it’s always under the username YellowJester, which is most likely a nod to the lyrics of the aforementioned song). He also professes to admire Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd musical.
Thomas Ligotti suffers from Anhedonia, Dysphoria, Agoraphobia, Bipolar Depression, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and a severe anxiety-panic disorder.
When asked to pick what he thinks is his best story, he usually answers “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” (which appears in the Grimscribe collection, among others).
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For the neophyte:
For many years, certain books written by Ligotti have been out-of-print and hard to come by, but as of recently that’s changed. His first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was reprinted in a third and definitive edition by Subterranean Press this year, and I read that in 2011 they’ll be reprinting his second collection of stories, Grimscribe. Also, in 2008 and 2009 Virgin Books reprinted Teatro Grottesco and My Work is not yet Done in affordable paperback editions, and while their cover art is kind of unfortunate (mainly for My Work is not yet Done) it’s nice to have them back in print. If I would recommend one Ligotti collection over any other, it would be Teatro Grottesco, which I think is probably his strongest collection.
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For those just exploring Ligotti for the first time, a good place to start would be the “greatest hits” collection The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which was released by Cold Spring Press in 2005. Although I believe it’s out-of-print now, it’s still easy enough to find on the Internet, and in fact this was the first Ligotti book I myself ever purchased. It features 16 of Ligotti’s stronger stories, taken from a number of his different collections: there are four stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer, six taken from Grimscribe, two taken from Noctuary, and four taken from Teatro Grottesco. In theory, however, the best starting point for beginners would be the omnibus collection of Ligotti’s work entitled The Nightmare Factory, which was published by Carroll and Graf in 1996. This hefty 551 page volume (which includes an introduction by Ligotti and a foreword written by Poppy Z. Brite, which famously begins with the question, “Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?”) features 45 of Ligotti’s stories: nearly all of the stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer (with only two exceptions), the entirety of Grimscribe, most of the contents of Noctuary (though it excludes the vignettes collected under the title “Notebooks of the Night”) and six bonus stories which were then new at the time and which ended up being published in the Teatro Grottesco collection years later. Sadly, this book has been out-of-print for years now and is hard to come by cheap… I myself only nabbed a copy of it a couple of months ago. Still, it’s worth seeking out.
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A few other interesting Ligotti products is a book entitled The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays And Explorations, which was published by Wildside Press in 2003 and edited by Darrell Schweitzer, and with great cover art by one of Ligotti’s favorite artists, Jason Van Hollander. It includes a number of essays on Ligotti written by such luminaries as Robert M. Price, Matt Cardin, S.T. Joshi, and David Tibet. It also features a few interviews with Ligotti himself, though both of these interviews may be read on the Thomas Ligotti Online website. And in 2007 and 2008, Fox Atomic Comics released two graphic novel collections featuring comics based on the short stories of Ligotti. These volumes, entitled The Nightmare Factory and The Nightmare Factory Volume 2, feature special introductions to each comic written by Ligotti himself, which alone makes them worth seeking out.
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Excerpts from my current top 10 favorite Ligotti stories:
“Anyway, nothing he said was sickeningly graphic in the way you might imagine. When he told me about his ‘most memorable frolic,’ it was with a powerful sense of wonder and nostalgia, shocking as that sounds to me now. He seemed to feel a kind of homesickness, though his ‘home’ is a ramshackle ruin of his decayed mind. His psychosis has evidently bred an atrocious fairyland which exists in a powerful way for him. And despite the demented grandeur of his thousand names, he actually sees himself as only a minor figure in this world- a mediocre courtier in a broken-down kingdom of miracles and horrors. This modesty is very interesting when you consider the egotistical magnificence that a lot of psychopaths would attribute to themselves given a limitless orbit where they could play any imaginary role. But not John Doe. He’s a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic’s universe.
“There’s actually quite a poetic geography to his interior dreamland as he describes it. He talked about a place that sounded like a cosmos of crooked houses and littered alleys, a slum among the stars. Which may be his distorted rendering of a life spent growing up in a shabby neighborhood- an attempt on his part to recast the traumatic memories of his childhood into a realm that cross-breeds a mean-street reality with a fantasy world of his imagination, a phantasmagoric mingling of heaven and hell. This is where he does his ‘frolicking’ with what he calls his ‘awestruck company.’ The place where he took his victims might possibly have been an abandoned building, or even an accommodating sewer. I say this based on his repeated mentioning of ‘the jolly river of refuse’ and ‘the jagged heaps in shadows,’ which could certainly be mad transmutations of a literal wasteland, some grubby and secluded environment that his mind turned into a funhouse of bizarre marvels. Less fathomable are his memories of a moonlit corridor where mirrors scream and laugh, dark peaks of some kind that won’t remain still, a stairway that’s ‘broken’ in a very strange way, though this last one fits in with the background of a dilapidated slum. There is always a paradoxical blend of forsaken topographies and shining sanctuaries in his mind, almost a self-hypnotic-” Dr. Munck caught himself before continuing in this vein of reluctant admiration.
-From “The Frolic” (Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
“As Veech progresses through the half-light, he is suddenly halted by a metal arm with a soft black handle. He backs off and continues to walk about the chamber, grinding sawdust, sand, perhaps pulverized stars underfoot. The dismembered limbs of dolls and puppets are strewn about everywhere. Posters, signs, billboards, and leaflets of various sorts are scattered around like playing cards, their bright words disarranged into nonsense. Countless other objects, devices, and leftover goods stock the room, more than one could possibly take notice of. But they are all, in some way, like those which have been described. One wonders, then, how they could add up to such an atmosphere of… isn’t repose the word? Yes, but a certain kind of repose: the repose of ruin.”
-From “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” (Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
“Very soon, however, he felt betrayed as the mystique of the Librairie de Grimoires was stripped away to reveal, in his eyes, a sideshow of charlatanry. For this disillusionment he had only himself to blame. It was his own fault that he continually subjected himself to the discrepancy between what he hoped to find and what he actually found in such establishments. In truth, there was little basis for his belief that there existed some arcane of a different kind altogether from that tendered by the books before him, all of which were sodden with an obscene reality. The other worlds portrayed in these books served only as annexes of this one; they were imposters of the authentic unreality which was the only redemption for Victor Keirion. And it was this terminal point that he sought, not those guidebooks of the “way” to useless destinations, heavens or hells that were mere pretexts for circumnavigating the real and reveling in it. For he dreamed of shadowed volumes that preached no earthly catechisms but delineated only a tenebrous liturgy of the spectral and rites of salvation by way of meticulous derangement. His absolute: to dwell among the ruins of reality.”
-From “Vastarien” (Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
“Something was making its way through the derelict’s scalp, rustling among the long greasy locks of an unsightly head. Part of it finally poked upwards- a thin sticklike thing. More of them emerged, dark wiry appendages that were bristling and bending and reaching for the outer world. At the end of each was a pair of slender snapping pincers. What ultimately broke through that shattered skull, pulling itself out with a wriggling motion of its many newborn arms, was approximately the size and proportions of a spider monkey. It had tiny translucent wings which fluttered a few times, glistening but useless, and was quite black, as if charred. Actually the creature seemed to be in an emaciated condition. When it turned its head toward the camera, it stared into the lens with malicious eyes and seemed to be chattering with its beaked mouth.”
-From “The Cocoons” (Grimscribe)
“In sleep he might thus find himself standing at the rim of a great gorge filled with pointed evergreens, and in the distance were the peaks of hills appearing in black silhouette under a sky chaotic with stars. Sublime scenery of this type often recurred in those books forbidden to him, sometimes providing the subject for one of the engraved illustrations accompanying a narrative. But he had never read in any book what his dream showed him in the sky above the gorge and above the hills. For each of the bright, bristling stars would begin to loosen in the places where the blackness held them. They wobbled at first, and then they rolled over in their bed of night. Now it was the other side of the stars that he saw, which was unlike anything ever displayed to the eyes of the earth. What he could see resembled not stars but something more like the underside of large stones one might overturn deep in damp woods. They had changed in the strangest way, changed because everything in the universe was changing and could no longer be protected from the changes being worked upon them by something that had been awakened in the blackness, something that desired to remold everything it could see… and had the power to see all things. Now the faces of the stars were crawling with things that made them gleam in a way that stars had never gleamed before. And then these things he saw in his dream began to drip from the stars toward the earth, streaking the night with their gleaming trails.”
-From “The Tsalal” (Noctuary)
“Vast organization of delirious images and impulses seeking Sustenance Input for its decaying systems. All data considered, including polluted discharges from the old Nightmare Network and after-images of degenerated EUs and Als (Con, Noncon, or OneiriCon). Total atrophy and occlusion of all circuits imminent- next stop, the Nowhere Network. Your surplus information- shadows and semblances lying dormant in long-unaccessed files- could be used to replenish our hungry database. No image too hideous; no impulse too attenuated or corrupt. Our organization has a life of its own, but without the continuous input of cheap data we cannot compete in today’s apocalyptic marketplace. From a rotting mutation, great illusions may grow. Don’t let us go belly up while the black empty spaces of the galaxy reverberate with hellish laughter. A multi-dimensional, semi-organic discorporation is dreaming… The signal repeats, steadily deteriorating, and then fades into nothingness. Long shot of the universe. There is no one behind the camera.”
-From “The Nightmare Network” (My Work is not yet Done)
“It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense. As long as I can remember, every incident and every impulse of my existence has served only to perpetrate one episode after another of conspicuous nonsense, each completely outrageous in its nonsensicality. Considered from whatever point of view- intimately close, infinitely remote, or any position in between- the whole thing has always seemed to be nothing more than some freak accident occurring at a painfully slow rate of speed. At times I have been rendered breathless by the impeccable chaoticism, the absolutely perfect nonsense of some spectacle taking place outside myself, or, on the other hand, some spectacle of equally outrageousness taking place within me. Images of densely twisted shapes and lines arise in my brain. Scribbles of a mentally deranged epileptic, I have often said to myself. If I may allow any exception to the outrageously nonsensical condition I have described- and I will allow none- this single exception would involve those visits which I experienced at scattered intervals throughout my existence, and especially one particular visit that took place in Mr. Vizniak’s medicine shop.”
