House of Small Shadows (2013) by Adam Nevill

House of Small Shadows (2013) by Adam Nevill: Adam Nevill explores the shadowlands between mental illness and the supernatural in disturbingly effective ways in this horror novel that also involves a whole lot of taxidermy and a battalion of creepy dolls and marionettes and puppets and old people.

Catherine is a 38-year-old antiques appraiser with a history of mental problems dating back to childhood when she was abandoned at birth, adopted, and then narrowly avoided being abducted. Or perhaps "spirited away" would be more accurate. After a violent meltdown in London, she's found some peace working for an eccentric antiques dealer and reconnecting with a long-lost boyfriend.

Alas, things will begin to go horribly wrong on the day her boss sends her to a preliminary meeting with ancient Edith, who owns The Red House, near Hereford. Nothing sinister in that name, is there? 

The Red House contains the life's work of post-WWI taxidermist and puppet-maker M.H. Mason: massive, exquisitely detailed tableaux of animals recreating WWI battlefields, strange dolls, and child-sized puppets of unusual design. None of it has ever been sold. If sold, the collection could bring in millions, though Catherine believes that perhaps the material should go to museums instead.

However, once Catherine enters the world of the Red House, Edith, and her laconic housekeeper Maude, events start to get a little odd. And progress towards greater oddity and horror. 

Catherine believes her mental state to be precarious, fragile, easily disturbed. As strange things begin to happen, and as the fugue states of her childhood and early teenage years suddenly return, she believes that the cause is interior to herself. To survive the mental barrage, she believes she must acknowledge that her problems are the problems of a diseased mind and cling thus to reality.

Of course, if these things are not the products of a diseased mind... well, that could be a problem for someone who fears the consequences of believing in many of the things she's experienced since she was a little girl, in Hereford... disturbingly close to The Red House for a couple traumatic years of childhood, she soon realizes.

Neville's portrayal of a mind besieged from within and without by the seemingly impossible reminds me a lot of many horror stories and novels by genre great Ramsey Campbell. An extended sequence in which Catherine attends a puppet show in the small village near the Red House is the most Campbell-like thing in the novel, a masterpiece of horror achieved through environmental description and the accumulation of disquieting details, partially glimpsed.

The character of Catherine has been a problem for some reviewers of this novel. I find her a compelling figure. Her mental problems are sympathetically and convincingly portrayed, as is her lonely battle to remain sane in an increasingly tilted and sinister world. Also, those goddam puppets are terrifying. Highly recommended.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2009) by Thomas Ligotti

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2009) by Thomas Ligotti: Whew! Great writer of visionary horror Thomas Ligotti checks in with his first non-fiction tome, a philosophical exploration of horror fiction and the need for the human race to cease to exist. It's the feel-good book of 2009!

Is it non-fiction, though? Throughout, Ligotti refers to lectures by Professor Nobody, a Ligotti stand-in. And the philosophical arguments made by Ligotti dovetail with the fictional horrors he's been visiting upon us for decades. One can never underestimate Ligotti's sense of humour.

Regardless, it's an interesting book. And a depressing one. Without giving too much away, the "conspiracy" of the title is the fact that humans possess self-awareness and an Ego. This means that we suffer more than anything else in creation, so much so that having a child is an atrocity: parents unleash children into a world where that child's suffering will always outweigh its joy.

In order to defeat suffering, humanity must cease to procreate. But it won't because humans have been programmed to have children. And they've been programmed to believe that their suffering will be lifted from them. Or isn't that bad.

Fun times, right? Ligotti goes into a number of areas in his relentlessly downbeat argument. Horror fiction, Ligotti notes, is the one branch of the Arts that faces the overwhelming suffering in a useful way: we are, in a way, all those characters in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft who learn that humanity's existence has neither hope nor meaning, and that we are all self-aware, suffering ants in a meaningless cosmos of suffering.

I've simplified and left out a lot of stuff. Look, read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Or don't. It just doesn't matter. Highly recommended.

