Review: Thomas Ligotti

LIGOTTI, Thomas, Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe, Penguin Books/Random House LLC, New York NY, USA, 2015.

Octavo; paperback; 448pp. Minor wear; creasing to the front cover. Very good.

I had been hearing this guy’s name a lot recently: every time I did an online search for something relating to the Cthulhu Mythos I invariably bumped into a reference. I began to half-heartedly look around but mostly all I got were gasping fan-boy exultations. I decided to keep things at arm’s length. Then, I discovered that Penguin had released Ligotti’s two short story collections in a single volume as part of their Penguin Classics range (along with Clark Ashton Smith’s oeuvre, but more of that anon) so I forked over my hard-earned and took a punt.

(Seriously, it helps to know people in this business: this book cost $33.00! With the discount extended to me by my friends-in-the-trade, it only cost me $19.00, so I pity any of you other saps out there without the proper connexions!)

Ligotti is a strange bird – Wikipedia told me so. I spent a while looking him up before I snaffled my copy of his writings, just to see what I was letting myself in for. Apparently, Mr. Ligotti is nihilistic, and suffers from a condition whereby he doesn’t receive pleasure from any activity, even those considered conducive to sparking the pleasure centres of the average human brain. His work is widely touted as being heavily influenced by HPL; I think, however, that if these two guys were somehow dumped into a room together they would not hit it off. I mean, Lovecraft enjoyed writing; he did it for pleasure and to entertain. If he brought a little cosmic indifference to the table, then that’s all to the good: it doesn’t get in the way of a good yarn. Ligotti? Not so much.

I’m guessing some critic somewhere read one of Ligotti’s pieces and thought “hey! The bad guys win! This must be that amoral cosmos that those Lovecraft fans always rave about!” It’s not the same thing. Ligotti, let me state it plainly, is bleak. No-one wins, apart from the ones who realise that no-one wins. There’s a large degree of 1990s serial-killer chic in his work: the dark underlying forces have us all in their sway and only those who can see these hidden motivations and act upon them have a true grasp upon the world. The guys who win are the ones who end up paddling through our entrails, out of their minds at the horror of it all. If this sounds like your cup of tea, then I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

Me, I find serial-killers dull. The average thriller wherein the sociopathic multiple-murderer is the target is boring in the extreme. The detective set against them has no material to work with and cannot anticipate the killer because - they’re mad. The killer randomly moves from event to event and is motivated solely because - they’re mad. Nothing definitive is stated about the human condition; no moral landscape is explored – the villain is just mad. On the one hand it’s police procedural dumbed down; on the other, it’s just lazy writing: he killed them - just ‘cos. Yawn! Agatha Christie wouldn’t stand for it.

This is the reason that I dislike Hastur as a Great Old One: madness for its own sake is tedious. Or rather, it has to be handled imaginatively, to make it effective. Very rarely have I encountered a Hastur-based Call of Cthulhu scenario which has been entirely satisfying. What’s happening? Oh, it’s just Hastur making everyone mad again. Oh, that Hastur! What a card! And - yawn. Awhile ago I reviewed a collection of Hastur-based fiction entitled Ripples From Carcosa as part of an overview of the Miskatonic River Press: it’s a badly-edited collection of sloppy splatterpunk - unfocussed, pointless, messy nihilism. Ligotti reads much like this collection, with the sole exception that he can write very well and is incredibly erudite. If that’s what melts your margarine, then I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

You see, the point that many splatterpunk writers and serial killer crime fiction types forget is that the goal of the writer is to entertain. That Hastur collection and this material from Ligotti both ignore this salient point: if you fail to entertain, there is no audience. With both of these collections, they lost me at the first pointless, amoral, sociopathic slash of the flensing knife against pre-pubescent flesh. I mean seriously – don’t these people watch the news? Don’t they pick up newspapers? Real life is appalling; it’s grubby, dispiriting and meaningless. If I want Ligotti, I’ll just pick up the Sydney Morning Herald, or download The Guardian. That’s free, by the way – not $33.00 from my local bookshop. If you enjoy overpriced, paedophiliac, serial-killing, however, I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow – the main source of our understanding of Hastur - discusses the notion of bleak nihilism unto madness but rarely ever brings it to fruition. It’s a thing that happens in his stories; not the stories themselves. Ligotti seems to have gone that extra mile and tried to reproduce in fact that which Chambers only discussed in theory. This too, is what happened with Ripples from Carcosa – despite the editor (and I use the term very loosely) stating that he didn’t want a bunch of wannabe writers trying to draft their own version of Chambers’ eponymous play, that’s in fact what happens several times in the collection. Ligotti’s tales would fit seamlessly into that collection, with the sole distinction that they’re several orders of magnitude above that dreck in terms of skill.

Ligotti takes on vampires, dark fantasy, psychological thrillers – myriad different premises and each revealing him to be uncannily well-informed wherever the territory takes him. The results are invariably quite chilling and unsettling – “The Frolic” is the best of the offerings and is genuinely disturbing, (despite my anti-serial bias). Still, far from a connexion with HPL, I found myself being reminded more of Frank Bellknap-Long, whose tendency to just drop things without explaining what’s happening is a constant frustration: Ligotti too, tends to leave things hanging, unexplained. He approaches Algernon Blackwood in terms of infusing a psychological mood into his pieces, without actually getting there; but, if this stokes your fire, I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

In one tale – “Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie” – Ligotti presents us with a thinly-veiled attack upon psychopharmacology. Set in a “Cask of Amontillado” type fantasy world, we are introduced to a devil-may-care duellist who has lost his frenetic disposition and has taken to wearing dark glasses given to him by a wizard. These spectacles remove the chaotic madness which had plagued our hero but they also have the effect of dulling his ability to take pleasure in his surroundings and also rob the world of its meaning for him. At the end of the tale, the swordsman’s madness comes calling for him in revenge, steals the glasses and throws our protagonist to the mob: in desperation he commits suicide by gouging his eyes out. It feels a little like Ligotti is drawing upon his own mental health issues here, and being unnecessarily negative about it to boot.

A repetitive device that Ligotti uses is the essay concerning supernatural horror. He starts writing an article about how to write horror stories, and each time subverts the expository style into a horror story in its own right. These are a thinly-veiled reference to HPL’s own useful essay on the same subject, but Ligotti uses them to display his own thoughts on the matter. Trivialising the groundbreaking work of others is hardly homage, but, if this fires your engines, I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

Thomas Ligotti is a far better writer than Patricia Cornwall or Thomas Harris; his writing has strong echoes of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. He has the ability to write something truly amazing; however he chooses to amble around in this puerile paddling pool. I’m amazed that Penguin has chosen to release this collection: maybe they saw it as a public service to warn people away – certainly the cover art won’t be attracting any casual readers any time soon. Still, if overpriced, bloody, amoral, psychotic violence is what you’re into – you don’t need my permission.

Three tentacled horrors and a bunch of Venlafaxine for this offering.