-From “The Clown Puppet” (Teatro Grottesco)
“So it was that the Red Tower put into production its new, more terrible and perplexing, line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight and insistently grew back should one attempt to clip them. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long, deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough, igneous forms were set a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual’s death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling “hands” were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused open for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of a kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.”
-From “The Red Tower” (Teatro Grottesco) NOTE: “The Red Tower” is perhaps my favorite Ligotti story
“Early last September I discovered among the exhibits in a local art gallery a sort of performance piece in the form of an audiotape. This, I later learned, was the first of a series of tape-recorded dream monologues by an unknown artist. The following is a brief and highly typical excerpt from the opening section of this work. I recall that after a few seconds of hissing tape noise, the voice began speaking: “There was far more to deal with in the bungalow house than simply an infestation of vermin,” it said, “although that too had its questionable aspects.” Then the voice went on: “I could see only a few of the bodies where the moonlight shone through the open blinds of the living room windows and fell upon the carpet. Only one of the bodies seemed to be moving, and that very slowly, but there may have been more that were not yet dead. Aside from the chair in which I sat in the darkness there was very little furniture in the room, or elsewhere in the bungalow house for that matter. But a number of lamps were positioned around me, floor lamps and table lamps and even two tiny lamps on the mantel above the fireplace.”
-From “The Bungalow House” (Teatro Grottesco)
“’It is all so very, very simple,’ the artist continued. ‘Our bodies are but one manifestation of the energy, the activating force that sets in motion all the objects, all the bodies of this world and enables them to exist as they do. This activating force is something like a shadow that is not on the outside of all the bodies of this world but is inside of everything and thoroughly pervades everything- an all-moving darkness that has no substance in itself but that moves all the objects of this world, including those objects which we call our bodies. While I was in the throes of my gastrointestinal episode at the hospital where I was treated I descended, so to speak, to that deep abyss of entity where I could feel how this shadow, this darkness, was activating my body. I could also hear its movement, not only within my body but in everything around me, because the sound that it made was not the sound of my body- it was the sound of this shadow, this darkness, which is not like any other sound. Likewise, I was able to detect the workings of this pervasive and all-moving force through the sense of smell and the sense of taste, as well as the sense of touch with which my body is equipped. Finally I opened my eyes, for throughout much of this agonizing ordeal of my digestive system my eyelids were clenched shut in pain. And when I opened my eyes I found that I could see how everything around me, including my own body, was activated from within by this pervasive shadow, this all-moving darkness. And nothing looked as I had always known it to look. Before that night I had never experienced the world purely by means of my organs of physical sensation, which are the direct point of contact with that deep abyss of entity that I am calling the shadow, the darkness. My false and unreal works as an artist were merely the evidence of what I concocted with my mind or my imagination, which are basically nonsensical and dreamlike fabrications that only interfere with the workings of our senses. I believed that somehow these works of art reflected in some way the nature of my self or my soul, when in actuality they only reflected my deranged and useless desires to do something and to be something false and unreal. Like everything else, these desires had been activated by the same pervasive shadow, the all-moving darkness which, due to the self-annihilating agony of my gastrointestinal distress, I could now experience directly by means of my sense organs and without the interference of my imaginary mind or imaginary self.”
-From “The Shadow, The Darkness” (Teatro Grottesco)
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A Collection of Thomas Ligotti quotes as extracted from his numerous interviews:
Thomas Ligotti on why he doesn’t like stories that are just stories:
“It seems natural to me that people who like to read stories will, if they are writers, like to write stories. For my part, I don’t care for stories that are just stories. I feel there’s something missing from them. What’s missing for me is the presence of an author or, more precisely, an author’s consciousness. In most literary novels, the author is there in the spaces between the characters and the scenery, but I like to see the author out front and the rest in the background. Aside from the stories you mentioned in your question, I believe my own stories to have story galore within them. But these are only pretexts, coat racks on which to hang what’s really important to me, which is my own sensibility. That’s all I really have to work with. Most writers adore observing other people and the lives they lead, then making up a story about them. They really pay attention to the world around them. This is something I literally can’t do. I just don’t care about what makes people tick, and, as Sherlock Holmes said, I see but do not observe. It just seems completely trivial and useless to pay attention to these things. I’m no more interested in the physical universe, which sends scientists into raptures of rhetoric but doesn’t impress me in the least. I can’t fathom why anyone should care about how the universe began, how it works, or how it will end. More triviality and uselessness. At the same time, I’m in awe of writers who are adept at telling stories, just as I’m in awe of people who speak foreign languages or play a musical instrument really well. But that doesn’t mean that I want to read their stories or listen to them talk or make music. As Morrissey says in the Smiths’ song “Panic”: “Because the music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life.” The work of writers such as Malamud, William Styron, Saul Bellow, et al. not only says nothing to me about my life, but it says nothing to me about what I’ve experienced or thought of life broadly speaking. By contrast, writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, H. P. Lovecraft, and Thomas Bernhard say plenty of things about both my life in particular and life in general as I have experienced and thought of it. I can take an interest in the writing of these authors because they seem to have felt and thought as I have. William Burroughs once said that the job of the writer is to reveal to readers what they know but don’t know that they know. But you have to be pretty close to knowing it or you won’t know it when you see it.”
Thomas Ligotti on Lovecraft:
“Lovecraft was the first writer of this sort that I read, and in addition to being an artist whose works harmonized so well with my literary tastes, he was also the first author with whom I strongly identified. This may sound bizarre or pathetic, but H.P. Lovecraft has been, bar none other, the most intense and real personal presence in my life. Lovecraft was a dark guru who confirmed to me all my most awful suspicions about the universe.”
Thomas Ligotti on his muse:
“Sickness of the body and the mind.”
Thomas Ligotti on his outlook on life:
“My outlook is that it's a damn shame that organic life ever developed on this or any other planet, and that the pain that living creatures necessarily suffer makes for an existence that is a perennial nightmare. This attitude underlies almost everything I've written.”
Thomas Ligotti on the reoccurrence of puppets and manikins in his work:
“I've never made any conscious decision to write about puppets and mannikins and so forth. It just happened that these images had a strong and mysterious attraction for me, so naturally they turned up in my stories when I started writing. I guess that puppets are for me what space monsters were for Lovecraft: a menacing symbol of some essential and terrible fact of life. Exactly what that fact is would be difficult to specify. There's something that seems profoundly insane and grotesque about puppets and other representations of human beings, something that says to me, “This is how you are and this is how the world is.”
Thomas Ligotti on puppets:
“However, I still find puppets to be uncanny things. For me, the puppet emblemizes the entrapment and manipulation of human beings by forces beyond our control. Obviously, there are a lot of things that people are aware they cannot control in their lives. As the Firesign Theatre brilliantly said, "Your brain is not the boss." In my world, this is an everyday experience because I've been long besieged by abnormal psychological states that cause me to be constantly aware that I have no control over who I am and how I'll act. Most people don't feel this way, or they don't notice the controlling forces because they're very subtle. Having any kind of control over your actions or feelings is everybody's illusion. No one can make themselves what they are. It's a totally absurd notion, because if you could make yourself what you are you'd first have to be a certain way and be able to choose what that way would be. But then you'd also have to be able to choose to choose what way you would be, and on into infinity. There are always determining powers, and those make us what the way we are whether or not we realize it. I realize that there are philosophers who have reconciled determinism with free will on paper, and that everyone feels as if they're in control of themselves and take responsibility for their actions. But how many of us can say that we're always, or even often, in control of our thoughts? And if you're not in control of your thoughts, than what are you in control of?”
Thomas Ligotti on living in the Detroit area and his aversion to the southern hemisphere:
“I really have no special appreciation for the Detroit area that I'm aware of. As long as all the modern conveniences are available to me, I could live in a bubble city on the moon or in an underwater shopping mall. Of course, I've never lived anywhere else, so this idea that it doesn't matter to me where I live could be a complete delusion, and probably is. I exist in pretty much a constant state of nervous agitation so I seldom take any enjoyment in my surroundings, except possibly to the extent that they stimulate my imagination and allow me the fleeting sense that I'm no longer in a physical locale but in some imaginary venue. This sense is often provoked by driving through very shabby urban areas on my way to or from my job. [Unfortunately no longer the case since two years ago the company I work for moved to a pristine suburb west of Detroit.] But this feeling usually lasts for only a split second. I do put a sort of imaginary value on living in Michigan because it's in the northern hemisphere and not the southern hemisphere, toward which I feel a definite aversion. In fact, I feel a definite aversion toward all geography that's not in the northern half of the northern hemisphere. I really don't even like the word "south" or anything that's in southern places, whether it's in South America or Africa or Asia or wherever. On the other hand, I don't have any problem, in my imagination, with North America, northern Europe, northern Asia, and so on. Anywhere in which the natural landscape dies, or at least goes into a state of suspended animation, for a part of the year, is okay with me. I'm imaginatively averse to tropical regions, especially jungles. I'd rather live in a parking lot than anywhere near a jungle.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether he’s ever suffered from writer’s block:
“No, I've never suffered from anything like writer's block. Writing is difficult for me only in the sense that it stresses me out so much that I become physically ill after about an hour of doing it. My stomach becomes severely upset, my anxiety level goes through the roof, and I just have to stop. This is why I've never been very prolific and will become less so as time goes by and my little flame starts to go out.”