Teatro Grottesco (2006/ This edition 2008) by Thomas Ligotti

Teatro Grottesco (2006/ This edition 2008) by Thomas Ligotti, containing the following stories:

Purity (2003)
The Town Manager (2003)
Sideshow and Other Stories (2003)
The Clown Puppet (1996)
The Red Tower (1996)
My Case for Retributive Action (2001) 
Our Temporary Supervisor (2001)
His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House (1997)
The Bells Will Sound Forever (1997)
A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing (1997) 
When You Hear the Singing, You Will Know It Is Time (1997)
Teatro Grottesco (1996) 
Gas Station Carnivals (1996)
The Bungalow House (1995)
Severini (1996)
The Shadow, The Darkness (1999)

Still the relatively slow-writing Thomas Ligotti's most recent collection, Teatro Grottesco is a droll, horrifying tour of strange places and the strange minds trapped within them. At this stage in his writing career, Ligotti has made the Lovecraftian elements in his fiction into a sinister underlier. No chants, no tentacled bogies: just the terrible hum of a universe so hostile to humanity that humanity may not even exist, or ever have existed, as humanity qua humanity. 

We may all just be puppets of a darkness that plays with us for its amusement. There is no free will, perhaps, because human beings only imagine that they possess imagination and individuality. Nothing real exists. 1999's "The Shadow, The Darkness" is Ligotti's definitive statement on this inhuman condition; fittingly, it closes the collection.

But for all the dismal absurdity of Ligotti's universe, it's also a bleakly comic one at times. "The Clown Puppet" showcases this best. The strange happenings -- happenings that would probably drive a 'normal' narrator insane -- are instead interpreted by our narrator as "outrageous nonsense." Our narrator riffs on various iterations of this phrase throughout the story. He exists in a world so strange that he essentially reacts to (and interprets) irruptions of insanity with a bemused 'Meh.'

Among other modern horrors, Ligotti deals with office life (in "My Case for Retributive Action" and "Our Temporary Supervisor") in ways that make both versions of The Office look like utopias by comparison. The horrors remain murky and partially unexplained, but horrors they are, whether of drudgery or sudden and mysterious death.

It's tempting to read some of these murky yet precise stories as allegory, especially "The Red Tower," which can seem at points like an examination of all human belief and faith. "The Town Manager" seems like it's about something other than its surface story, in which a decaying town is run by a succession of never-glimpsed Town Managers. 

The stories can support a lot of interpretations. They can also be enjoyed simply for their oddness, their existential dread, their linguistic elegance, their commitment to outrageous nonsense. They're destabilizing of one's sense of reality in the way all truly great horror is. Highly recommended.

My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) by Thomas Ligotti

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.

Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991/This edition 2015) by Thomas Ligotti

Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991/This edition 2015) by Thomas Ligotti, containing the following stories:

• Introduction: Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991): Janus-like, the introduction peers toward pomposity and parody.
• "The Last Feast of Harlequin" (1990): Almost certainly Ligotti's most-reprinted work, a novella that is both somewhat obliquely an homage to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Festival" and its very own thing, a striking, funny, droll, disturbing journey through a small town and its mysterious festival and the narrator who gets pulled into stranger and stranger situations as he investigates the town for anthropological reasons. Ligotti takes a number of horror tropes and makes them seem new and horrible again through the sheer force and inventiveness of his imagination and his narrative POV. One of the all-time great stories of cosmic horror, and perhaps Ligotti's most accessible major work.
• "The Spectacles in the Drawer"  (1987): Quintessential Ligotti in its combination of reality-busting and extraordinarily idiosyncratic characters.
• "Flowers of the Abyss" (1991): Another tale of a polluted reality and its peculiar attraction for people who should probably know better.
• "Nethescurial" (1991): Another oft-reprinted piece of Ligotti's Major Arcana. Vaguely Lovecraftian in tone and content, but distinctly a working-through of these things from Ligotti's assured, unique perspective. Puppet alert.
• "The Dreaming in Nortown" (1991): Reality breaks down in disturbing ways, all narrated by Ligotti's most Poe-esque protagonist.
• "The Mystics of Muelenburg"  (1987): Oblique, bleak reality-bender.
• "In the Shadow of Another World" (1991): Very strange and distinctive tale takes the haunted-house story and utterly scrambles it.
• "The Cocoons" (1991): Very, very horrific piece of absurdism, or at least near-absurdism. One of Ligotti's stories that disturbs without offering anything in the way of an attempt to frame things within a rational explanation.
• "The Night School" (1991): Worst night class ever.
• "The Glamour" (1991): A trip to a movie becomes a nightmarish, inexplicable tour of some peculiar, horrible sights and sounds. One of Ligotti's stories that leaves one shaken without any real way to parse what has happened in the story.
• "The Library of Byzantium" (1988): Sinister drawings, sinister priests, a sinister book, and a surprisingly traditional use of holy water.
• "Miss Plarr" (1991): Nothing really terrible happens in this tale of a boy and his nanny, yet the story defies simple explanation while it constructs a world that alternates between claustrophobic interior spaces and fog-erased exterior spaces.
• "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World" (1990): One of Ligotti's more straightforward stories in terms of its construction of what Evil is and what position it occupies in the universe. Another horror trope (the scary scarecrow) becomes revitalized by Ligotti's imagination. 

