The
horror stories of Thomas Ligotti, however, may be peculiar enough to
qualify as “actual” literature: They clearly obey impulses that have
little to do with entertainment, and sometimes feel indifferent even to
story. A few years ago, Ligotti told an interviewer: “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.” The stories in his 1985
and 1991 collections SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER and GRIMSCRIBE, (Penguin,
paper, $17), now reissued in a single volume, do not lack that
authorial consciousness, and a frightening consciousness it is. The
voices in his tales are, more often than not, those of men who expect
very little of life: no spiritual meaning, certainly, no pleasure beyond
the occasional sardonic chuckle, no beauty save in the grotesque and
the anomalous, and no good end. They believe that “the most innocuous
phenomena should eventually find their way from good dreams into bad, or
from bad dreams into those that were wholly abysmal.” One character, in
search of “a reality so saturated with its own presence that it had
made a leap into the unreal,” finds in an old book “his long-sought
abode of exquisite disfigurations.” He may be a madman, or he may not;
Ligotti isn’t sure, so he leaves it up to us.
There are powerful
echoes of Lovecraft in Ligotti, both in his willing embrace of demented
physical and mental landscapes and in his often ornate,
archaic-sounding prose. Ligotti is a much more accomplished stylist,
though; you can detect traces of a higher, more self-aware decadence in
his manipulations of pulp hyperbole, a hint of Lautréamont in the
Lovecraftian perfume. The closest thing to a conventional genre story in
these collections is a creepy little item called “The Last Feast of
Harlequin,” in which an academic social anthropologist — author of “The
Clown Figure in American Media” — travels to the upper Midwest for an
obscure local festival and stumbles onto something rather stranger than
he’d anticipated, a cult of voluntary zombies. “Their ideal,” he
writes, “was a melancholy half-existence consecrated to all the many
shapes of death and dissolution.” Yes, that gives the story away, but
with Ligotti that matters rather less than it would with, say, Stephen
King. King, the great entertainer, needs the story as the comedian needs
the joke, and when he can’t quite deliver it he dies (in the comedian’s
sense). King is a master of horror, though. When inspiration fails, he
has the technique to fake it. Thomas Ligotti is a master of a different
order, practically a different species. He probably couldn’t fake it if
he tried, and he never tries. He writes like horror incarnate.
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