Thomas Ligotti on literary fame:
“I was very relieved when my stories were well-received by readers of small press magazines and, later, by critics who reviewed my collections. I wanted to be a writer in the fashion of Lovecraft, and until I attained some recognition for my horror stories I could barely stand to live with myself. It was something that I really needed to get out of my system. So, as I said, I was very relieved within myself when I achieved my modest literary ambitions. But as far as the circumstances of my life are concerned, nothing really changed. I go to work every day like most people. I wonder what's going to become of me if I live into old age since one doesn't become rich or famous just by writing short horror stories. As for being a cult author, I've said this many times to people: "There's no obscurity like minor renown." Not that I mind obscurity in the least. I wouldn't want to be well known to a wide public. I'd rather acquire millions of dollars playing the lottery than by writing best-selling books. Don't misunderstand me-as I mentioned before, I wanted to be published in the worst way and I craved attention for what I had written. That true for just about anyone who writes. Poor Poe openly declared that he lusted for a level of fame that he never saw in his lifetime. But I've already gotten all the fame I can handle at the moment, thanks.”
Thomas Ligotti on why he can never be a professional writer:
“I realized a long time ago that I could never be a professional writer for the simple reason that I'm not interested in the same things that people who buy the majority of the books in this world are interested in. Like Lovecraft, I'm not interested in people and their relationships. That alone counts me out as a professional writer. I also have a bad attitude toward the world. I think that life is a curse and so on. People reading a book on a beach or in an airplane don't want to hear stuff like that. They just want to relax and be told a diverting story from a third-person omniscient viewpoint, giving them the sense that they have a movie playing in their mind. I don't blame them in the least.”
Thomas Ligotti on the agony of writing:
“To me the actual task of writing is a real pain in the ass. I've fantasized about just imagining the characters and incidents of a story and having it appear in written form before my eyes. I know that there are plenty of writers who genuinely enjoy the nuts and bolts of the literary process. I'm not one of them. I really don't even think of myself as a writer. Probably the only people who think of themselves as writers are the pros who are doing it everyday and have "writer" on their tax forms and passports as their occupation. They're constantly being reminded by one thing or another that they're writers.”
Thomas Ligotti on what he wanted to be growing up:
“When I was a kid I wanted to be a baseball player named Rocky Calavito and imitated his batting stance and swing, pretending that I was him. Later I wanted to be any number of rock music stars. And then I wanted to be H. P. Lovecraft. At this time I've run out of other people that I want to be. My ideal persona these days is that of an inmate in a minimum security prison. That really seems like the good life to me.”
Thomas Ligotti on Current 93’s David Tibet:
“David Tibet is an incredibly well-read individual, and his reading interests include classic horror fiction of the kind that has served as a model for my own writing. He has read my stories and sent me practically the entire catalogue of Current 93 on CD, sensing that I would discover a fundamental likeness in artistic and philosophic attitude between us and suggesting collaboration. I did indeed sense that likeness in attitude and proposed that I write several very short stories that he could integrate in some way into a Current 93 recording. The stories became longer than I originally intended them to be and started to bleed into one another to compose a larger piece that was ultimately published by Durtro as, In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land, titled after a line in the classic Current 93 song, "Falling Back in Fields of Rape", and issued with an accompanying CD by Current 93. I don’t readily recall what made In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land ultimately take the form it did as a more or less integrated work. I don’t usually remember much about beginnings of most of the stories I’ve written. In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land seems very much a piece similar to a certain type of story which I’ve written over and over through the years, featuring a quasi-fantastical and deteriorated town where puppet-like characters play out their doom. As I remember it, I sent the stories to David one at a time, and I believe that he and his colleagues were working on the music about the same time I was producing the tales.”
Thomas Ligotti on his musical tastes:
“I listen mostly to instrumental rock music. My favorite bands of the past in this genre are the Shadows and various surf bands, including the Chantays ("Pipeline") and the Sandals ("Theme for 'The Endless Summer'"). My favorite contemporary instrumental bands are the Mermen, Pell Mell, the Aqua Velvets, Scenic, and others I can't recall at the moment. I'm also a big fan of such "guitar hero" figures as Eric Johnson, Steve Morse, and the late Danny Gatton, to whom I dedicated The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein. What I like most about Current 93's work is its sheer visionary intensity, and what I like to consider its morbidity and world disgust. To hear David Tibet screaming, "Dead, dead, dead, dead" or mewling an ode to the memory of Louis Wain, makes me glad to be half-alive.”
Thomas Ligotti on his favorite piece of music:
“In the Court of the Crimson King” by King Crimson. I’m also a big fan of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.”
Thomas Ligotti on his fan base:
“It's pretty much all maladjusted guys with advanced university degrees, although there are some outstanding female exceptions with advanced degrees and literary talents. They're not what people think of as nerds living in their parents' basements. The ones with whom I've been in contact over the years live far more normal lives than I do. In any case, I'd like to put in a good word for nerds living in their parents' basement--they're an undeservedly maligned subculture that I'm proud to count among my readers if they're out there.”
Thomas Ligotti on how he spends his days:
“For the past few years I’ve worked at home as a freelance copyeditor. (Previously, I worked at an office job for 23 years.) People send me editorial projects either by mail or email. I wake up in the morning and within five minutes I’m sitting in front of my computer with a cup of coffee. It’s intense work and I can’t do it for more than five six hours at a stretch. By then, I’m pretty burned out. I often take a long nap in the afternoon to recover. When I wake up there are usually emails to answer. That takes an hour or so. My mother and brother live within walking distance, and I usually have dinner with them and spend the rest of the evening watching TV with them. Then I go home and answer more emails. About once a week, my brother and I go to the local racetrack. We live in Florida, where they have jai-alai, so we bet on simulcast games from Miami or Dania. It’s a shame that this sport never caught on in this country. If you have a high-speed Internet connection, you can watch games most nights and some afternoons at http://www.dania-jai-alai.com. It’s far more interesting if you’re able to bet on the games. That’s not how jai-alai was intended to be played, but that’s how it came to be adapted outside of Spain. You bet on it just like horse racing.”
Thomas Ligotti on dreams:
“I have to say that I find dreaming to be among the most wretched experiences forced on human beings. It denies you the relief of sleep, which is supposed to knit up the raveled sleeve of care. But if you always wake up with a dream in your head, it feels like you've been dreaming all night, and that you've never gotten any respite from conscious existence. Every time I go to bed, I think, "What kind of inane or traumatizing trash am I going to get into tonight?" But if I thought too much about dreaming I'd never get to sleep. To top it off, I have night terrors in which I'm awake but am paralyzed and feel as if I'm having a heart attack. The only way I can wake up is by screaming, which takes a lot of effort. And then there are those dreams in which I find myself in a place that's supercharged by the presence of something evil that never makes an appearance. How can anyone tell someone to have "Sweet Dreams"? I know that there are dreams that are pleasant and that one regrets awaking from. And that is regret indeed.”
Thomas Ligotti on the future of horror fiction:
“Except as a form of popular entertainment, I don't think that horror fiction ever had a future. In my view, it has been only pure accident that joined the tastes and temperament of someone like Poe or Lovecraft to a talent sufficient to express these tastes and this temperament, which, as Lovecraft pointed out many times, are the province of very few individuals. Let's say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft - not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Frank Kafka - were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of "outsider artists." That's where the future development of horror fiction lies - in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction. It's a delicate balance . . . and the determining factors are not predominantly literary.”
Thomas Ligotti on what types of films he prefers:
“With few exceptions, I don’t care for artistically ambitious, serious films and can only tolerate action extravaganzas or adaptations of blockbuster horror novels.”
Thomas Ligotti on digestive disorders:
“I myself suffer from a digestive disorder and I think that many people can identify with characters suffering from stomach problems. To me, disorders of the digestive system have a metaphysical dimension to them that other types of physical suffering do not. This might sound crazy, but I think stomach problems provoke an awakening to our general condition in this life as I alluded to above.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether the internet has had any impact on his writing:
“The online Merriam-Webster dictionary makes it easier to look up words that I want to spell correctly. Otherwise, no.”
Thomas Ligotti on why many of his narrators are artists:
“Artists are explicitly concerned with unreal worlds, which makes them and their activities very well suited to a type of fiction that deals in the unreal. Artists are also stereotypically eccentric characters with whom I identify and find interesting to portray. I don't think I'm capable of depicting a normal, everyday person, and I'm sure I have no interest in doing so.”
Thomas Ligotti on his favorite artists:
“You mean visual artists? I have what I would call a tin eye for the visual arts. I appreciate the talents of certain artists like Alfred Kubin or horror illustrators like Harry Morris or Jason Van Hollander. But I can look at visual images for only about thirty seconds before I get bored.”
Thomas Ligotti on the question of ‘what is art?’:
“Distraction, escape, a way to transform the intolerable into the enjoyable, a booby prize that we give ourselves for continuing to exist.”
Thomas Ligotti on subversive art:
“Fiction can't be subversive. If the reader feels threatened, then he'll stopped reading. The reader will only continue reading if he is being entertained. Subversion in any art form is impossible. Even nonfiction can't be subversive. It may be used to serve some person or group's preconceived purposes, usually to gain power, but its ideas will be recast and deliberately skewed. Freud, Marx, and all religious doctrines are obvious examples of this.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether he’s ever written anything he considered too dark to be published:
“No, but I’ve conceived of stories that were just too disturbing for me to write. If you can write something, then it’s only so disturbing. Anything truly disturbing can’t even be written. Even if it could, no one could stand to read it. And writing is essentially a means of entertainment for both the writer and the reader. I don’t care who the writer is--literature is entertainment or it is nothing. Some readers would object and point to someone like Lautremont’s Les Chants De Maldoror. If they want to see it that way, it’s fine with me. Who am I deny someone their demonic heroes? No one has that much credibility in the history of humanity, nor ever will.”