In all: a great collection of Ligotti's late 1980's and early 1990's work with all its cosmic, absurdist, horrific, comic, infernal devices. Highly recommended.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer (With these contents 2010) by Thomas Ligotti

Songs of a Dead Dreamer (With these contents 2010) by Thomas Ligotti, in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2015). Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer; containing the following stories:

The Frolic • (1982)
Les Fleurs • (1981)
Alice's Last Adventure • (1985)
Dream of a Manikin • (1982)
The Nyctalops Trilogy, consisting of The Chymist • (1981), Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes • (1982), and Eye of the Lynx • (1983)
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story • (1985)
The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe • (1983)
The Lost Art of Twilight • (1986)
The Troubles of Dr. Thoss • (1985)
Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie • (1986
Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech • (1983)
Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror • (1985)
Dr. Locrian's Asylum • (1987)
The Sect of the Idiot • (1988)
The Greater Festival of Masks • (1985)
The Music of the Moon • (1987)
The Journal of J.P. Drapeau • (1987)
Vastarien • (1987) 


Songs of a Dead Dreamer first appeared in 1985 as Thomas Ligotti's first short-story collection. Its contents changed in different editions over the years. In this Penguin 'Double,' paired with Grimscribe, his second collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer uses the same contents as the 2010 Subterranean Press edition.

Ligotti is a relatively unknown quantity outside horror fiction -- his biggest career exposure came as people on-line debated whether or not he'd been plagiarized in the first season of True Detective to supply Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle with all his best lines.

Prior to that, Ligotti was a mysterious figure. After that, he was also a mysterious figure. His reclusiveness isn't at the level of Pynchon or Salinger, but it's still remarkable in today's media-saturated age. His stories and essays tell the story. He doesn't write novels, though he has written one fairly long novella (My Work is Not Yet Done). He's certainly not for everybody, but then again, what writer is?

Ligotti's literary universe, already distinctly Ligottian early in his career, resembles something assembled in a laboratory from pieces of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. Then someone threw in an obsession with puppets, mannequins, and marionettes. Then someone set Phasers to Nihilism and roasted everything for about an hour. And that doesn't really describe his corpus all that well. He's got a more noticeable sense of humour than the four named authors, for one. Poe occasionally had a similar sense of humour in his blackly comic stories, but he didn't tend to exhibit that sense of humour in his horror stories. Ligotti often does.

But while there will always be attempts to classify Ligotti as Weird (including one by Weird spokesman Jeff VanderMeer in his clumsy, vague introduction to this Penguin volume), he's horror all the way down. His narrative structure and voice sometimes seem more Absurdist than horrific, but next to Ligotti, Kafka and other absurdists look like Pollyannas. 

There are no happy endings in these stories. There aren't even any points where one can imagine that anyone, anywhere is happy, or fulfilled, or anything other than Totally Damned except when that person is fulfilled by doing terrible things to other people. The biggest positive moral triumph in any of these stories comes when a mind-blasted person manages to kill himself, leaving a "victorious corpse" as a rebuke to his nemesis, a nemesis which is in actuality the personification of the Universe as a malign chaos at eternal play with everything that composes its body. That's a happy ending. 

