I can see why Sideshow, and Other Stories was published as a separate chapbook – this Thomas Ligotti yarn is a collection of seven short interconnecting stories: Foreword, The Malignant Matrix, Premature Communication, The Astronomic Blur, The Abyss of Organic Forms, The Phenomenal Frenzy, Afterword, each tale deserving its own part in this review -
FORWORD
“I have always desired to escape,” he said, “from the grip of show business." So speaks an older writer to the tale's narrator, a younger writer, when sitting in a corner booth of a coffee shop. They're both insomniacs and it's the middle of the night.
The narrator quickly comes to consider the older writer as his “lost literary father,” a man I'll refer to as LF. Everything, according to LF, is a phenomenon of show business, all we supposedly live by and die by, all myths, religions, science, philosophy, the sun, the stars, all nothing but show business phenomenon.
LF makes no special claims for his writing as “Writing is simply another action I perform on cue." Such a statement echoes the philosophy of Peter Wessel Zapffe, a writer Thomas Ligotti frequently references in his Conspiracy Against the Human Race. According to Zapffe, artistic creation serves as simply another shield to protect us humans against the horrors of chaos, suffering and death.
LF goes even further: he speaks of the wretchedness of his own life as so peculiar, so ridiculous , so base that it doesn't even count as first rate show business; rather, the senseless episodes of his pathetic existence are nothing more than a series of sideshows. Sidebar: Perhaps you've seen a circus sideshow with its lineup of freaks: the lion faced man, the four legged lady, the human skeleton. Quite the statement, LF makes, likening his own life to a freak show.
The narrator is taken aback. He asks LF one last penetrating question. LF gives him an answer and then, without another word, leaves the coffee house. When the narrator makes his next appearance at the shop, the night shift waitress hands him sheets of paper and lets him know his friend will not be back again. The narrator takes a seat, orders coffee and begins to read. In this way, Thomas Ligotti has given us an old fashioned frame story.
THE MALIGNANT MATRIX
“For years I have been privileged to receive frequent and detailed communication regarding the most advanced scientific and metaphysical studies.” The narrator goes on to note the key is being temperamentally predisposed to such communications. Not so coincidentally, in his Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Thomas Ligotti also emphasizes a person's temperament in determining their outlook on life, their being inclined to either optimism or pessimism as well as an individual's being drawn to or not being drawn to tales of horror, especially supernatural horror.
The narrator recounts a particular encounter he had at a research facility of sorts, where he saw and heard the sounds of two creatures he can only identify as animated tissue. Soon thereafter he leaves but realizes “how much those sounds I heard reminded me of the tiny voices of things which, however imperfect their form, have been newly thrust into the world of phenomenal existence.”
Tiny voices are all that are needed to echo a line from Ligotti's book, “That which makes a nightmare of our world had revealed itself for a time and withdrawn once again behind the scenes of life.”
PREMATURE COMMUNICATION
A boy hears a voice seeming to speak from beyond the natural world, “The ice is breaking up on the river.” Throughout the morning, the voice repeats those words to him. This eerie scrape with the supernatural leads his parents to place him in a hospital where he's given potent drugs (ah, modern science to the rescue!) but, ironically, those very drugs allow him to grasp the nature of the voice he heard that winter morning.
The boy knows his parents must cross an old bridge to visit him at the hospital and isn't surprised when he learns of a “tragic event” involving his parents. Before the doctor or his relatives can say anything further, he says to them: “The ice has broken up on the river” in a voice not of a child but a harsh, whispery voice “emanating from the depths of that great and ancient machinery which powered, according to its own faculty and unknown mechanisms, the most infinitesimal movements of the world as I knew it.”
Similar to the first tale, we have a supernatural something “which makes a nightmare of our world.” However, with this tale, the result is more profound: the death of a boy's parents.
THE ASTRONOMICAL BLUR
An eerie tale of a narrator considering a little store on a residential street possessing a “primitive, virtually primal nature,” a store emitting a luminous glow. Following repeated visits to observe the glowing little store, he senses something uncanny is about to happen. “Nevertheless, that night I did not return to my home, because it was now glowing with the same primordial light as that within the little store. All the houses in the neighborhood were lit up in the same way, all of their little windows glowing dimly at that late hour. No one will ever again emerge from those houses, I thought as I abandoned the street of that neighborhood. Nor will anyone ever desire to enter them.”
Yet again we have a supernatural something “which makes a nightmare of our world.” But with this third tale, the result is even more diabolical: the death of many people.
THE ABYSS OF ORGANIC FORMS
Thomas Ligotti, master of horror fiction, has the narrator tell his tale replete with subtlety and suggestion, a tale of his half-brother confined to a wheelchair with eyes a strange, pale shade of gray, yet so luminous, eyes truly demonic as he stares with bitter, brutish force. There's visits to a racetrack and, once his brother mysteriously disappears, a visit where the narrator himself goes to the racetrack and beholds one horse turning its eye full upon him, the horse's eye's pale and a peculiarly gray “staring directly into my own eyes in a way that seemed bitter and thoroughly brutish and which conveyed to me the sense of something unusual, something truly demonic that I could never bring myself to name.”
That supernatural something “which makes a nightmare of our world,” anyone?
THE PHENOMENAL FRENZY
A tale with signature Ligotti atmosphere and precision of language. The narrator searches for a house to live out the remainder of his days in peace. It appears he's found the perfect house in one particular remote location but there's that ruined water tower nearby and the sky, the clouds, the wind press on him in such a way as to produce feelings of dread, of horror. He retreats to his car. It seems an eternity to drive away as quickly as he can. Later he wonders if his perfect house “was now only one more thing that I had to fear.”
We're left to wonder if that supernatural something “which makes a nightmare of our world,” has become the narrator's entire world.
AFTERWORD
The younger writer returns to tell us that in addition to these five stories, LF left notes “mostly in the form of unconnected phrases, for a sixth story with the apparent working title of 'Sideshow.'” The narrator isn't surprised LF's notes make direct references to him. The notes take on a most unusual cast as do those things the young writer encounters on his leaving the coffee shop to return home. The result? The young writer makes a decision about his own writing, a decision for each reader to discover on the last page of this extraordinary Thomas Ligotti tale.
Author Thomas Ligotti, born 1953
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