Thomas Ligotti on William S. Burroughs:
“Definitely febrile. Even more than Poe or Lovecraft, Burroughs is the one whose writing provides that measure of fever, nightmare, and the grotesque by which all other American writers who aspire to representing these qualities in their work should be judged. Even in his last novel, The Western Lands, he writes of the smell of rotting metal. That’s sick genius if there ever was such a thing. Now, this whole business about febrility and sickness and negativism might raise the question in some people’s minds: if that’s the sort of thing you like, then why don’t you just read case histories of psychos and psychotics, suicide notes, and books like "A History of My Nervous Illness?" As I mentioned earlier, it’s principally a matter of style, of entertainment, and of expression. I know that a lot of people are very interested in real life misery. The evening news is testimony to that. I don’t care for the evening news.”
Thomas Ligotti on change:
“Human life moves in only one direction-toward disease, damage, and death. The best you can hope for is to remain stagnant or, in certain cases, return to a previous condition when things weren't as bad as they've become for you. For instance, I now work on a freelance basis for my former employer, except the sort of work that I do outside of the company is the work I used to do twenty years ago as an employee of the company. For me, this is a "change" for the better. Broadly speaking, you can argue that there's such a thing as "social progress" because, for example, people are no longer literally enslaved to other people. But slavery was an innovation, a progressive solution to labor shortage. I don't think that things ever change for the better in the way that many people believe they do. They only assume different masks of the worst. One can only hope that these masks hold tight as long as possible before revealing what is beneath them.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether he is a fatalist:
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. . .in principle. In fact, I'm just another sucker like everyone else. I get carried away all the time and desire things that only drag me deeper into the trap of human existence. I'm very attached to members of my family, for instance. And obviously I still write horror stories every once in a while. That's not going to help me when I really need it. There really isn't any difference between me and some religious fundamentalist who thinks about attaining ill-defined state of salvation and then existing forever in a blissful afterlife. Even to carry on until tomorrow is act of ecstatic lunacy, since every tomorrow just brings you closer to that last one, which will probably not shape up to be a very good day.”
Thomas Ligotti on the difference between cats and people:
“It's always a sad occasion when a cat dies.”
Thomas Ligotti on what his perfect world would be:
“Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear. We would still function as beings that needed the basics--food, shelter, and clothing--but life wouldn’t be any more than that. It wouldn’t need to be. We would be content just to exist. There’s only one problem in this world: none are content with what they have. We always want something else, something “more.” And then when we get it, we still want something else and something more. There is no place of satisfaction for us. We die with regrets for what we never did and will never have a chance to do. We die with regrets for what we never got and will never get. The perfect manner of existence that I’m imagining would be different than that of most mammals, who feed on one another and suffer fear due to this arrangement, much of it coming at the hands of human beings. We would naturally still have to feed, but we probably would not be the omnivorous gourmands and gourmets that we presently are. Of course, like any animal we would suffer from pain in one form or another--that’s the essence of existence--but there wouldn’t be any reason to take it personally, something that escalates natural pain to the level of nightmare. I know that this kind of world would seem terribly empty to most people--no competition, no art, no entertainment of any kind because both art and entertainment are based on conflict between people, and in my world that kind of conflict wouldn’t exist. There would be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than you need, no scientific activity because we wouldn’t be driven to improve the world or possess information unnecessary to living, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions from which we would no longer suffer, no relationships because those are based on difference and in the perfect world we’d all be the same person, as well as being integrated into the natural world. Everything we did would be for practical purposes in order to satisfy our natural needs. We wouldn’t be enlightened beings or sages because those ways of being are predicated on the existence of people who live at a lower epistemological stratum.”
Thomas Ligotti on God and life on other planets:
“I know that there are states of mind in which anybody is capable of believing in anything, such as an afterlife or a soul or a god, but I haven't experienced such a state of mind for some time now. Even in those days when I did believe in a god, or at least believed that I believed in one, I never felt that there was anything very real about it. On the subject of intelligent life forms existing in other precincts of the universe, I just don't care one way or the other. I can't bring myself to feel that it makes any difference. I remember my youngest brother saying something funny about this subject. He's a big sports fan and as a way of expressing his devotion to football he remarked that if an alien landing were being televised on one channel and Monday Night Football was on another channel, he would watch the football game and tape the alien landing. I think that I'd probably watch the alien landing because I'm not a football fan and there aren't any decent TV shows on Monday. I do remember being disheartened to learn that there might exist some form of organic life below the glacial surface of one of the moons of Jupiter. "There's goes another perfectly good wasteland pure of the agitations of creaturely existence," I thought to myself in a mood of relative detachment.”
Thomas Ligotti on what he believes is the most frightening thing about reality:
“Suffering and death.”
Thomas Ligotti on online dating:
“I've been checking out computer matchmaking sites for years but I can't find anyone whose idea of a good time is dinner and a suicide pact.”
Thomas Ligotti on having a sense of humor:
“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be. If you think of the real bastards in world history as well as those with whom you are personally acquainted, they are people who invariably have no sense of humor. And they will often regard your sense of humor as "inappropriate." Humor is the mark of their enemy.”
Thomas Ligotti on how he’d want his epitaph to read:
“He never knew what hit him.”
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Selections from Thomas Ligotti’s notes and aphorisms:
The horror of forms merging.
If we could listen into another mind, in the process of conversing with itself, we would go insane. Overwhelmed by the reality of the other.
One can only truly negate life 'from the grave.'
The greatest power one may possess -- in any situation -- is simply not to care what happens. In fact, it's the only power, all others being a semblance and mockery of it. But you must also not care about possessing the power itself. So fuck it.
If all individuals, all groups and societies, all human institutions reaped the fruits of their respective labors today -- tomorrow you could walk the earth and hear only the wind, the stupid sounds of nature. When did we forget that we deserve annihilation?
Anyone who has experienced a complete absence of emotion, say for a year or two, knows that the universe is entirely made up of our feelings about it. In fact, it's just made up, period.
Horror concept: that characters in one's dreams are aware of being characters in a dream.
To write a story that did not depend on the reader for its existence.
I hate to speculate on such things, but I have my suspicions that paradise itself is a nightmare.
Only in the unreal can we be saved. Reality ruins everything and everyone.
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The music of Thomas Ligotti
As has previously been mentioned, when he was younger Ligotti fantasized about being a rock musician, and in the early 1990s, during his brief retirement from writing, began practicing guitar and became a total “guitar geek” (to use his words). In 2003 David Tibet’s Dutro label released the Crampton screenplay, and this release was accompanied by a six track CD by Ligotti entitled The Unholy City. As Ligotti described it, “These are spoken-word pieces backed by music that I recorded on my home 8-track recorder using my guitars and a synthesizer. The whole production is therefore quite lo-fi, even crude. The six pieces were inspired by the themes of Crampton and the title of the CD is The Unholy City. It was a lot of work for me to put this CD together because I have no talent for the process of recording. Nevertheless, producing a CD that contained both words and music that I had written is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I wish I had more time and energy to pursue similar projects, but I don't.” Essentially, these tracks involve Ligotti reading his prose over musical soundscapes of his own creation. I don’t actually own a physical copy of the CD but you can pretty much hear all the tracks on Youtube. Check them out: I think they’re pretty good, especially the third track, “No One Knows The Big News.”
Track 1: The Player Who Takes No Chances
Track 2: You Do Not Own Your Head
Track 3: No One Knows The Big News
Track 4: Welcome To The Unholy City
Track 5: The Name Is Nothing
Track 6: Nobody Is Anybody
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Photographs
To my knowledge, these are the only five known photographs of Thomas Ligotti that one may find on the internet, and the authenticity of a few of these is questionable. But anyway, here they are:
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Links of Interest
The closest thing on the internet to an official Thomas Ligotti website, even though he himself does not maintain it. Contains many of the interviews from which I pulled a great majority of the above Ligotti quotes.
A collection of Ligotti’s notes and aphorisms from his notebooks dating from 1976-1982.
A long interview with Ligotti at the Mumpsimus website that, of all his interviews, seems to go into the most detail on his pessimistic worldview.
“It’s all a Matter of Personal Pathology” (an interview with Ligotti conducted by horror writer Matt Cardin)
“Devotees of Decay and Desolation” (an interview with Ligotti conducted by a chap named Venger Satanis)
“Thomas Ligotti: Puppets, Nightmares and Gothic Splendor” (another interview)
“His vast and diseased world, full of dusty mannequins, soiled wallpaper, prosthetic fakes and vampiric impersonations of the living, is written in a mixture of the colours of cement and peacock. His characters move as shadow-puppets move, badly and lit blurringly, through two-dimensional landscapes cast by dirty lights, tracked under malevolent, spiteful, starlacked skies. The ends to which our schemes and dreams come is of no importance, like our gestures and thoughts: pointless motions of body and mind in a universe of smeared fairground mirrors. This is the Gnostic nightmare par excellence. He is the greatest writer of our time in any genre, whether our eyes are closed to his abysmal vision of the overwhelming nature of the sadness and terror of things or not.”
-From David Tibet’s article Soft Black Stars: Some Thoughts on Knowing Tom Ligotti
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Ligotti’s favorite writers include the following: H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, William S. Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, Bruno Schulz, Raymond Chandler, Philip Larkin, Dino Buzzati, Hagiwara Sakutaro, Thomas Bernhard, Jorge Luis Borges, E. M. Cioran, Sadeq Hedeyat, S. I. Witkiewicz, and Roland Topor.
Ligotti’s favorite actor of all-time is Christopher Walken (who he imagines could play the lead role of Frank Dominio in My Work is not yet Done), though he’s also expressed admiration towards Udo Kier. In a 2006 interview, he claimed that the 2005 French film Caché was the worst film he had ever seen. Interestingly enough, he also prefers political thrillers, courtroom dramas and caper films to horror movies.
