This collection features tormented individuals who play out their doom in various odd little towns, as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics. The cycle of narratives that includes the title work of this collection, for instance, introduces readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that ultimately engulf their lives. These are selected examples of the forbidding array of persons and places that compose the mesmerizing fiction of Thomas Ligotti.
Teatro Grottesco
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"A generous serving of Edgar Allan Poe, a dash of Franz Kafka, a smidgen of Robert Aickman: These comprise the components in the cauldron of creativity of Thomas Ligotti. . . . His descriptive powers are mesmerizing." —Hellnotes
From the Back Cover
Thomas Ligotti is one of the most original and remarkable figures in horror literature since H. P. Lovecraft. In Teatro Grottesco Ligotti follows the literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe: portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. Just by entering his unique world where odd little towns and dark sectors are peopled with clowns, manikins and hideous puppets, and where tormented individuals and blackly comical eccentrics play out their doom, is to risk your own vision of the world.
'Quite unlike anything else being published … One of the most unique voices in the field … His imagery is breathtaking' – Science Fiction Chronicle
'(Ligotti uses) restrained, lyrical prose and subtly disturbing images that Poe himself might well have admired' – USA Today
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48 of 53 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Impressed enough by the Ligotti work I've seen in anthologies devoted to following up on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, I bought this anthology.
Is Ligotti a Lovecraftian writer? Well, based on this collection - and I have no idea how representative it is - yes and no. There are no explicit Lovecraftian allusions in this collection - no references to the forbidden books, nightmare locations, and mysterious entities created by Lovecraft and those adding to the Mythos. Yet, the pre-eminent, most important aspect of Lovecraft's work, "cosmic horror", the "infinite terror and dreariness" of existence, as one story here puts it, is shared by Ligotti.
Yet, that horror is expressed in vaguer and more general terms than in Lovecraft. In one of his stories, the horrific revelation is one of man's hidden evolutionary past, miscegenation in a family's past, the existence of alien races. The revelation at the end of a Ligotti story is rarely so specific.
And their prose differs. The scientific references in a Lovecraft story are not here. The technological trappings of a Lovecraft story frequently link it to its time of composition. Ligotti's stories are noticeably lacking in any specific technological reference. An "audiotape" is the most time specific reference there is. Otherwise, they could be set almost anytime during the 20th century. Ligotti's prose reminded me more of Lovecraft's idol, Poe, than Lovecraft. Always told in the first person, they frequently deal with odd psychological states and fixations. The notion of the alternate self, the doppelganger as pioneered by Poe in his "William Wilson", also shows up a lot.
In fact, if one wanted to be snarky, you could say Ligotti was a writer of bloated prose, stories almost always told in the same way, ending usually with some horrible revelation of malevolent, vague cosmic forces, a recycler of the images of dilapidated buildings and towns, abandoned factories, clowns and puppets, and intestinal viruses. In short, Ligotti's not a storyteller telling many tales in many ways, but a writer obsessively telling the same story the same way.
Yet, when that story is worth telling and told well, that sort of writer is also called an artist. And, by that definition, Ligotti is an artist.
What might seem, on a quick reading, bloated prose with frequent repetition of the same phrases and the same details of event and character, is not exactly poetry but it is incantory, akin to the repetition often found in writing for children. But here, rather than a child, it is adults introduced to a world of horrible wonder, the world of "the icy bleakness of things". The use of those recurring images is varied enough not to bore - though I can see some readers perhaps wanting to ration themselves an occasional Ligotti story rather than gulping them down all at once. And Ligotti is consistently, even more than Lovecraft, a writer of weird, not horror, fiction. The rewards of each are different.
Ligotti groups his 13 stories into three sections - Derangements, Deformations, and the Damaged and Diseased. These classifications are a bit too general to provide a sense of the collection.