For all that nihilism, the stories are exhilarating, witty, unique, intellectually challenging, aesthetically pleasing, and often bleakly hilarious. Ligotti riffs on predecessors such as H.P. Lovecraft and genre tropes such as vampirism at certain points ("The Cult of the Idiot" posits a cult devoted to Lovecraft's burbling, bubbling, atomic chaos of an idiot god Azathoth; "Alice's Last Adventure" bounces Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl and several other writers off some very hard and unforgiving walls; "The Lost Art of Twilight" makes vampires both horrible and absurd). 

Throughout, Ligotti offers short stories with enough Big Ideas to support entire novels. Ligotti may not write novels, but he certainly doesn't write miniatures. Stories such as "Vastarien" and "Les Fleurs" supply massive mythologies in Fun-Size form. And "The Frolic" presents one of the most annoying and tired of modern horror tropes, the antic and seemingly omniscient serial killer, in such a fresh and sinister way that in other hands it would have supported a trilogy. 

"The Frolic" is the first story in the collection and it's a killer -- a serial killer who makes Hannibal Lecter and his ilk look like the tired pop contrivances that they are and a horror mostly implied that clutches the heart. "The Frolic" also showcases a relative rarity for Ligotti as 'normal' suburban characters are set off against the horror of the world. It could almost be a Charles Beaumont or T.E.D. Klein story except for the bleak, nihilistic cosmic vistas described by the serial killer. 

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is an extraordinary collection, one that does indeed make one nervous about the realities of, well, reality. If your perfect model of horror runs to Stephen King (or John Saul, gods help you), then one should probably avoid this collection -- or buy it and shake yourself up. To lift Buzz Aldrin's phrase about the Moon, this is Magnificent Desolation. But Jesus, does Ligotti love puppets. Highly recommended.

Thomas Ligotti's Comics and Stories

The Nightmare Factory Volume 1, adapting stories by and with essays by Thomas Ligotti, including the following stories: The Last Feast of Harlequin, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Colleen Doran; Dream of a Mannikin, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Ben Templesmith; Dr. Locrian's Asylum, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Ted McKeever; and Teatro Grottesco, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Michael Gaydos (2007).

The rapidly defunct Fox Atomic comic-book line has to be credited with a whole lot of WTF chutzpah. Adapting four stories by cult horror writer Thomas Ligotti into a graphic album looks almost as odd as some of Ligotti's stories. Who thought this was a good idea? Kudos for risk-taking.

The adaptations are certainly solid. Much of Ligotti's prose has been preserved, and the art on all four stories is more than competent. However, the strangeness of Ligotti's work rests to a great extent on what a reader makes of the strange events and deadpan delivery of most of his protagonists and narrators. Illustrating the stories literalizes them, freezing a reader's ideas into an artist's singular interpretation of events.

The most straightforward story adapted, the Lovecraftian "The Last Feast of Harlequin," showcases a mostly understated art job by Colleen Doran. But once literalized by Doran's art, the creatures of the story lose a lot of their menace. The more surreal stories that follow also lose something in the translation. These are illustrated stories that never needed to be illustrated. A fascinating failure. Lightly recommended.


The Nightmare Factory Volume 2, adapting stories by and with essays by Thomas Ligotti, including the following stories: Gas Station Carnivals, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Vasilis Lolos; The Clown Puppet, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz; The Chymist, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Toby Cypress; and The Sect of the Idiot, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Nick Stakal (2008):

This second volume of Fox Atomic's comics adaptations of the work of horror writer Thomas Ligotti is weaker than the first, with only "The Clown Puppet"'s eerie visuals by Bill Sienkiewicz really adding anything to one's appreciation of the original stories. The exaggerated, cartoony approach favoured by artists Vasilis Lolos on "Gas Station Carnivals" and Toby Cypress on "The Chymist" seems to me to be a colossal mis-step.

In the former, the surreal paranoia of the piece would be better served by a more realistic style, perhaps even a hyper-realistic style. The cartooniness defuses the horror of Ligotti's conception, which here and in other stories requires a combination of hyper-realism and the surreal to be effective. The story should be a sinister, over-rendered Magritte piece with the distortions in reality coming from artistic juxtaposition, not distortion.