In terms of music, Ligotti mainly likes guitar instrumentals (mainly from the 1960s) and surf-guitar music. Other bands he has been said to like include The Shadows, My Bloody Valentine, The Moody Blues, Iron Butterfly, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and King Crimson (in fact, he’s claimed that King Crimson’s song “In the Court of the Crimson King” is his favorite piece of music, and on the rare occasions in which he posts on the forums of his website it’s always under the username YellowJester, which is most likely a nod to the lyrics of the aforementioned song). He also professes to admire Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd musical.
Thomas Ligotti suffers from Anhedonia, Dysphoria, Agoraphobia, Bipolar Depression, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and a severe anxiety-panic disorder.
When asked to pick what he thinks is his best story, he usually answers “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” (which appears in the Grimscribe collection, among others).
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For the neophyte:
For many years, certain books written by Ligotti have been out-of-print and hard to come by, but as of recently that’s changed. His first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was reprinted in a third and definitive edition by Subterranean Press this year, and I read that in 2011 they’ll be reprinting his second collection of stories, Grimscribe. Also, in 2008 and 2009 Virgin Books reprinted Teatro Grottesco and My Work is not yet Done in affordable paperback editions, and while their cover art is kind of unfortunate (mainly for My Work is not yet Done) it’s nice to have them back in print. If I would recommend one Ligotti collection over any other, it would be Teatro Grottesco, which I think is probably his strongest collection.
For those just exploring Ligotti for the first time, a good place to start would be the “greatest hits” collection The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which was released by Cold Spring Press in 2005. Although I believe it’s out-of-print now, it’s still easy enough to find on the Internet, and in fact this was the first Ligotti book I myself ever purchased. It features 16 of Ligotti’s stronger stories, taken from a number of his different collections: there are four stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer, six taken from Grimscribe, two taken from Noctuary, and four taken from Teatro Grottesco. In theory, however, the best starting point for beginners would be the omnibus collection of Ligotti’s work entitled The Nightmare Factory, which was published by Carroll and Graf in 1996. This hefty 551 page volume (which includes an introduction by Ligotti and a foreword written by Poppy Z. Brite, which famously begins with the question, “Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?”) features 45 of Ligotti’s stories: nearly all of the stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer (with only two exceptions), the entirety of Grimscribe, most of the contents of Noctuary (though it excludes the vignettes collected under the title “Notebooks of the Night”) and six bonus stories which were then new at the time and which ended up being published in the Teatro Grottesco collection years later. Sadly, this book has been out-of-print for years now and is hard to come by cheap… I myself only nabbed a copy of it a couple of months ago. Still, it’s worth seeking out.
A few other interesting Ligotti products is a book entitled The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays And Explorations, which was published by Wildside Press in 2003 and edited by Darrell Schweitzer, and with great cover art by one of Ligotti’s favorite artists, Jason Van Hollander. It includes a number of essays on Ligotti written by such luminaries as Robert M. Price, Matt Cardin, S.T. Joshi, and David Tibet. It also features a few interviews with Ligotti himself, though both of these interviews may be read on the Thomas Ligotti Online website. And in 2007 and 2008, Fox Atomic Comics released two graphic novel collections featuring comics based on the short stories of Ligotti. These volumes, entitled The Nightmare Factory and The Nightmare Factory Volume 2, feature special introductions to each comic written by Ligotti himself, which alone makes them worth seeking out.
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Excerpts from my current top 10 favorite Ligotti stories:
“Anyway, nothing he said was sickeningly graphic in the way you might imagine. When he told me about his ‘most memorable frolic,’ it was with a powerful sense of wonder and nostalgia, shocking as that sounds to me now. He seemed to feel a kind of homesickness, though his ‘home’ is a ramshackle ruin of his decayed mind. His psychosis has evidently bred an atrocious fairyland which exists in a powerful way for him. And despite the demented grandeur of his thousand names, he actually sees himself as only a minor figure in this world- a mediocre courtier in a broken-down kingdom of miracles and horrors. This modesty is very interesting when you consider the egotistical magnificence that a lot of psychopaths would attribute to themselves given a limitless orbit where they could play any imaginary role. But not John Doe. He’s a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic’s universe.
“There’s actually quite a poetic geography to his interior dreamland as he describes it. He talked about a place that sounded like a cosmos of crooked houses and littered alleys, a slum among the stars. Which may be his distorted rendering of a life spent growing up in a shabby neighborhood- an attempt on his part to recast the traumatic memories of his childhood into a realm that cross-breeds a mean-street reality with a fantasy world of his imagination, a phantasmagoric mingling of heaven and hell. This is where he does his ‘frolicking’ with what he calls his ‘awestruck company.’ The place where he took his victims might possibly have been an abandoned building, or even an accommodating sewer. I say this based on his repeated mentioning of ‘the jolly river of refuse’ and ‘the jagged heaps in shadows,’ which could certainly be mad transmutations of a literal wasteland, some grubby and secluded environment that his mind turned into a funhouse of bizarre marvels. Less fathomable are his memories of a moonlit corridor where mirrors scream and laugh, dark peaks of some kind that won’t remain still, a stairway that’s ‘broken’ in a very strange way, though this last one fits in with the background of a dilapidated slum. There is always a paradoxical blend of forsaken topographies and shining sanctuaries in his mind, almost a self-hypnotic-” Dr. Munck caught himself before continuing in this vein of reluctant admiration.
-From “The Frolic” (Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
“As Veech progresses through the half-light, he is suddenly halted by a metal arm with a soft black handle. He backs off and continues to walk about the chamber, grinding sawdust, sand, perhaps pulverized stars underfoot. The dismembered limbs of dolls and puppets are strewn about everywhere. Posters, signs, billboards, and leaflets of various sorts are scattered around like playing cards, their bright words disarranged into nonsense. Countless other objects, devices, and leftover goods stock the room, more than one could possibly take notice of. But they are all, in some way, like those which have been described. One wonders, then, how they could add up to such an atmosphere of… isn’t repose the word? Yes, but a certain kind of repose: the repose of ruin.”
-From “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” (Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
“Very soon, however, he felt betrayed as the mystique of the Librairie de Grimoires was stripped away to reveal, in his eyes, a sideshow of charlatanry. For this disillusionment he had only himself to blame. It was his own fault that he continually subjected himself to the discrepancy between what he hoped to find and what he actually found in such establishments. In truth, there was little basis for his belief that there existed some arcane of a different kind altogether from that tendered by the books before him, all of which were sodden with an obscene reality. The other worlds portrayed in these books served only as annexes of this one; they were imposters of the authentic unreality which was the only redemption for Victor Keirion. And it was this terminal point that he sought, not those guidebooks of the “way” to useless destinations, heavens or hells that were mere pretexts for circumnavigating the real and reveling in it. For he dreamed of shadowed volumes that preached no earthly catechisms but delineated only a tenebrous liturgy of the spectral and rites of salvation by way of meticulous derangement. His absolute: to dwell among the ruins of reality.”
-From “Vastarien” (Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
“Something was making its way through the derelict’s scalp, rustling among the long greasy locks of an unsightly head. Part of it finally poked upwards- a thin sticklike thing. More of them emerged, dark wiry appendages that were bristling and bending and reaching for the outer world. At the end of each was a pair of slender snapping pincers. What ultimately broke through that shattered skull, pulling itself out with a wriggling motion of its many newborn arms, was approximately the size and proportions of a spider monkey. It had tiny translucent wings which fluttered a few times, glistening but useless, and was quite black, as if charred. Actually the creature seemed to be in an emaciated condition. When it turned its head toward the camera, it stared into the lens with malicious eyes and seemed to be chattering with its beaked mouth.”
-From “The Cocoons” (Grimscribe)
“In sleep he might thus find himself standing at the rim of a great gorge filled with pointed evergreens, and in the distance were the peaks of hills appearing in black silhouette under a sky chaotic with stars. Sublime scenery of this type often recurred in those books forbidden to him, sometimes providing the subject for one of the engraved illustrations accompanying a narrative. But he had never read in any book what his dream showed him in the sky above the gorge and above the hills. For each of the bright, bristling stars would begin to loosen in the places where the blackness held them. They wobbled at first, and then they rolled over in their bed of night. Now it was the other side of the stars that he saw, which was unlike anything ever displayed to the eyes of the earth. What he could see resembled not stars but something more like the underside of large stones one might overturn deep in damp woods. They had changed in the strangest way, changed because everything in the universe was changing and could no longer be protected from the changes being worked upon them by something that had been awakened in the blackness, something that desired to remold everything it could see… and had the power to see all things. Now the faces of the stars were crawling with things that made them gleam in a way that stars had never gleamed before. And then these things he saw in his dream began to drip from the stars toward the earth, streaking the night with their gleaming trails.”
-From “The Tsalal” (Noctuary)
“Vast organization of delirious images and impulses seeking Sustenance Input for its decaying systems. All data considered, including polluted discharges from the old Nightmare Network and after-images of degenerated EUs and Als (Con, Noncon, or OneiriCon). Total atrophy and occlusion of all circuits imminent- next stop, the Nowhere Network. Your surplus information- shadows and semblances lying dormant in long-unaccessed files- could be used to replenish our hungry database. No image too hideous; no impulse too attenuated or corrupt. Our organization has a life of its own, but without the continuous input of cheap data we cannot compete in today’s apocalyptic marketplace. From a rotting mutation, great illusions may grow. Don’t let us go belly up while the black empty spaces of the galaxy reverberate with hellish laughter. A multi-dimensional, semi-organic discorporation is dreaming… The signal repeats, steadily deteriorating, and then fades into nothingness. Long shot of the universe. There is no one behind the camera.”
