Songs of a Dead Dreamer is the first volume of short stories by Thomas Ligotti. (DJ Spooky later used the title for one of his finest albums).
I’m a bit embarrassed that I never encountered Ligotti’s work before now, because it is amazing. Ligotti specializes in short stories of horror (I don’t think he’s ever published a novel).
In a way, these stories are quite classical: in terms of imagery and content they are much closer to Lovecraft than to, say, Stephen King. As for their language, it is as gothic as Lovecraft’s, even though it is subtle, restrained and economical, where Lovecraft is always textually excessive. This may seem almost oxymoronic (how can something subtle and restrained be the slightest bit like Lovecraft?), but it is the best I can do. Put it this way: sentence by sentence and metaphor by metaphor, Ligotti’s language is heightened in much the same way that Lovecraft’s is. But where Lovecraft will typically write:
“Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell”
(– which is admittedly one of my favorite sentences in the English language),
Ligotti tends rather towards a sort of hyperbolic understatement (to desperately use another oxymoron), e.g.:
“He is still kneeling before the coffin as his features begin to undergo the ravages of various, obviously conflicting, phases of feeling. Eyes, mouth, the whole facial structure is called upon to perform gruesome acrobatics of expression.”
These sentences describe extremity, but hold back from it at the same time.
Ligotti’s themes are aesthetic and metaphysical, and here he is nothing like Lovecraft. There are no Cthulhus, no fish-people from Innsmouth, in Ligotti’s universe; no Lovecraftian dread of the Other. But neither is Ligotti’s dread psycho-cultural, in the manner of King and most mainstream horror.
Ligotti’s horror rather points depressively inward, to a claustrophobic, suffocating zone, where there is no longer any outside or Other, but where equally there is no more self, no more identity, no more culture. Many of his stories are written in the first person, with rather fussy and self-conscious narrators; but these narrators (as well as the protagonists of the stories written in the third person) are unmade by a metamorphosis that empties them of themselves, gives them over to forces of chaos and entropy, but usually without granting them the release of complete dissolution. They do not come face to face with some ultimate reality, but rather with a sort of unreality that (sometimes slowly but surely, other times with a disturbing rapidity) corrodes away all foundations, all points of reference, all solidity, to leave behind a kind of photographic negative of what Giorgio Agamben calls whatever-being: something without qualities, without any distinguishing marks, but only the dread of (in)distinction itself:
“These screams, the ones from beyond the door at the top of the stairs, belong only to a dummy who now feels warm drops of blood sliding thickly over his lacquered cheeks, and who has been left — alone and alive — in the shadows of an abandoned loft.”
Ligotti’s stories are like little time bombs: they are creepy when you first read them, but their profounder effects of estrangement only become apparent later, when you reflect back on them, and find their contours troublingly difficult to grasp.
Horror is a genre that tends to be beset, more than others even, by uninteresting repetition. (Think how often Poe, or Lovecraft, or George Romero, has simply been imitated, time and time again). Against this general tendency, I think that Ligotti is the most original horror writer of the last twenty or thirty years (and perhaps longer). Only Kathe Koja, who apparently is no longer writing horror, even comes close in terms of originality).
I need to read more of Ligotti’s stories.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Songs of a Dead Dreamer is the first volume of short stories by Thomas Ligotti. (DJ Spooky later used the title for one of his finest albums).
I’m a bit embarrassed that I never encountered Ligotti’s work before now, because it is amazing. Ligotti specializes in short stories of horror (I don’t think he’s ever published a novel).
In a way, these stories are quite classical: in terms of imagery and content they are much closer to Lovecraft than to, say, Stephen King. As for their language, it is as gothic as Lovecraft’s, even though it is subtle, restrained and economical, where Lovecraft is always textually excessive. This may seem almost oxymoronic (how can something subtle and restrained be the slightest bit like Lovecraft?), but it is the best I can do. Put it this way: sentence by sentence and metaphor by metaphor, Ligotti’s language is heightened in much the same way that Lovecraft’s is. But where Lovecraft will typically write:
“Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell”
(– which is admittedly one of my favorite sentences in the English language),
Ligotti tends rather towards a sort of hyperbolic understatement (to desperately use another oxymoron), e.g.:
“He is still kneeling before the coffin as his features begin to undergo the ravages of various, obviously conflicting, phases of feeling. Eyes, mouth, the whole facial structure is called upon to perform gruesome acrobatics of expression.”
These sentences describe extremity, but hold back from it at the same time.
Ligotti’s themes are aesthetic and metaphysical, and here he is nothing like Lovecraft. There are no Cthulhus, no fish-people from Innsmouth, in Ligotti’s universe; no Lovecraftian dread of the Other. But neither is Ligotti’s dread psycho-cultural, in the manner of King and most mainstream horror.
Ligotti’s horror rather points depressively inward, to a claustrophobic, suffocating zone, where there is no longer any outside or Other, but where equally there is no more self, no more identity, no more culture. Many of his stories are written in the first person, with rather fussy and self-conscious narrators; but these narrators (as well as the protagonists of the stories written in the third person) are unmade by a metamorphosis that empties them of themselves, gives them over to forces of chaos and entropy, but usually without granting them the release of complete dissolution. They do not come face to face with some ultimate reality, but rather with a sort of unreality that (sometimes slowly but surely, other times with a disturbing rapidity) corrodes away all foundations, all points of reference, all solidity, to leave behind a kind of photographic negative of what Giorgio Agamben calls whatever-being: something without qualities, without any distinguishing marks, but only the dread of (in)distinction itself:
“These screams, the ones from beyond the door at the top of the stairs, belong only to a dummy who now feels warm drops of blood sliding thickly over his lacquered cheeks, and who has been left — alone and alive — in the shadows of an abandoned loft.”
Ligotti’s stories are like little time bombs: they are creepy when you first read them, but their profounder effects of estrangement only become apparent later, when you reflect back on them, and find their contours troublingly difficult to grasp.
Horror is a genre that tends to be beset, more than others even, by uninteresting repetition. (Think how often Poe, or Lovecraft, or George Romero, has simply been imitated, time and time again). Against this general tendency, I think that Ligotti is the most original horror writer of the last twenty or thirty years (and perhaps longer). Only Kathe Koja, who apparently is no longer writing horror, even comes close in terms of originality).
I need to read more of Ligotti’s stories.