The latter is an astonishingly unpleasant romp featuring a mad scientist, a prostitute, and terrible experiments. It's like a debased homage to the EC Comics horror shorts of the 1950's, except that the female character has done nothing wrong other than being female and a prostitute, and the male character will be triumphant and unpunished at the end. I haven't read the original, but this adaptation is predictable, unpleasant without being horrific, and grindingly long. I have no idea how it got selected. It's the worst story by Thomas Ligotti I've sort-of read. In total, not recommended.

Monumental Sausage Party

Prime Evil edited by Douglas Winter, containing the following stories (1988):

The Night Flier by Stephen King: One of King's five or six worst short pieces (and it's a long short piece, by the way) seems to have been written solely for the central image. What a terrible, dumb, illogical story otherwise.

Having a Woman at Lunch by Paul Hazel: A weak bit of misogynistic whimsy from someone whom Winter notes has never written a horror short story before. It's like a bad EC Comics horror short, right down to the misogyny, but at least EC could defend itself by noting the time it existed.

The Blood Kiss by Dennis Etchison: Solid bit of Hollywood weird from Etchison, though with nothing particularly scary in sight.

Coming to Grief by Clive Barker: A fairly gentle Barker piece about loss and childhood fears.

Food by Thomas Tessier: Slight but enjoyable gross-out.

The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison: Subtle and elliptical novella about the aftermath of some sort of supernatural event that's never fully explained; the connection to the great Arthur Machen story of the same name seems to me to be so faint as to be perhaps problematic.

Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity by David Morrell: Brilliant horror piece from a writer generally known for his thrillers (and for creating John Rambo). Painting and secrets and the danger of seeing what cannot be unseen.

The Juniper Tree by Peter Straub: Disturbing tale of childhood sexual abuse could use a stronger, or at least more direct, conclusion, but still effective.

Spinning Tales with the Dead by Charles L. Grant: A representative bit of elusive, elliptical dark fantasy from Grant.

Alice's Last Adventure by Thomas Ligotti: Great piece from Ligotti, though in some ways it reminds me more of Ramsey Campbell than Ligotti in terms of subject matter and the treatment thereof.

Next Time You'll Know Me by Ramsey Campbell: A copy-editing mistake screws up some of the humour of the story, though it's still a droll (though non-frightening) bit of business.

The Pool by Whitley Strieber: Blech. Terrible stuff.

By Reason of Darkness by Jack Cady : Viet Nam horror evokes Conrad and Apocalypse Now in equal measure; its effect is weakened by an overly long climax when more development of events 'In Country' would have been far more welcome.

Beginning in the late 1970's, horror fiction seemed to cough up at least one attempt at a genre-defining/re-defining original anthology every decade or so. Notable entries in this accidental enterprise include Ramsey Campbell's excellent New Terrors, Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces, and Al Sarrantonio's 999.

Douglas Winter seems to have been going for the same thing with Prime Evil, though it's a much shorter anthology than any of those mentioned above. And it's also a bit underwhelming. There are good stories included here, the best being David Morrell's terrific novella about painting, madness, and the supernatural. In the end, though, Prime Evil is an interesting, deeply flawed snapshot of some of what horror fiction was up to in the late 1980's. Lightly recommended.

They Eat Babies, Don't They?

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2013) containing the following stories: Blackwood's Baby (2011); The Redfield Girls (2010); Hand of Glory (2012); The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven (2011); The Siphon (2011); Jaws of Saturn (2012); Vastation (2010); The Men from Porlock (2011); and More Dark (2012):

As his fictional cosmos becomes denser and more awful with each new story, Laird Barron's sense of humour has become more apparent. One of the jokes is in the collection's title. Look at the contents. "The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All" is mentioned in the collection's final, blackly satiric "More Dark", but it's a work by a thinly veiled parody of horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Hunh?

Barron certainly hasn't transmogrified into a laugh-riot, but nonetheless assays one semi-parodic roman a clef ("More Dark") and one warp-speed, semi-comic, ultra-cosmic cruise through the Cthulhu Mythos ("Vastation") in this new collection. Lurking somewhere in each story is at least the shadow of Barron's space-born, Earth-afflicting creation, the Children of Old Leech. As always, their sense of humour only amuses themselves.