-From “The Nightmare Network” (My Work is not yet Done)
“It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense. As long as I can remember, every incident and every impulse of my existence has served only to perpetrate one episode after another of conspicuous nonsense, each completely outrageous in its nonsensicality. Considered from whatever point of view- intimately close, infinitely remote, or any position in between- the whole thing has always seemed to be nothing more than some freak accident occurring at a painfully slow rate of speed. At times I have been rendered breathless by the impeccable chaoticism, the absolutely perfect nonsense of some spectacle taking place outside myself, or, on the other hand, some spectacle of equally outrageousness taking place within me. Images of densely twisted shapes and lines arise in my brain. Scribbles of a mentally deranged epileptic, I have often said to myself. If I may allow any exception to the outrageously nonsensical condition I have described- and I will allow none- this single exception would involve those visits which I experienced at scattered intervals throughout my existence, and especially one particular visit that took place in Mr. Vizniak’s medicine shop.”
-From “The Clown Puppet” (Teatro Grottesco)
“So it was that the Red Tower put into production its new, more terrible and perplexing, line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight and insistently grew back should one attempt to clip them. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long, deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough, igneous forms were set a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual’s death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling “hands” were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused open for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of a kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.”
-From “The Red Tower” (Teatro Grottesco) NOTE: “The Red Tower” is perhaps my favorite Ligotti story
“Early last September I discovered among the exhibits in a local art gallery a sort of performance piece in the form of an audiotape. This, I later learned, was the first of a series of tape-recorded dream monologues by an unknown artist. The following is a brief and highly typical excerpt from the opening section of this work. I recall that after a few seconds of hissing tape noise, the voice began speaking: “There was far more to deal with in the bungalow house than simply an infestation of vermin,” it said, “although that too had its questionable aspects.” Then the voice went on: “I could see only a few of the bodies where the moonlight shone through the open blinds of the living room windows and fell upon the carpet. Only one of the bodies seemed to be moving, and that very slowly, but there may have been more that were not yet dead. Aside from the chair in which I sat in the darkness there was very little furniture in the room, or elsewhere in the bungalow house for that matter. But a number of lamps were positioned around me, floor lamps and table lamps and even two tiny lamps on the mantel above the fireplace.”
-From “The Bungalow House” (Teatro Grottesco)
“’It is all so very, very simple,’ the artist continued. ‘Our bodies are but one manifestation of the energy, the activating force that sets in motion all the objects, all the bodies of this world and enables them to exist as they do. This activating force is something like a shadow that is not on the outside of all the bodies of this world but is inside of everything and thoroughly pervades everything- an all-moving darkness that has no substance in itself but that moves all the objects of this world, including those objects which we call our bodies. While I was in the throes of my gastrointestinal episode at the hospital where I was treated I descended, so to speak, to that deep abyss of entity where I could feel how this shadow, this darkness, was activating my body. I could also hear its movement, not only within my body but in everything around me, because the sound that it made was not the sound of my body- it was the sound of this shadow, this darkness, which is not like any other sound. Likewise, I was able to detect the workings of this pervasive and all-moving force through the sense of smell and the sense of taste, as well as the sense of touch with which my body is equipped. Finally I opened my eyes, for throughout much of this agonizing ordeal of my digestive system my eyelids were clenched shut in pain. And when I opened my eyes I found that I could see how everything around me, including my own body, was activated from within by this pervasive shadow, this all-moving darkness. And nothing looked as I had always known it to look. Before that night I had never experienced the world purely by means of my organs of physical sensation, which are the direct point of contact with that deep abyss of entity that I am calling the shadow, the darkness. My false and unreal works as an artist were merely the evidence of what I concocted with my mind or my imagination, which are basically nonsensical and dreamlike fabrications that only interfere with the workings of our senses. I believed that somehow these works of art reflected in some way the nature of my self or my soul, when in actuality they only reflected my deranged and useless desires to do something and to be something false and unreal. Like everything else, these desires had been activated by the same pervasive shadow, the all-moving darkness which, due to the self-annihilating agony of my gastrointestinal distress, I could now experience directly by means of my sense organs and without the interference of my imaginary mind or imaginary self.”
-From “The Shadow, The Darkness” (Teatro Grottesco)
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A Collection of Thomas Ligotti quotes as extracted from his numerous interviews:
Thomas Ligotti on why he doesn’t like stories that are just stories:
“It seems natural to me that people who like to read stories will, if they are writers, like to write stories. For my part, I don’t care for stories that are just stories. I feel there’s something missing from them. What’s missing for me is the presence of an author or, more precisely, an author’s consciousness. In most literary novels, the author is there in the spaces between the characters and the scenery, but I like to see the author out front and the rest in the background. Aside from the stories you mentioned in your question, I believe my own stories to have story galore within them. But these are only pretexts, coat racks on which to hang what’s really important to me, which is my own sensibility. That’s all I really have to work with. Most writers adore observing other people and the lives they lead, then making up a story about them. They really pay attention to the world around them. This is something I literally can’t do. I just don’t care about what makes people tick, and, as Sherlock Holmes said, I see but do not observe. It just seems completely trivial and useless to pay attention to these things. I’m no more interested in the physical universe, which sends scientists into raptures of rhetoric but doesn’t impress me in the least. I can’t fathom why anyone should care about how the universe began, how it works, or how it will end. More triviality and uselessness. At the same time, I’m in awe of writers who are adept at telling stories, just as I’m in awe of people who speak foreign languages or play a musical instrument really well. But that doesn’t mean that I want to read their stories or listen to them talk or make music. As Morrissey says in the Smiths’ song “Panic”: “Because the music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life.” The work of writers such as Malamud, William Styron, Saul Bellow, et al. not only says nothing to me about my life, but it says nothing to me about what I’ve experienced or thought of life broadly speaking. By contrast, writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, H. P. Lovecraft, and Thomas Bernhard say plenty of things about both my life in particular and life in general as I have experienced and thought of it. I can take an interest in the writing of these authors because they seem to have felt and thought as I have. William Burroughs once said that the job of the writer is to reveal to readers what they know but don’t know that they know. But you have to be pretty close to knowing it or you won’t know it when you see it.”
Thomas Ligotti on Lovecraft:
“Lovecraft was the first writer of this sort that I read, and in addition to being an artist whose works harmonized so well with my literary tastes, he was also the first author with whom I strongly identified. This may sound bizarre or pathetic, but H.P. Lovecraft has been, bar none other, the most intense and real personal presence in my life. Lovecraft was a dark guru who confirmed to me all my most awful suspicions about the universe.”
Thomas Ligotti on his muse:
“Sickness of the body and the mind.”
Thomas Ligotti on his outlook on life:
“My outlook is that it's a damn shame that organic life ever developed on this or any other planet, and that the pain that living creatures necessarily suffer makes for an existence that is a perennial nightmare. This attitude underlies almost everything I've written.”
Thomas Ligotti on the reoccurrence of puppets and manikins in his work:
“I've never made any conscious decision to write about puppets and mannikins and so forth. It just happened that these images had a strong and mysterious attraction for me, so naturally they turned up in my stories when I started writing. I guess that puppets are for me what space monsters were for Lovecraft: a menacing symbol of some essential and terrible fact of life. Exactly what that fact is would be difficult to specify. There's something that seems profoundly insane and grotesque about puppets and other representations of human beings, something that says to me, “This is how you are and this is how the world is.”
Thomas Ligotti on puppets:
“However, I still find puppets to be uncanny things. For me, the puppet emblemizes the entrapment and manipulation of human beings by forces beyond our control. Obviously, there are a lot of things that people are aware they cannot control in their lives. As the Firesign Theatre brilliantly said, "Your brain is not the boss." In my world, this is an everyday experience because I've been long besieged by abnormal psychological states that cause me to be constantly aware that I have no control over who I am and how I'll act. Most people don't feel this way, or they don't notice the controlling forces because they're very subtle. Having any kind of control over your actions or feelings is everybody's illusion. No one can make themselves what they are. It's a totally absurd notion, because if you could make yourself what you are you'd first have to be a certain way and be able to choose what that way would be. But then you'd also have to be able to choose to choose what way you would be, and on into infinity. There are always determining powers, and those make us what the way we are whether or not we realize it. I realize that there are philosophers who have reconciled determinism with free will on paper, and that everyone feels as if they're in control of themselves and take responsibility for their actions. But how many of us can say that we're always, or even often, in control of our thoughts? And if you're not in control of your thoughts, than what are you in control of?”
Thomas Ligotti on living in the Detroit area and his aversion to the southern hemisphere:
“I really have no special appreciation for the Detroit area that I'm aware of. As long as all the modern conveniences are available to me, I could live in a bubble city on the moon or in an underwater shopping mall. Of course, I've never lived anywhere else, so this idea that it doesn't matter to me where I live could be a complete delusion, and probably is. I exist in pretty much a constant state of nervous agitation so I seldom take any enjoyment in my surroundings, except possibly to the extent that they stimulate my imagination and allow me the fleeting sense that I'm no longer in a physical locale but in some imaginary venue. This sense is often provoked by driving through very shabby urban areas on my way to or from my job. [Unfortunately no longer the case since two years ago the company I work for moved to a pristine suburb west of Detroit.] But this feeling usually lasts for only a split second. I do put a sort of imaginary value on living in Michigan because it's in the northern hemisphere and not the southern hemisphere, toward which I feel a definite aversion. In fact, I feel a definite aversion toward all geography that's not in the northern half of the northern hemisphere. I really don't even like the word "south" or anything that's in southern places, whether it's in South America or Africa or Asia or wherever. On the other hand, I don't have any problem, in my imagination, with North America, northern Europe, northern Asia, and so on. Anywhere in which the natural landscape dies, or at least goes into a state of suspended animation, for a part of the year, is okay with me. I'm imaginatively averse to tropical regions, especially jungles. I'd rather live in a parking lot than anywhere near a jungle.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether he’s ever suffered from writer’s block:
“No, I've never suffered from anything like writer's block. Writing is difficult for me only in the sense that it stresses me out so much that I become physically ill after about an hour of doing it. My stomach becomes severely upset, my anxiety level goes through the roof, and I just have to stop. This is why I've never been very prolific and will become less so as time goes by and my little flame starts to go out.”
