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Songs of a Dead Dreamer

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Here's the biggest compliment I can pay Thomas Ligotti: he writes as though he were completely unaware of any other horror fiction written in his lifetime. There is not a major horror writer today whose work even vaguely resembles Ligotti's. I've heard him compared to Poe and Lovecraft but even these comparisons are misleading. His prose and imagery are far more akin to those of Bruno Schulz, the great Polish fantasist who wrote "Street of Crocodiles." These stories spill over with chilling images, irrational "plots," and a sense of dread that feels less like fiction than it does the kinds of horrible dreams we have while suffering a high fever. If you don't recognize that as high praise, you probably shouldn't read this book. But I love it.

"Songs of a Dead Dreamer" is his earliest collection, and perhaps because of this, I feel it still packs the biggest wallop. But if you like these stories, I recommend "Grimscribe" and "Noctuary."

A personal note: Years ago I had the chance to illustrate Ligotti's story "The Night School" for a small press publication. The editor sent me a copy of the manuscript, full of Ligotti's own notes and corrections. Reading the story in that form, feeling that much closer to the original process that brought the story into being, was an awesome experience. I felt compelled to examine the manuscript, as though somewhere amid its wandering margins and sloppy typing I might detect a sign, however cryptic, a clue as to how to tap into the same chilling dreamworld that Ligotti described so beautifully. It didn't work, of course. But "Night School" did inspire a pretty good illustration and reading Ligotti did provide one of the high points during my own dubious ventures into the realm of horror fiction.

This unarguable classic collection of stories appeared at the end of the 1980s. Horror fiction, or what publishers chose to market as horror fiction, was big business. However, there is a large variety of styles under this arbitrary umbrella ("Horror isn't a genre, it's an emotion", editor/author David Hartwell). Authors such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz had become best sellers with novels often using pulp-orientated elements (vampires, ghouls, werewolves, or assorted permutations) that invade our modern society. Others wrote popular horror novels with the villain(s) being psychotic or sociopathic, but an explainable (and real) element in our society. One of my favorite styles of horror, however, could best be described as "hallucinatory nightmare", which is rarer and probably more difficult to pull off. Ligotti succeeds time and time again with a rich lyrical style that is varied, multi-leveled, and often witty as well. There are the former mentioned types of tales here. There's a great vampire story, and you'll meet a few psychos, one for instance who loves flowers, but it's the stories of reality rotting away or perhaps take place entirely in an askew dream fantasy where Ligotti makes his mark. Stories like "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech", or "the Greater Festival of Masks" take place in the landscape of a surreal nightmare. In one of his best stories, "Alice's Last Adventure", a twisted ode to Lewis Carroll, the narrator's reality may have literally turned inside out. Amongst all the vacuous abstract blather about literature and art, good fiction's ultimate goal, along with telling a good story, is to create the mental state in the reader of a "waking dream", as the late John Gardner accurately described it. A world is created in the reader's imagination and he or she, while reading, forgets it's merely words on paper. For myself, good horror fiction, for perhaps a number of reasons, has always produced the most vivid "waking dream" state, and the hallucinatory nightmare style best of all. Probably since the logic is often skewed or hidden as in actual dreams. "Notes On Horror: A Story", which unfortunately does not appear in his later comprehensive collection, "The Nightmare Factory" makes a great litmus test for whether you're a lover of "weird fiction". If you finish it and question what is this Ligotti guy's problem, this type of horror probably isn't for you. On the other hand, it may thrill, delight, and amuse you and you may after all, as Ligotti says, "find it all so easy".

The truth is that Thomas Ligotti has come out of seemingly nowhere in just the last ten years and has, in that time, set a new standard in literature of the supernatural. I picked up _Songs_ in 1992, initially for the Washington Post's declaration, "Put this on the bookshelf between Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft where it belongs." My hopes were more than realized. Ligotti is not only as good as the nineteenth and twentieth century masters of the macabre. For the select few who have read his material, he is simply one of the finest authors of the terrifying and disturbing short story and novella ever to grace the English language. Do I exaggerate? Read this compilation of masterworks and ask yourself afterwards whether Ligotti will be considered the groundbreaking Poe or Lovecraft of the late twentieth century. When the likes of King and Straub are mostly forgotten in a century, it is my firm opinion that Thomas Ligotti's stories, such as the terrifying "Dr. Locrian's Asylum", will still be read by those students of the genre who will still appreciate the authors subtlety, flowing eloquence, and his chilling originality and detail of plot and character

Urban solitude, houses that are suggested to appear and disappear, empty voids laying hidden behind dark crumbled brick facades, streets with a mysterious accumulation of names seemingly coming from nowhere, doors hanging in their hinges but do not open that easily, pieces of clothing laying abandoned in the street, shadows rise and fall, voices in the distance calling your name, or do they?
These are the settings for the superb short story "The greater festival of masks" and believe me, this is just the beginning. From here on, from the moment lead character Noss walks in a shop that solely sells costumes and masks and falls asleep, it only gets worse, and more eerie, and untouchable. And at the end, you're not realy sure what you've just witnessed.
What happens exactly behind the deceitfull brick walls of the old houses and behind the wooden fence at the back of the shop? Why de some masks perfectly fit the customer's face while other hurt and slide of with every step you take. What cries out underneath the blank faces of the inhabitant who have no facial features or expressions what so ever?