Two of Ligotti's best stories deal with the world of work. In "The Town Manager", we are told of the mysterious disappearances of a town's unelected, unrequested town managers, each of which institute reforms which hasten the town's decay. "Our Temporary Supervisor" has the narrator in a meaningless job detailing how a new employee, in collusion with a new, horribly undefined and unseen supervisor, transforms a factory job into virtually round the clock enslavement via social pressure. While it is tempting to see these stories as commentaries on politics and capitalism, I think Ligotti has just set his existential horror in a more recognizable, specific setting.
The Quine Corporation is the force behind the latter story and is also mentioned in "My Case for Retributive Action". The title brings to mind the opening of Poe's "The Casque of Amontillado" and the plot Kafka's "Metamorphoses". The story seems to share the same vague setting, near the border of an unnamed country, with "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land". In this collection of four first person accounts obliquely gazing the horror encroaching on a town, Lovecraft fans may strain to see echoes of the master's "The Festival" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".
The technique of multiple accounts in one story also shows up, as an artist's vignettes rather than recollections of characters, in "Sideshow, and Other Stories". It is an interesting story of trying to compare our world to an unknown order which may or may not exist, but compounded ambiguities make it a failure. Also, in the failed category, is "The Clown Puppet". The titular figure and his attached strings are a metaphor for unseen forces. But the image is too common, and the plot not very compelling.
"Purity" is another strong story. Rather than demolishing a vague and general notion of existence and replacing it with some general, nihilistic notion of cosmic reality, this story attacks the universal human anchors and consolations of country, faith, and family. The child narrator's father is up to something creepy in the basement - but Ligotti neatly surprises us with what that horror is and then throws in another hint about what the rest of the family has been up to. "The Red Tower" is the most Poe like story in its prose which recounts the odd appearance, history, and function of an abandoned factory. "Teatro Grottesco" has a writer seeking out a mysterious cabal that strips artists of their creative impulses and powers. Like so many stories in this collection, its narrator ultimately embraces the maleovelent forces that are revealed. This is also the first of four stories in the collection's last section that feature physical distress, specifically gastrointestinal distress, as a revelatory ordeal. "Gas Station Carnivals" is all right as a story but is mostly interesting for the delusional details of the title attraction. "The Bungalow Horror" combines a Poe-like doppelganger with "Teatro Grottesco"'s notion of destroyed artist. It is also something of a rumination of what people get out of writers like Lovecraft and Ligotti - and how the art serves its creators. "Severini" is the most physical story and the story whose images most evoke Lovecraft. Actually, its glimpses of a priesthood of Tantric Medicine on an island near the Philippines using dysentery as a tool of enlightenment reminded me of one of Lovecraft's favorite stories - A. Merritt's "The Moon Pool". "The Shadow, the Darkness" is a powerful story that, in its horrific insistence on humans as only bodies, tools for the Tsalal (evidently, recurring entitites in Ligotti's works) raises questions of free will and cosmic parasitism.
Is Ligotti a Lovecraftian writer? Well, based on this collection - and I have no idea how representative it is - yes and no. There are no explicit Lovecraftian allusions in this collection - no references to the forbidden books, nightmare locations, and mysterious entities created by Lovecraft and those adding to the Mythos. Yet, the pre-eminent, most important aspect of Lovecraft's work, "cosmic horror", the "infinite terror and dreariness" of existence, as one story here puts it, is shared by Ligotti.
Yet, that horror is expressed in vaguer and more general terms than in Lovecraft. In one of his stories, the horrific revelation is one of man's hidden evolutionary past, miscegenation in a family's past, the existence of alien races. The revelation at the end of a Ligotti story is rarely so specific.
And their prose differs. The scientific references in a Lovecraft story are not here. The technological trappings of a Lovecraft story frequently link it to its time of composition. Ligotti's stories are noticeably lacking in any specific technological reference. An "audiotape" is the most time specific reference there is. Otherwise, they could be set almost anytime during the 20th century. Ligotti's prose reminded me more of Lovecraft's idol, Poe, than Lovecraft. Always told in the first person, they frequently deal with odd psychological states and fixations. The notion of the alternate self, the doppelganger as pioneered by Poe in his "William Wilson", also shows up a lot.