Thomas Ligotti on literary fame:
“I was very relieved when my stories were well-received by readers of small press magazines and, later, by critics who reviewed my collections. I wanted to be a writer in the fashion of Lovecraft, and until I attained some recognition for my horror stories I could barely stand to live with myself. It was something that I really needed to get out of my system. So, as I said, I was very relieved within myself when I achieved my modest literary ambitions. But as far as the circumstances of my life are concerned, nothing really changed. I go to work every day like most people. I wonder what's going to become of me if I live into old age since one doesn't become rich or famous just by writing short horror stories. As for being a cult author, I've said this many times to people: "There's no obscurity like minor renown." Not that I mind obscurity in the least. I wouldn't want to be well known to a wide public. I'd rather acquire millions of dollars playing the lottery than by writing best-selling books. Don't misunderstand me-as I mentioned before, I wanted to be published in the worst way and I craved attention for what I had written. That true for just about anyone who writes. Poor Poe openly declared that he lusted for a level of fame that he never saw in his lifetime. But I've already gotten all the fame I can handle at the moment, thanks.”
Thomas Ligotti on why he can never be a professional writer:
“I realized a long time ago that I could never be a professional writer for the simple reason that I'm not interested in the same things that people who buy the majority of the books in this world are interested in. Like Lovecraft, I'm not interested in people and their relationships. That alone counts me out as a professional writer. I also have a bad attitude toward the world. I think that life is a curse and so on. People reading a book on a beach or in an airplane don't want to hear stuff like that. They just want to relax and be told a diverting story from a third-person omniscient viewpoint, giving them the sense that they have a movie playing in their mind. I don't blame them in the least.”
Thomas Ligotti on the agony of writing:
“To me the actual task of writing is a real pain in the ass. I've fantasized about just imagining the characters and incidents of a story and having it appear in written form before my eyes. I know that there are plenty of writers who genuinely enjoy the nuts and bolts of the literary process. I'm not one of them. I really don't even think of myself as a writer. Probably the only people who think of themselves as writers are the pros who are doing it everyday and have "writer" on their tax forms and passports as their occupation. They're constantly being reminded by one thing or another that they're writers.”
Thomas Ligotti on what he wanted to be growing up:
“When I was a kid I wanted to be a baseball player named Rocky Calavito and imitated his batting stance and swing, pretending that I was him. Later I wanted to be any number of rock music stars. And then I wanted to be H. P. Lovecraft. At this time I've run out of other people that I want to be. My ideal persona these days is that of an inmate in a minimum security prison. That really seems like the good life to me.”
Thomas Ligotti on Current 93’s David Tibet:
“David Tibet is an incredibly well-read individual, and his reading interests include classic horror fiction of the kind that has served as a model for my own writing. He has read my stories and sent me practically the entire catalogue of Current 93 on CD, sensing that I would discover a fundamental likeness in artistic and philosophic attitude between us and suggesting collaboration. I did indeed sense that likeness in attitude and proposed that I write several very short stories that he could integrate in some way into a Current 93 recording. The stories became longer than I originally intended them to be and started to bleed into one another to compose a larger piece that was ultimately published by Durtro as, In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land, titled after a line in the classic Current 93 song, "Falling Back in Fields of Rape", and issued with an accompanying CD by Current 93. I don’t readily recall what made In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land ultimately take the form it did as a more or less integrated work. I don’t usually remember much about beginnings of most of the stories I’ve written. In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land seems very much a piece similar to a certain type of story which I’ve written over and over through the years, featuring a quasi-fantastical and deteriorated town where puppet-like characters play out their doom. As I remember it, I sent the stories to David one at a time, and I believe that he and his colleagues were working on the music about the same time I was producing the tales.”
Thomas Ligotti on his musical tastes:
“I listen mostly to instrumental rock music. My favorite bands of the past in this genre are the Shadows and various surf bands, including the Chantays ("Pipeline") and the Sandals ("Theme for 'The Endless Summer'"). My favorite contemporary instrumental bands are the Mermen, Pell Mell, the Aqua Velvets, Scenic, and others I can't recall at the moment. I'm also a big fan of such "guitar hero" figures as Eric Johnson, Steve Morse, and the late Danny Gatton, to whom I dedicated The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein. What I like most about Current 93's work is its sheer visionary intensity, and what I like to consider its morbidity and world disgust. To hear David Tibet screaming, "Dead, dead, dead, dead" or mewling an ode to the memory of Louis Wain, makes me glad to be half-alive.”
Thomas Ligotti on his favorite piece of music:
“In the Court of the Crimson King” by King Crimson. I’m also a big fan of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.”
Thomas Ligotti on his fan base:
“It's pretty much all maladjusted guys with advanced university degrees, although there are some outstanding female exceptions with advanced degrees and literary talents. They're not what people think of as nerds living in their parents' basements. The ones with whom I've been in contact over the years live far more normal lives than I do. In any case, I'd like to put in a good word for nerds living in their parents' basement--they're an undeservedly maligned subculture that I'm proud to count among my readers if they're out there.”
Thomas Ligotti on how he spends his days:
“For the past few years I’ve worked at home as a freelance copyeditor. (Previously, I worked at an office job for 23 years.) People send me editorial projects either by mail or email. I wake up in the morning and within five minutes I’m sitting in front of my computer with a cup of coffee. It’s intense work and I can’t do it for more than five six hours at a stretch. By then, I’m pretty burned out. I often take a long nap in the afternoon to recover. When I wake up there are usually emails to answer. That takes an hour or so. My mother and brother live within walking distance, and I usually have dinner with them and spend the rest of the evening watching TV with them. Then I go home and answer more emails. About once a week, my brother and I go to the local racetrack. We live in Florida, where they have jai-alai, so we bet on simulcast games from Miami or Dania. It’s a shame that this sport never caught on in this country. If you have a high-speed Internet connection, you can watch games most nights and some afternoons at http://www.dania-jai-alai.com. It’s far more interesting if you’re able to bet on the games. That’s not how jai-alai was intended to be played, but that’s how it came to be adapted outside of Spain. You bet on it just like horse racing.”
Thomas Ligotti on dreams:
“I have to say that I find dreaming to be among the most wretched experiences forced on human beings. It denies you the relief of sleep, which is supposed to knit up the raveled sleeve of care. But if you always wake up with a dream in your head, it feels like you've been dreaming all night, and that you've never gotten any respite from conscious existence. Every time I go to bed, I think, "What kind of inane or traumatizing trash am I going to get into tonight?" But if I thought too much about dreaming I'd never get to sleep. To top it off, I have night terrors in which I'm awake but am paralyzed and feel as if I'm having a heart attack. The only way I can wake up is by screaming, which takes a lot of effort. And then there are those dreams in which I find myself in a place that's supercharged by the presence of something evil that never makes an appearance. How can anyone tell someone to have "Sweet Dreams"? I know that there are dreams that are pleasant and that one regrets awaking from. And that is regret indeed.”
Thomas Ligotti on the future of horror fiction:
“Except as a form of popular entertainment, I don't think that horror fiction ever had a future. In my view, it has been only pure accident that joined the tastes and temperament of someone like Poe or Lovecraft to a talent sufficient to express these tastes and this temperament, which, as Lovecraft pointed out many times, are the province of very few individuals. Let's say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft - not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Frank Kafka - were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of "outsider artists." That's where the future development of horror fiction lies - in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction. It's a delicate balance . . . and the determining factors are not predominantly literary.”
Thomas Ligotti on what types of films he prefers:
“With few exceptions, I don’t care for artistically ambitious, serious films and can only tolerate action extravaganzas or adaptations of blockbuster horror novels.”
Thomas Ligotti on digestive disorders:
“I myself suffer from a digestive disorder and I think that many people can identify with characters suffering from stomach problems. To me, disorders of the digestive system have a metaphysical dimension to them that other types of physical suffering do not. This might sound crazy, but I think stomach problems provoke an awakening to our general condition in this life as I alluded to above.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether the internet has had any impact on his writing:
“The online Merriam-Webster dictionary makes it easier to look up words that I want to spell correctly. Otherwise, no.”
Thomas Ligotti on why many of his narrators are artists:
“Artists are explicitly concerned with unreal worlds, which makes them and their activities very well suited to a type of fiction that deals in the unreal. Artists are also stereotypically eccentric characters with whom I identify and find interesting to portray. I don't think I'm capable of depicting a normal, everyday person, and I'm sure I have no interest in doing so.”
Thomas Ligotti on his favorite artists:
“You mean visual artists? I have what I would call a tin eye for the visual arts. I appreciate the talents of certain artists like Alfred Kubin or horror illustrators like Harry Morris or Jason Van Hollander. But I can look at visual images for only about thirty seconds before I get bored.”
Thomas Ligotti on the question of ‘what is art?’:
“Distraction, escape, a way to transform the intolerable into the enjoyable, a booby prize that we give ourselves for continuing to exist.”
Thomas Ligotti on subversive art:
“Fiction can't be subversive. If the reader feels threatened, then he'll stopped reading. The reader will only continue reading if he is being entertained. Subversion in any art form is impossible. Even nonfiction can't be subversive. It may be used to serve some person or group's preconceived purposes, usually to gain power, but its ideas will be recast and deliberately skewed. Freud, Marx, and all religious doctrines are obvious examples of this.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether he’s ever written anything he considered too dark to be published:
“No, but I’ve conceived of stories that were just too disturbing for me to write. If you can write something, then it’s only so disturbing. Anything truly disturbing can’t even be written. Even if it could, no one could stand to read it. And writing is essentially a means of entertainment for both the writer and the reader. I don’t care who the writer is--literature is entertainment or it is nothing. Some readers would object and point to someone like Lautremont’s Les Chants De Maldoror. If they want to see it that way, it’s fine with me. Who am I deny someone their demonic heroes? No one has that much credibility in the history of humanity, nor ever will.”