He's still the reigning champion of stories about tough, competent men faced with overwhelming, horrific evil. "The Men from Porlock" is a modern classic about a hunting expedition gone tragically wrong; it bears comparison to that foundational giant in the 'Bad Camping Trip' sub-genre of horror, Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows."

I love this story. It's brutal and elegaic and startling. And its characters even manage to land a few punches on the snouts of those awful cosmic cancers, the Children of Old Leech, albeit at one remove. The day's coming when somebody's going to kill one of the Children of Old Leech in a Barron story, and that moment is going to be goddammed Christmas and New Year's all rolled into one.

Barron also continues to explore new voices and new approaches: all-female casts of protagonists in "The Redfield Girls" and "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven"; an extraordinarily unpleasant gangland stooge in "Jaws of Saturn"; a suicidal writer in "More Dark"; quite possibly the most disturbing vampires ever in "The Siphon." Along the way, we revisit old haunts, most prominently the demon-haunted forests of Washington state and the demon-haunted rooms of Olympia, Washington's Broadsword Hotel.

Well, really, the whole world is demon-haunted. But most of Barron's protagonists keep plugging along, heads down, trying to move forward against the blood torrent. There's a metaphysical lack of hope herein, but not complete hopelessness. Highly recommended.

First the Horror

Best New Horror Volume 1 (1989) edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories: "Pin" by Robert R. McCammon; "The House on Cemetery Street" by Cherry Wilder; "The Horn" by Stephen Gallagher; "Breaking Up" by Alex Quiroba; "It Helps If You Sing" by Ramsey Campbell; "Closed Circuit" by Laurence Staig; "Carnal House" by Steve Rasnic Tem; "Twitch Technicolor" by Kim Newman; "Lizaveta" by Gregory Frost; "Snow Cancellations" by Donald R. Burleson; "Archway" by Nicholas Royle; "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" by Thomas Ligotti; "...To Feel Another's Woe" by Chet Williamson; "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux" by Robert Westall; "No Sharks in the Med" by Brian Lumley; "Mort au Monde" by D. F. Lewis; "Blanca" by Thomas Tessier; "The Eye of the Ayatollah" by Ian Watson; "At First Just Ghostly" by Karl Edward Wagner; and "Bad News" by Richard Laymon (Collected 1990):

The first of the still-running Best New Horror anthologies is mostly excellent and manages to look at a broad slice of horror sub-genres. Cherry Wilder's Holocaust-tinged "The House on Cemetery Street" is literally and figuratively haunting, as is Thomas Tessier's Central American nightmare "Blanca." "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux" by Robert Westall does a terrific job of homaging the style and content of M.R. James in a more modern context, while the Thomas Ligotti piece included here is an emblematic bit of WTF? embodying Ligotti's unnerving fictional universe.

Ian Watson's piece is a black-comic horror-satire dealing with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Ramsey Campbell's story also satirizes religious fundamentalism, in this case against the backdrop of a world-wide zombie apocalypse, while Kim Newman's tale visits death and destruction on people who colourize movies (sort of). Only the Karl Edward Wagner tale is a bummer from a formerly great talent on his tragic way down, an unscary, unfunny homage to TV's The Avengers that features yet another alcoholic, self-loathing, sexually charismatic Wagner protagonist. Recommended.

Live Twee or Die Hard

Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology: edited by Peter Straub, containing the following stories:

The Bees by Dan Chaon
Cleopatra Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand
The Man on the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
The Great God Pan by M. John Harrison
The Voice of the Beach by Ramsey Campbell
The Body by Brian Evenson
Louise's Ghost by Kelly Link
The Sadness of Detail by Jonathan Carroll
Leda by M. Rickert
In Praise of Folly by Thomas Tessier
Plot Twist by David J. Schow
The Two Sams by Glen Hirshberg
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story by Thomas Ligotti
Unearthed by Benjamin Percy
Gardener of Heart by Bradford Morrow
Little Red's Tango by Peter Straub
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet by Stephen King
20th Century Ghost by Joe Hill
The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
The Kiss by Tia V. Travis
Black Dust by Graham Joyce
October in the Chair by Neil Gaiman
Missolonghi 1824 by John Crowley
Insect Dreams by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

I'd like this anthology a lot better with 'horror' removed from the title, though what one would replace that word with could lead to some debate: several stories don't feature the supernatural, so that's out; ghosts don't appear in all the stories, so there goes 'ghost story.' Even The New Fabulists fails, despite the broad net of that term.

