"No one anticipates the arrival of the Teatro." So voices the tale's narrator, a writer of what he terms nihilistic prose. I wonder if he was familiar with that famous line from Monty Python, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."
Only with Thomas Ligotti, the Teatro means real terror.
One aspect of a Thomas Ligotti tale I especially appreciate: the author leaves room for a reader's imagination - Teatro Grottesco serves as prime example.
The narrator hangs out with a group of artists, an unstable, precarious bunch since one of their number could drop out at any moment without notice. So it was with a filmmaker, a creator of art films, who disappeared and was eventually spotted watching a porno flick at a crap movie house.
What's going on here? We're given a hint when one of the artists, a woman who always wears purple, says, “His stuff and Teatro stuff,” as she holds up two tightly crossed fingers.
The purple woman then relates a ghastly tale of a self-styled “visceral artist” who worked nights stocking shelves for a suburban supermarket chain. Following an episode of weird, grizzly violence in an alley when he was returning home one winter morning, this artist, Spense by name, sometime thereafter finds himself at the office of Theatre Grottesco where he informs the young female receptionist he would like to enlist the services of Teatro “to utterly destroy someone.” She, in turn, explains that TG Ventures is an “entertainment service” that provides clowns, magicians and novelty performances for things like children's parties.
But don't you believe her. The narrator states, “Whether or not an artist was approached by the Teatro or took the initiative to approach the Teatro himself, it seemed the effect was the same: the end of the artist's work.” The narrator substantiates his statement by recounting that the filmmaker became a full-time dealer in others' porno videos, the visceral artist manages that suburban supermarket and the purple woman makes tons of money selling real estate. All of them now ex-artists
His tale takes a dramatic shift when he remarks, "I must end my list of no-longer artistic persons with myself." Oh, yes, as he tells us, “I feel certain that for an artist to encounter the Teatro there can be only one consequence: the end of that artist's work. Strange, then, that knowing this fact I still acted as I did.”
The narrator can't say if he was approached or if he himself was the one who approached Teatro but from that moment he perceives the Teatro to be "a profoundly anti-artistic phenomenon." He then decides to turn his nihilistic prose writing into "an anti-Teatro phenomenon."
From this point forward, his tale spirals into dimensions of the hyperweird. He contracts an intestinal virus (author's italics) and knows he must develop insights to counter a "company of nightmares." Although he recovers somewhat, at least physically, and proclaims to others that he knows the true nature of the Teatro, it isn't long before he collapses during a meeting of artists and is taken to the emergency room.
What happens after he wakes up at night in a bed in a backstreet hospital is the stuff of nightmares. He shares a dimly lit ward with other damaged bodies and hears a voice over the public address system sounding like a child's sing-song taunting, a mischievous giggling voice repeating paging Dr. Groddeck. Then, as if in a dream, he wanders down the long corridor and eventually arrives at the office of Dr. T. Groddeck.
The narrator's encounter with this seemingly demented man and his unending wheezing laughter proves most unsettling. There's mysterious movements within a glass globe that sits on his desk. The narrator's mind spins with one particular thought recurring: "it was all a fix from the start."
You'll have to read for yourself to learn the fate of the narrator following his encounter with Dr. T Groddeck and Teatro Grottesco. Let me simply remark the ending of this tale will bring to mind themes familiar to fans of the author: a human life as little more than a puppet manipulated by a malevolent hidden power. Also, the invitation to join an organization, a company, with all the diabolical echoes of corporate horror. Thus those masked actors in the photo above.
Author Thomas Ligotti, born 1953
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