In fact, if one wanted to be snarky, you could say Ligotti was a writer of bloated prose, stories almost always told in the same way, ending usually with some horrible revelation of malevolent, vague cosmic forces, a recycler of the images of dilapidated buildings and towns, abandoned factories, clowns and puppets, and intestinal viruses. In short, Ligotti's not a storyteller telling many tales in many ways, but a writer obsessively telling the same story the same way.
Yet, when that story is worth telling and told well, that sort of writer is also called an artist. And, by that definition, Ligotti is an artist.
What might seem, on a quick reading, bloated prose with frequent repetition of the same phrases and the same details of event and character, is not exactly poetry but it is incantory, akin to the repetition often found in writing for children. But here, rather than a child, it is adults introduced to a world of horrible wonder, the world of "the icy bleakness of things". The use of those recurring images is varied enough not to bore - though I can see some readers perhaps wanting to ration themselves an occasional Ligotti story rather than gulping them down all at once. And Ligotti is consistently, even more than Lovecraft, a writer of weird, not horror, fiction. The rewards of each are different.
Ligotti groups his 13 stories into three sections - Derangements, Deformations, and the Damaged and Diseased. These classifications are a bit too general to provide a sense of the collection.
Two of Ligotti's best stories deal with the world of work. In "The Town Manager", we are told of the mysterious disappearances of a town's unelected, unrequested town managers, each of which institute reforms which hasten the town's decay. "Our Temporary Supervisor" has the narrator in a meaningless job detailing how a new employee, in collusion with a new, horribly undefined and unseen supervisor, transforms a factory job into virtually round the clock enslavement via social pressure. While it is tempting to see these stories as commentaries on politics and capitalism, I think Ligotti has just set his existential horror in a more recognizable, specific setting.
The Quine Corporation is the force behind the latter story and is also mentioned in "My Case for Retributive Action". The title brings to mind the opening of Poe's "The Casque of Amontillado" and the plot Kafka's "Metamorphoses". The story seems to share the same vague setting, near the border of an unnamed country, with "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land". In this collection of four first person accounts obliquely gazing the horror encroaching on a town, Lovecraft fans may strain to see echoes of the master's "The Festival" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".
The technique of multiple accounts in one story also shows up, as an artist's vignettes rather than recollections of characters, in "Sideshow, and Other Stories". It is an interesting story of trying to compare our world to an unknown order which may or may not exist, but compounded ambiguities make it a failure. Also, in the failed category, is "The Clown Puppet". The titular figure and his attached strings are a metaphor for unseen forces. But the image is too common, and the plot not very compelling.
"Purity" is another strong story. Rather than demolishing a vague and general notion of existence and replacing it with some general, nihilistic notion of cosmic reality, this story attacks the universal human anchors and consolations of country, faith, and family. The child narrator's father is up to something creepy in the basement - but Ligotti neatly surprises us with what that horror is and then throws in another hint about what the rest of the family has been up to. "The Red Tower" is the most Poe like story in its prose which recounts the odd appearance, history, and function of an abandoned factory. "Teatro Grottesco" has a writer seeking out a mysterious cabal that strips artists of their creative impulses and powers. Like so many stories in this collection, its narrator ultimately embraces the maleovelent forces that are revealed. This is also the first of four stories in the collection's last section that feature physical distress, specifically gastrointestinal distress, as a revelatory ordeal. "Gas Station Carnivals" is all right as a story but is mostly interesting for the delusional details of the title attraction. "The Bungalow Horror" combines a Poe-like doppelganger with "Teatro Grottesco"'s notion of destroyed artist. It is also something of a rumination of what people get out of writers like Lovecraft and Ligotti - and how the art serves its creators. "Severini" is the most physical story and the story whose images most evoke Lovecraft. Actually, its glimpses of a priesthood of Tantric Medicine on an island near the Philippines using dysentery as a tool of enlightenment reminded me of one of Lovecraft's favorite stories - A. Merritt's "The Moon Pool". "The Shadow, the Darkness" is a powerful story that, in its horrific insistence on humans as only bodies, tools for the Tsalal (evidently, recurring entitites in Ligotti's works) raises questions of free will and cosmic parasitism.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
By Mr. Anthrope
Format:Paperback
I am a relative newcomer to Thomas Ligotti, but I love his work. Evocative and cerebral, his stories conjure feelings of dread and surreal alienation. I think this is why H. P. Lovecraft is so often mentioned in connection with Ligotti; their styles are vastly different, but work the same empty and dimly-lit back alleys of our emotional cores.