Thomas Ligotti on William S. Burroughs:
“Definitely febrile. Even more than Poe or Lovecraft, Burroughs is the one whose writing provides that measure of fever, nightmare, and the grotesque by which all other American writers who aspire to representing these qualities in their work should be judged. Even in his last novel, The Western Lands, he writes of the smell of rotting metal. That’s sick genius if there ever was such a thing. Now, this whole business about febrility and sickness and negativism might raise the question in some people’s minds: if that’s the sort of thing you like, then why don’t you just read case histories of psychos and psychotics, suicide notes, and books like "A History of My Nervous Illness?" As I mentioned earlier, it’s principally a matter of style, of entertainment, and of expression. I know that a lot of people are very interested in real life misery. The evening news is testimony to that. I don’t care for the evening news.”
Thomas Ligotti on change:
“Human life moves in only one direction-toward disease, damage, and death. The best you can hope for is to remain stagnant or, in certain cases, return to a previous condition when things weren't as bad as they've become for you. For instance, I now work on a freelance basis for my former employer, except the sort of work that I do outside of the company is the work I used to do twenty years ago as an employee of the company. For me, this is a "change" for the better. Broadly speaking, you can argue that there's such a thing as "social progress" because, for example, people are no longer literally enslaved to other people. But slavery was an innovation, a progressive solution to labor shortage. I don't think that things ever change for the better in the way that many people believe they do. They only assume different masks of the worst. One can only hope that these masks hold tight as long as possible before revealing what is beneath them.”
Thomas Ligotti on whether he is a fatalist:
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. . .in principle. In fact, I'm just another sucker like everyone else. I get carried away all the time and desire things that only drag me deeper into the trap of human existence. I'm very attached to members of my family, for instance. And obviously I still write horror stories every once in a while. That's not going to help me when I really need it. There really isn't any difference between me and some religious fundamentalist who thinks about attaining ill-defined state of salvation and then existing forever in a blissful afterlife. Even to carry on until tomorrow is act of ecstatic lunacy, since every tomorrow just brings you closer to that last one, which will probably not shape up to be a very good day.”
Thomas Ligotti on the difference between cats and people:
“It's always a sad occasion when a cat dies.”
Thomas Ligotti on what his perfect world would be:
“Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear. We would still function as beings that needed the basics--food, shelter, and clothing--but life wouldn’t be any more than that. It wouldn’t need to be. We would be content just to exist. There’s only one problem in this world: none are content with what they have. We always want something else, something “more.” And then when we get it, we still want something else and something more. There is no place of satisfaction for us. We die with regrets for what we never did and will never have a chance to do. We die with regrets for what we never got and will never get. The perfect manner of existence that I’m imagining would be different than that of most mammals, who feed on one another and suffer fear due to this arrangement, much of it coming at the hands of human beings. We would naturally still have to feed, but we probably would not be the omnivorous gourmands and gourmets that we presently are. Of course, like any animal we would suffer from pain in one form or another--that’s the essence of existence--but there wouldn’t be any reason to take it personally, something that escalates natural pain to the level of nightmare. I know that this kind of world would seem terribly empty to most people--no competition, no art, no entertainment of any kind because both art and entertainment are based on conflict between people, and in my world that kind of conflict wouldn’t exist. There would be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than you need, no scientific activity because we wouldn’t be driven to improve the world or possess information unnecessary to living, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions from which we would no longer suffer, no relationships because those are based on difference and in the perfect world we’d all be the same person, as well as being integrated into the natural world. Everything we did would be for practical purposes in order to satisfy our natural needs. We wouldn’t be enlightened beings or sages because those ways of being are predicated on the existence of people who live at a lower epistemological stratum.”
Thomas Ligotti on God and life on other planets:
“I know that there are states of mind in which anybody is capable of believing in anything, such as an afterlife or a soul or a god, but I haven't experienced such a state of mind for some time now. Even in those days when I did believe in a god, or at least believed that I believed in one, I never felt that there was anything very real about it. On the subject of intelligent life forms existing in other precincts of the universe, I just don't care one way or the other. I can't bring myself to feel that it makes any difference. I remember my youngest brother saying something funny about this subject. He's a big sports fan and as a way of expressing his devotion to football he remarked that if an alien landing were being televised on one channel and Monday Night Football was on another channel, he would watch the football game and tape the alien landing. I think that I'd probably watch the alien landing because I'm not a football fan and there aren't any decent TV shows on Monday. I do remember being disheartened to learn that there might exist some form of organic life below the glacial surface of one of the moons of Jupiter. "There's goes another perfectly good wasteland pure of the agitations of creaturely existence," I thought to myself in a mood of relative detachment.”
Thomas Ligotti on what he believes is the most frightening thing about reality:
“Suffering and death.”
Thomas Ligotti on online dating:
“I've been checking out computer matchmaking sites for years but I can't find anyone whose idea of a good time is dinner and a suicide pact.”
Thomas Ligotti on having a sense of humor:
“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be. If you think of the real bastards in world history as well as those with whom you are personally acquainted, they are people who invariably have no sense of humor. And they will often regard your sense of humor as "inappropriate." Humor is the mark of their enemy.”
Thomas Ligotti on how he’d want his epitaph to read:
“He never knew what hit him.”
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Selections from Thomas Ligotti’s notes and aphorisms:
The horror of forms merging.
If we could listen into another mind, in the process of conversing with itself, we would go insane. Overwhelmed by the reality of the other.
One can only truly negate life 'from the grave.'
The greatest power one may possess -- in any situation -- is simply not to care what happens. In fact, it's the only power, all others being a semblance and mockery of it. But you must also not care about possessing the power itself. So fuck it.
If all individuals, all groups and societies, all human institutions reaped the fruits of their respective labors today -- tomorrow you could walk the earth and hear only the wind, the stupid sounds of nature. When did we forget that we deserve annihilation?
Anyone who has experienced a complete absence of emotion, say for a year or two, knows that the universe is entirely made up of our feelings about it. In fact, it's just made up, period.
Horror concept: that characters in one's dreams are aware of being characters in a dream.
To write a story that did not depend on the reader for its existence.
I hate to speculate on such things, but I have my suspicions that paradise itself is a nightmare.
Only in the unreal can we be saved. Reality ruins everything and everyone.
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The music of Thomas Ligotti
As has previously been mentioned, when he was younger Ligotti fantasized about being a rock musician, and in the early 1990s, during his brief retirement from writing, began practicing guitar and became a total “guitar geek” (to use his words). In 2003 David Tibet’s Dutro label released the Crampton screenplay, and this release was accompanied by a six track CD by Ligotti entitled The Unholy City. As Ligotti described it, “These are spoken-word pieces backed by music that I recorded on my home 8-track recorder using my guitars and a synthesizer. The whole production is therefore quite lo-fi, even crude. The six pieces were inspired by the themes of Crampton and the title of the CD is The Unholy City. It was a lot of work for me to put this CD together because I have no talent for the process of recording. Nevertheless, producing a CD that contained both words and music that I had written is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I wish I had more time and energy to pursue similar projects, but I don't.” Essentially, these tracks involve Ligotti reading his prose over musical soundscapes of his own creation. I don’t actually own a physical copy of the CD but you can pretty much hear all the tracks on Youtube. Check them out: I think they’re pretty good, especially the third track, “No One Knows The Big News.”
Track 1: The Player Who Takes No Chances
Track 2: You Do Not Own Your Head
Track 3: No One Knows The Big News
Track 4: Welcome To The Unholy City
Track 5: The Name Is Nothing
Track 6: Nobody Is Anybody
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Photographs
To my knowledge, these are the only five known photographs of Thomas Ligotti that one may find on the internet, and the authenticity of a few of these is questionable. But anyway, here they are:
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Links of Interest
The closest thing on the internet to an official Thomas Ligotti website, even though he himself does not maintain it. Contains many of the interviews from which I pulled a great majority of the above Ligotti quotes.
A collection of Ligotti’s notes and aphorisms from his notebooks dating from 1976-1982.
A long interview with Ligotti at the Mumpsimus website that, of all his interviews, seems to go into the most detail on his pessimistic worldview.
“It’s all a Matter of Personal Pathology” (an interview with Ligotti conducted by horror writer Matt Cardin)
“Devotees of Decay and Desolation” (an interview with Ligotti conducted by a chap named Venger Satanis)
“Thomas Ligotti: Puppets, Nightmares and Gothic Splendor” (another interview)
“His vast and diseased world, full of dusty mannequins, soiled wallpaper, prosthetic fakes and vampiric impersonations of the living, is written in a mixture of the colours of cement and peacock. His characters move as shadow-puppets move, badly and lit blurringly, through two-dimensional landscapes cast by dirty lights, tracked under malevolent, spiteful, starlacked skies. The ends to which our schemes and dreams come is of no importance, like our gestures and thoughts: pointless motions of body and mind in a universe of smeared fairground mirrors. This is the Gnostic nightmare par excellence. He is the greatest writer of our time in any genre, whether our eyes are closed to his abysmal vision of the overwhelming nature of the sadness and terror of things or not.”
-From David Tibet’s article Soft Black Stars: Some Thoughts on Knowing Tom Ligotti
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p.s. Hey. Nobody makes posts like d.l. Sypha aka the great writer James Champagne. He put together this amazing post about Thomas Ligotti some years back. Now Ligotti has been 'discovered' and has become a thing and so on, and writers are writing about him and so on, but you will never have a better introduction to his work that what's right up above this. Luxuriate. Thank you again, James!