Like the best poetry there is so much more than meets the eye. It's between the lines that the real things happen, but what is reallity and when do dreams and nightmares take over?
A lot has been said about "Songs of a dead dreamer", Thomas Ligotti's debut collection of short stories. The comparisons with Poe and Lovecraft seems endless, Kafka and Bruno Schulz are mentioned as well because of their nightmarishness and plotless compositions.
You could add the cinema of David Lynch and Roman Polanski if you like, even throw in the animated shorts of the twin brothers Timothy and Stephen Quay, especially their master creation "Streets of crocodiles" (and, why not, their solo feature film "Institute Benjamenta" as well.) And how about some hints at Jan Svankmajer's surreal work like "Faust", "Alice", and surely the suggested perversities of the absurd "Conspirators of pleasure".

And yet, with all these big names in a long line, if one author can be called original and being capable of standing completely on his own, it is Mr. Ligotti. One of the reasons why this is a justified statement is because Ligotti has a gift not many writers of the horror genre have: style. Ligotti's prose sings, cries, wanders, but never realy lingers off. Sentences can be long at time, but never tedious, their is a meaning in every word and an underlying motivation for each syllable. It's the horrifying stuff of heavey metal perfectly blend with the otherworldlyness of a choir chant and the bravoura of an opera.

You could call Ligotti's prose even autistic because it describes a world of its own in a language that stands on its own and seems to be introverted, no matter how many word-explosions and super nova's of illuminations and imagery it may contain. Its locked in itself, it is both lock and key, and the reader has but one choise, go along with the lyrical flow and enter the forbidden zone of Ligotti's unique language or stay out and leave.

Having said this, I would like to mention one more film to illustrate these last statements about this unique kind of literary autism, namely Andrei Tarkovski's "Stalker": a highly unique and eerie film, created by one of the worlds best cinematic stylists, and standing completely on his own, no other movie can be compared with it, and to make things even more interesting: "Stalker" is about a guide who takes two men, a writer and a scientist, into a mysterious "forbidden zone"; a dark, desolate place which dangers and clues consist mostly in the minds of the audience.
To me, it could have been made from the perfect Ligotti script.

In a way, this book could easily have been called "Movies of a dead dreamer" or "Dreams of a dead poet" or "In the twilight of dead films" or "A panorama of dead songs" and that just shows in how many ways you can look at Ligotti's craft. And that should tell you enough.

I could go on for much longer, there is so much to discover in this one volume. "Dr. Locrian's asylum" for instance, about the creepy, unimaginable history of an insane asylum where patients were kept for something other than a straight forward cure... Repelled citizens who have no other choise than to create a revolution against the building and the restless ghosts it keeps behind its windows. And the eventual downfall of the entire town as result.

I will say no more. You stop listening. Turn the pages before they crumble between your fingers. Be a blessed audience to these rare little songs. They will haunt you long after nightfall.... and thank all the Gods in the netherworlds for that.

There is something strangely comforting about reading the bad review posted above, from Publisher's Weekly, and knowing that it refers to one of the greatest anthologies of horror literature published in the last fifty years. Just goes to show you that even the best writers in this genre are inevitably misunderstood: Here we have a man in the same league as Blackwood, M. R. James, Lovecraft or Poe--and he's still being dismissed in his own lifetime by TOTAL DUMMIES.

But Ligotti is certainly appreciated, at least by some. There is a published THOMAS LIGOTTI READER...despite the fact that almost all his books are out of print. His signed first editions are already priced like horror artifacts, and increasingly hard to come by.

Personally, if I had any signed first edition of Ligotti's, it would be SONGS. There is a tangible loneliness to the horror, an emotional dimension. The ending of ALICE'S LAST ADVENTURE, for instance, is simultaneously terrifying AND enormously sad. And a wry sense of humor is also present in this particular collection, though it's not remotely comforting--quite the opposite in fact. Something about the world of Ligotti's stories being so unforgivingly funny just makes it MORE threatening. Like his characters are caught up in a particularly cruel 'cosmic joke'.

Now it's also true that something about this first collection is more traditional than Ligotti's later work, and that turns off some of the die-hard Ligottians (who understandably prefer the lyric otherworldiness of his recent collections). But that also means SONGS is the best place to get introduced to this remarkable author.