I believe this is the only Ligotti book currently in print, and it is only the second I have read (after "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World"). Like a lot of short story collections, some stories appear in more than one book, and there are indeed a few in here that were included in "...Shadow...", but "Teatro Grottesco" is still well worth the cover price.
A few of the stories take place in a shared setting, near the foreboding border of a country controlled by an omnipresent company. Far from cyberpunk sci-fi, these stories have a rich old-fashioned tinge, and are some of my favorites.
If you tend to be attracted to things dark and offbeat, you owe it to yourself to check out Thomas Ligotti.
I believe this is the only Ligotti book currently in print, and it is only the second I have read (after "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World"). Like a lot of short story collections, some stories appear in more than one book, and there are indeed a few in here that were included in "...Shadow...", but "Teatro Grottesco" is still well worth the cover price.
A few of the stories take place in a shared setting, near the foreboding border of a country controlled by an omnipresent company. Far from cyberpunk sci-fi, these stories have a rich old-fashioned tinge, and are some of my favorites.
If you tend to be attracted to things dark and offbeat, you owe it to yourself to check out Thomas Ligotti.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Teatro Grottesco is Thomas Ligotti's fifth collection, containing tales written throughout his career. Almost all of Ligotti's fiction is an attack on the same lines, a slander against just about everything in our world. Still, Ligotti is not an author content to repeat himself; his various stories approach his thematic mission in their own way. It's honestly debatable whether this is a horror collection at all, at least in the traditional sense. Monsters are almost wholly absent, and the suffering and violence present here is almost never the point of the stories and often takes place in the periphery if it's shown at all. But this is certainly a Ligotti collection, in many ways the fulfillment of the promise, the broadening of the vision, displayed in Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Teatro Grottesco is the author at the height of his powers, filling the reader with both awe and dread as the collection goes on.
Ligotti's name is rarely mentioned without Lovecraft's also coming up in the conversation. The comparison is apt, but where Lovecraft strove to render humanity irrelevant when compared to the vastness of the cosmos and time, Ligotti seeks to attack us as individuals. Lovecraft's ancient vistas and sunken cities are here replaced by industrial districts and offices, slums and small towns, corner cafes and backroom art exhibits. Ligotti's work is precision targeted, built to attack and not bothering to sustain itself once its point is conveyed. The work in this collection is inimical and difficult to grasp, half-created oddities rendered seductive by flowing prose and immaculately stained atmospheres.
The opening story, Purity, perhaps best displays the almost unfinished nature of much of Ligotti's work. The elements are all present, but they're assembled out of order and connections are often pushed into the shadows and difficult to spot. The story seems, at first, to be about the narrator's father and his bizarre experiments. In actuality, however, the supernatural elements of the story are merely a red herring, a tangent to absorb the reader's attention while Ligotti hits us in the back with a killing blow. Unlike many of Ligotti's stories, the narrator is not a loner, and dialogue and relationships play a large role in the tale. Those various characters drift offstage as the story closes, leaving the tale's meaning buried in brief pockets of exposition and a single off hand comment.