"The New Horror" seems to have started around 1980 for Straub, though several writers (Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Straub himself, among others) have published careers that stretch back up to 15 years before that. Again, odd: there are at least two generations of writers here, maybe even three. 130 years after Poe, the title seems a bit odd as well, and unintentionally dismissive of those 130 years of horror between Poe's death and the appearance of the first story here.

And horror, no -- about half the stories here fail to horrify, terrify, gross out or (per S.T. Joshi) unnerve. And not just because I've read too much horror. Some of the choices -- maybe none moreso than Straub's choice for his own story -- simply aren't horror, though all the stories in this anthology are well written.

One of the strangely dominant modes here is the sort of dark, fantastical whimsy that John Collier and Roald Dahl, among others, were masters of -- perhaps the most acceptable literary form of the fantastic through much of the 20th century if one bases one's analysis on the slick magazines and what they tended to publish for decades on end. Neil Gaiman, Straub, Jonathan Carroll and a few others offer this sort of project, in which the whimsy can sometimes be smothered in twee, never moreso than in Kelly Link's "Louise's Ghost", a treacly, twinkly botch of a story.

King's uncharacteristic entry here -- I can't recall ever seeing it anthologized since its first appearance in 1984 -- is much better than I remember it, but still undercut by the sheer, well, whimsy of the basic premise. The fantastic element simply can't bear the weight of the story's exploration of madness and addiction. The story would be better without any nod to the fantastic.

I did enjoy many of the stories I'd never encountered before, even many of those that aren't really horror at all. But it's a darn peculiar anthology: peculiarly skimpy on contextual material, and peculiarly spotty in terms of satisfying the 'horror' portion of its title. Lightly recommended.

Work Sucks

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.

Ruins

Teatro Grottesco, written by Thomas Ligotti (2006): Ligotti is an unusual American writer, a unique voice with echoes of Lovecraft, Borges, Kafka, Robert Aickman and Poe. He doesn't write novels, believing them unequal to the task of writing horror. And in terms of his horror -- metaphysical and unnerving, terrifying, and deeply weird -- he may be right. The longest story in this collection runs about 40 pages, and that's almost too much.

A Ligotti protagonist from a story not in this collection wanted to "stand among the ruins of reality." That's often where a Ligotti story begins, in a landscape subtly altered, or in a situation that makes no rational sense, a situation the characters often react to with just a bit too little surprise. People vanish. Towns die. The very notion of the self gets destroyed by a spiritual revelation brought on by acute gastrointestinal distress. Strange buildings loom over dead cities. Failed artists confront...what? The abyss? Factory workers build parts for mysterious machines. Ligotti's vision is apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic. Something has torn apart the illusions of the world, leaving deep unease everywhere.

Which isn't to say that the stories aren't funny at points. Ligotti deals as much with absurdity as he does terror (actually, absurdity and terror are often the same thing in these stories). For example, in one story a character recounts childhood visits to "gas station carnivals" at which no rides ever worked and only one performer ever appeared at the sideshow, and that sideshow performer usually the gas station attendant in a costume. In great detail, these visits are recounted, along with the character's reactions to them then and now. And these things, these gas station carnivals, are just the set-up for what comes next.

After awhile, one notes that Ligotti uses repeated phrases, phrases repeated by his characters throughout a work, as a musical ordering principle, or possibly an incantation. Late at night, this is the sort of horror fiction that can worry one because the fiction itself may seem to be acting against reality. Or for something beyond consensus reality.

That's a high order of horror, the sort of thing TED Klein used Arthur Machen's "The White People" for in Klein's novel The Ceremonies: as a fiction that had unintentionally tapped into fundamental principles. Woohoo! The forbidden books are always being written. The conspiracy against the human race is ongoing. Is Ligotti a great writer? Yes -- his stories demand concentration and deliberation, and they affect the way one sees the world. Highly recommended.