Linguistically complex, structurally virtuosic and just plain brilliant. If you're thinking of reading SONGS, do it right now. You'll become a fan overnight, I promise.

"It is said that death is a great awakening, an emergence from the mystifications of life. Ha, I have to laugh. Death is the consummation of mortality and - to let out a big secret - only heightens mortal imperfections." (p. 94, Only Drink to Me with Labyrinthine Eyes)

Songs of a Dead Dreamer opens with The Frolic, a seemingly simple story about a child abductor. Out of all the collection's stories, The Frolic is by far the most traditional, complete with easily sympathetic characters and a thoroughly sane narration. In the distance, however, are hints of something far stranger. The incarcerated abductor is clearly insane, but his delusions aren't of grandeur but of insignificance, denying himself even a proper name. John Doe, as our psychologist protagonist tags him, says that the abuse he defiles his victim with is wholly irrelevant to his true purpose. John Doe, instead, "frolics" with the children, claiming to liberate them and take them to a "cosmos of crooked houses and littered alleys, a slum among the stars." (p. 21, The Frolic) But, until the end, that strangeness is kept at bay:

"Until then their home had been an insular haven beyond the contamination of the prison, an imposing structure outside the town limits. Now its psychic imposition transcended the limits of physical distance. Inner distance constricted, and David sensed the massive prison walls shadowing the cozy neighborhood outside." (p. 14, The Frolic)

As the Frolic ends, the bizarre explodes into the ordinary, and the collection proper begins.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is an incredibly difficult reader. Like all the best horror, Ligotti's works are drenched in atmosphere. This is not, however, the kind of atmosphere that you sink into and are carried away by. The book is, instead, a very active read; the reader has to build up their own atmosphere, brick by brick, with the pieces that Ligotti provides.

What makes the experience truly trying is what you are expected to imbibe. Ligotti, like Lovecraft before him, is a truly cosmic author. This is not fiction meant to simply unsettle you. Ligotti entirely forgoes the standard pathways of horror; there is no gore here, precious little suspense, scarce violence. Ligotti's words will, instead, get inside your mind and, once there, ransack everything that you hold dear. This is one of the bleakest collections you will ever read, a grand altar assembled to celebrate the utter unimportance of your world. These stories will not evoke your sympathy, because while reading you will realize that no living creature deserves sympathy. These stories don't even have the prospect of a happy ending, because while reading you will come to realize that there is no such thing as a happy ending. Story after story is an inexorable slide through darkness, the blessed perhaps ending in a Ligottian paradise:

"And was it a world at all? Rather the unreal essence of one, all natural elements purged by an occult process of extraction, all days distilled into dreams and nights into nightmares. Each passage he entered in the book both enchanted and appalled him with images and incidents so freakish and chaotic that his usual sense of these terms disintegrated along with everything else. Rampant oddity seemed to be the rule of the realm, while imperfection was the paradoxical source of idealities - miracles of aberrance and marvels of miscreation. There was horror, undoubtedly. But it was a horror uncompromised by any feeling of lost joy or a thwarted searching for the good. Instead, there was proffered a deliverance by damnation. And if Vastarien was a nightmare, it was a nightmare transformed in spirit by the utter absence of refuge: nightmare made normal." (p. 276, Vastarien)

Of course, I don't mean to imply that the stores in Songs of a Dead Dreamer are dry or uninteresting, not at all. In an interview a few years ago, Ligotti said that "Literature is entertainment or it is nothing", and he lives up to that principle in every single piece here. A large part of the enveloping atmosphere of the collection comes from Ligotti's prose, which is nothing short of incredible:

"Best of all, though, would be the depiction of my life as an abstract painting - a twilight world, indistinct around the edges and without center or focus; a bridge without banks, tunnel without openings; a crepuscular existence pure and simple. No heaven or hell, only a quiet withdrawal from life's hysteria and death's tenacious darkness. (And I tell you this: What I most love about twilight is the deceptive sense, as one looks down the dimming west, not that it is some fleeting transitional moment, but that there's actually nothing before or after it: that that's all there is.)" (p. 147, The Lost Art of Twilight)

Ligotti's writing is incredible at capturing a moment and then making that moment seem like all eternity. His use of description in Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech, for instance, fills the room with so many oddities that it's impossible to picture all at once, leading to a claustrophobic and cluttered atmosphere where the reader is sure something vital is lurking behind them. The one drawback of the style comes about in Masquerade of a Dead Sword, which is essentially a nihilistic heroic fantasy story. The majority of the tale works quite well, but when the climax comes around and events are supposed to leap into motion, the immediacy that such an action scene requires is smothered under the oppressive weight of the atmosphere.

