My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) by Thomas Ligotti, containing the short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done and the short stories "I Have A Special Plan For This World" and "The Nightmare Network.": Frank Dominio hates his job as a mid-level project manager in a nameless city. And he's going to get screwed over by his immediate superior and his fellow managers. And then he's going to get revenge.
Supernatural revenge. Crazy, weird supernatural revenge in which the punishment fits the crime, sort of. Because nothing here works all that well in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy -- it's not Falling Down or 9 to 5 or The Office. It's existentially bleak horror comedy from Thomas Ligotti, the king of existentially bleak horror comedy.
As almost always, Ligotti can be droll and blackly humourous without detracting from the abysmal horror of the work. My Work Is Not Yet Done and the two short stories in this volume all imagine a workplace environment of utter, soul-crushing horror. Which is to say, the workplace a lot of people spend a lot of their lives within.
My Work Is Not Yet Done's protagonist, narrating in first-person, isn't necessarily a sympathetic figure. But sympathy isn't necessary because he's fascinating, flawed, fractured, and more than a little self-loathing. And his adventures in revenge take him further and further into a world of absolute Night.
Ligotti's stories don't take place in a meaningless universe, in general -- they take place in a universe in which human beings are meaningless except insofar as they entertain the vast bleak powers of that universe. There's a reason Ligotti's stories return again and again to sinister puppets and marionettes (and there's one here too).
Ligotti's style -- droll, incantatory, spotted with repeated phrases that become almost meaningless placeholders at times (to bleak effect) -- is in full bloom here, full bloom at night. He's not a popular writer, but those who like him, like him a lot. And the writers he cites as his main influences -- H.P. Lovecraft, Franz Kafka, and Nabokov -- can be seen in his own work, transmuted by his own peculiar sensibilities. He's one of a handful of the greatest horror writers of the last 50 years. Highly recommended.
My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror by Thomas Ligotti containing "My Work Is Not Yet Done", "I Have a Special Plan for the World", and "The Nightmare Network" (2007): Frank Dominio is a team supervisor at a corporation called New Product. On his own initiative, he comes up with, well, a new product, and briefly presents his idea to his fellow supervisors and their boss, Richard (nicknamed "The Doctor" for initially unknown-to-Frank reasons).
And here Frank's troubles begin in the lengthy titular novella.
Thomas Ligotti gets to be described as a unique voice in horror because he really is a unique voice in horror. He can be approximated by imagining some bizarre mash-up of two or three or four other writers (for the record, I'd go with Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Clark Ashton Smith, and Roald Dahl) , but there's no single writer who's truly like him. He's an American original, writer of some of the bleakest, bleakly funniest horror stories of the past thirty years.
His take on corporate horror is singular and tricky. The novella initially seems to exist in the realm of the workplace revenge fantasy, something we've all seen. But the means of Frank's revenge are extraordinarily odd, and become odder as that revenge progresses. This is not Office Space With Ghosts.
People who've read other Ligotti stories may realize around the halfway mark that "My Work Is Not Yet Done" takes place in the same bleak universe as 1999's "The Shadow, The Darkness." One doesn't need to know this to understand what's going on, but it does deepen the experience as we plunge into the Magical Nihilism that is Ligotti's dominant mode of discourse.
But the novella is also horribly funny, as are the two short stories that complete this triptych. Frank Dominio begins the novella with a bleak outlook on humanity in general and his co-workers in particular, and the events of the story show that bleakness to not be enough. The world is much worse than Dominio ever imagined. The revenge scenarios initially carry a certain grotesque zing, but they quickly lose their enjoyability for Frank as he realizes who and what he's up against -- or working for.
Ligotti's fiction can truly unnerve one (as S.T. Joshi has observed), leading one to question the parameters of one's own existence, and the meaning of existence itself. But it's strangely, blackly refreshing because if one rejects the nihilistic cosmos of many of Ligotti's stories, one finds one's own cosmos to be that much more welcoming and benign by comparison. Highest recommendation.