Many of the first section, Derangements, are similarly fragmentary. We are shown glimpses and images, brought into the picture when events are already well in motion but nowhere yet near ending. The Clown Puppet is one such story, a visit by the demon on strings that heralds all things in the narrator's life. The Red Tower, too, is generally devoid of traditional structure. It is, I think, the pure essence of Ligotti's beliefs and style. It's a story without a single human element save for the off stage narrator, a parable for all existence written with moments of sly humor near-drowned under impersonal and inevitable imagery:
"I can certainly picture a time before the existence of the factor, before any of its features blemished the featureless country that extended so gray and so desolate on every side. Dreaming upon the grayish desolation of that landscape, I also find it quite easy to imagine that there might have occurred a lapse in the monumental tedium, a spontaneous and inexplicable impulse to deviate from a dreary perfection, perhaps even an unconquerable desire to risk a move toward a tempting defectiveness. As a concession to this impulse or desire out of nowhere, as a minimal surrender, a creation took place and a structure took form where there had been nothing of its kind before." (p. 79, The Red Tower)
Sideshow and Other Stories is one of the two tales in the collection that is more mosaic than united narrative. Our protagonist, a writer temporarily unable to create, meets another writer in a café. The mainstay of the tale is five unconnected vignettes penned by the other, older writer. Where many writers go through extravagant lengths to insist mid story that the transpiring events are real, Ligotti openly takes us through flights of fancy within imaginary settings, tales told by fictional people about fictional things that lose none of their impact from their incorporeality. Fiction is not rare within the author's fiction. Ligotti's work makes its impact from its ideas, from convincing you that it is describing your reality, not from the actual nuts and bolts of its own construction.
Two of Ligotti's "Corporate Horror" stories begin the second section, Deformations. In addition to the two stories here, I'd add The Town Manager from the first section to the list of the collection's corporate horror; though it does not share the setting of the other two, it uses the same general techniques to establish the same feel.
The Town Manager depicts a small town where all work is assigned and directed by a Manager. As managers appear and disappear, the town disintegrates and the jobs grow bizarre, grueling, and reward-less. The disappearance of the first manager in the story is marked by the townspeople's obsession with the Manager's light bulb. Throughout the collection, characters fixate on either small details or seemingly insignificant objects, unable to look away while the world changes around them.
The surreal imagery and disquieting oddities of the town are excellently depicted, but it's the stories climax - the realization that there is no escape possible, and that the narrator's town is only remarkable in how open it is in its purposeless manipulation - that cements the tale's power
My Case for Retributive Action is one of the collection's strongest tales. The narrator is a nervous and broken individual from over the border, forced to work for the Quine Corporation to afford the medicine that he needs to keep functioning. The doctors, however, all work for the Quine corporation, as does everyone else on this side of the border (and, perhaps, on the other), and there's no escape possible once the job is taken on. The familiar odors of cigarettes are banned in Quine's storefront offices, while the smell of pickles permeates everything, further hammering home the senselessness of it all. Like in many of Ligotti's stories, My Case for Retributive Action is plagued with a slippery and untrustworthy timescale, here crystallized with the "indefinite hours" that govern the schedules of Quine's workers, those working in a workplace that (like ours?) has come to not only dominate, not only define, but become their lives.
The final corporate horror story, Our Temporary Supervisor, is one of the two stories in the collection that I found lacking. Like in the prior tale, our narrator takes what he assumes to be a temporary job with the Quine corporation, viewing the work as an unfortunate stepping stone on his way to bigger and better things (though what those bigger and better things are is as unknown to us as it is to him, a vagueness that many of Ligotti's narrator's goals seem to share). At the beginning, the corporation seems almost normal, but, as we progress, the emergence of the indefinite hours and endlessly frantic pace of the previous story emerges, and the narrator's attempts to distance himself from the system are inconsequential in the face of its inescapable, unguided, and unnecessary productivity.
And yet, the very inevitability of the story plays against it. Deprived of even the possibility of another outcome, the monotony of ceaseless work becomes - well, monotonous. The supernatural aspect of the story, the temporary supervisor of the title that waits in a seemingly empty office as a "dark ripple" that may or may not have "arm protrusions" and "head protrusions" (p. 115, Our Temporary Supervisor), is an initially interesting image but ultimately feels undeveloped and never manages to instill a sense of fear or unease. In the end, Our Temporary Supervisor is somewhat interesting but wholly lacking in emotion, retreading the ground of the prior two corporate stories without making half of their impact.