Ligotti has said that he has no interest in capturing the lives of "normal" people in his stories, but, when it comes to the fringes of society, he has almost no equal. The discomfort and fear of Alice (Alice's Last Adventure), or the repressed dreams of the "fair haired girl" (The Eye of the Lynx), the conflicted nature of Alb Indys (The Troubles with Dr. Thoss), the sheer longing of Victor Keirion (Vastarien), these are portrayals that are almost painfully poignant, characters outside our own experience whose plight is so vast that we not only come to recognize theirs but lose the ability, for a time, to even glimpse our own.

When it comes to the integration of philosophy and atmosphere, Dream of a Manikin is a good example of Ligotti's general style. The story uses several different frames to layer itself, gradually building an extremely unsettling air while introducing us to Ligotti's concept of shared dreaming and Divine Masochism (p. 61, Dream of a Manakin). The majority of the story is discomforting and thought provoking, but it's only at the end, when Ligotti has fully developed both idea and atmosphere, when events became truly visceral. The story's conclusion causes the entirety of the text to come to life and turn on us, infusing what seemed like a relatively contained exploration of ideas into a rapier stabbing into us.

That sudden reversal characterizes many of the stories here, though it rarely comes in the form of a conventional twist. Often, the majority of the story will describe a ritual, setting, or mindset that seems at once standard and ye so subtly wrong that we can't do anything but fail to comprehend it again and again. Then, as the story closes, Ligotti puts down the final piece of the puzzle and pulls the whole story into focus, showing us that not only was the world we'd been seeing correct, but that it was, in fact, the world we live in, the only possible mindset to ever even contemplate. A great example of this is The Greater Festival of Masks. The vast majority of the story takes events that seem simple and makes them so surreal as to be indecipherable. Noss tries on a mask, watches over the mask shop, supplies a mask or two, and then goes off with his mask. It's only at the end that the reader can truly appreciate the story and see why no word of it was wasted, which is the reason that so many of Ligotti's stories are even stronger on reread.

The use of several different frames is a technique that Ligotti uses throughout the collection. Many of these stories are about identity, so the constantly shifting nature of how the tale is told compliment that perfectly. Probably the most accomplished of the shifting frame stories are Notes on the Writing of Horror Fiction (a piece that is delightfully metafictional, informative, and creepy as hell) and The Christmas Eve of Aunt Elise. The latter is interesting because the narrator's feeling of familiarity and tradition are only matched by the reader's sense of dislocation. Is the tale Jack recounting his experiences many years later? Is it a new experience that the narrator is having? Perhaps, the center of the stale is the story that Aunt Elise is telling. Or, perhaps, it's another possibility, only coming to light at the end, and grotesquely altering everything that came before.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer will terrify you, and I'd be lying if I said it was a truly pleasant experience. All the same, this collection is absolutely essential. If you are going to read two works of horror in your life, make one Lovecraft and the other Ligotti.

I have to state right off the bat that most of the reason for giving this book 4 stars instead of 5 is that it suffers in comparison to some of Ligotti's other work, such as "Noctuary." "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" drags and wanders a little more. However, that should in no way discourage you from reading this book!

Ligotti writes horror. Not horror with lots of blood and gore; not the stereotypical fare of serial killers, vampires, werewolves, and witches. Even when he does touch on "standard" topics, they come to life in unusual and fundamentally odd ways. Ligotti writes a sort of text-poetry, a magic of words and images, shadows and light, madness and clarity, puppets and people. Ligotti's work mystifies and terrifies. He doesn't spell everything out. He leaves questions unanswered and oddities unexplained. But he does it well--I never feel as though I've been left missing anything.

Some of the pieces in this book are not entirely fiction. You'll find essays on the art of writing horror, but they'll send no less of a shiver down your spine than the stories themselves. There's even one piece that's an essay on writing horror and a story, both in one ("Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story"). In this piece we follow the character of Nathan and the various versions of his life as might befit a horror story.

"By means of supernatural horror we may evade, momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation."

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell what is essay and what is story, as Ligotti blurs the line beyond recognition. Ligotti speaks in analogy and metaphor, image and verse. Some may find this book slow, or too wordy. Ligotti is certainly not for everyone. But if you enjoy unusual, thrilling, subtle, lyrical, dark stories, then please give him a try. His is a voice worth hearing.

"And in darkness we open our eyes, briefly, and in darkness we close them."

That was true then, and it is true now. The paperback edition of this book was my introduction to TL's work, I fell in love w/ it instantly and to this very day, he remains THE Master of Horror. This is not his best book, for that, to me, The Nightmare Factory is, but this collection is a small work of true genius.

This book is bleak in beauty and stark in horror. The horror of it twisted around me like a mist. Its words festered in my head until they exploded, spewing forth a black pus that overwhelmed my small and finite brain.