The final story of the second section is In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land, the second of the two mosaic stories, previously published as its own collection of four stories. This is the most abstract piece of the entire collection, almost wholly devoid of actual motion or characterization, instead relying almost wholly on language and ambiance. The four interconnected stories are about a "northern border town" (the same border that was crossed in the Quine stories?) that seems to lie between death and life.
Names take on a very special significance here, as they do in many of the other stories in the collection. Especially in the first story, His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House, the people of the town seem to understand the world around them only through names, through attempts to quantify the unknown into the manageable and easily identifiable. Epithets abound here, characters introduced through their prior deeds without the slightest hint of what lies within them.
IAFTIAFL is about what's beyond. Beyond the setting and the rare recurring character, the stories are united only by their mood. The stories each approach that theme in different ways and with different central characters, while just what is beyond is itself shifting. These are expository in nature, contemplation and "metaphysical lectures" drifting about a core established by vivid and bizarre imagery:
"Now I could see the parade approaching. From the far end of the gray, tunnel-like street, the clown creature strolled in its loose white garments, his egg-shaped head scanning the high houses on either side. Read more ›
Ligotti's name is rarely mentioned without Lovecraft's also coming up in the conversation. The comparison is apt, but where Lovecraft strove to render humanity irrelevant when compared to the vastness of the cosmos and time, Ligotti seeks to attack us as individuals. Lovecraft's ancient vistas and sunken cities are here replaced by industrial districts and offices, slums and small towns, corner cafes and backroom art exhibits. Ligotti's work is precision targeted, built to attack and not bothering to sustain itself once its point is conveyed. The work in this collection is inimical and difficult to grasp, half-created oddities rendered seductive by flowing prose and immaculately stained atmospheres.
The opening story, Purity, perhaps best displays the almost unfinished nature of much of Ligotti's work. The elements are all present, but they're assembled out of order and connections are often pushed into the shadows and difficult to spot. The story seems, at first, to be about the narrator's father and his bizarre experiments. In actuality, however, the supernatural elements of the story are merely a red herring, a tangent to absorb the reader's attention while Ligotti hits us in the back with a killing blow. Unlike many of Ligotti's stories, the narrator is not a loner, and dialogue and relationships play a large role in the tale. Those various characters drift offstage as the story closes, leaving the tale's meaning buried in brief pockets of exposition and a single off hand comment.
Many of the first section, Derangements, are similarly fragmentary. We are shown glimpses and images, brought into the picture when events are already well in motion but nowhere yet near ending. The Clown Puppet is one such story, a visit by the demon on strings that heralds all things in the narrator's life. The Red Tower, too, is generally devoid of traditional structure. It is, I think, the pure essence of Ligotti's beliefs and style. It's a story without a single human element save for the off stage narrator, a parable for all existence written with moments of sly humor near-drowned under impersonal and inevitable imagery:
"I can certainly picture a time before the existence of the factor, before any of its features blemished the featureless country that extended so gray and so desolate on every side. Dreaming upon the grayish desolation of that landscape, I also find it quite easy to imagine that there might have occurred a lapse in the monumental tedium, a spontaneous and inexplicable impulse to deviate from a dreary perfection, perhaps even an unconquerable desire to risk a move toward a tempting defectiveness. As a concession to this impulse or desire out of nowhere, as a minimal surrender, a creation took place and a structure took form where there had been nothing of its kind before." (p. 79, The Red Tower)
Sideshow and Other Stories is one of the two tales in the collection that is more mosaic than united narrative. Our protagonist, a writer temporarily unable to create, meets another writer in a café. The mainstay of the tale is five unconnected vignettes penned by the other, older writer. Where many writers go through extravagant lengths to insist mid story that the transpiring events are real, Ligotti openly takes us through flights of fancy within imaginary settings, tales told by fictional people about fictional things that lose none of their impact from their incorporeality. Fiction is not rare within the author's fiction. Ligotti's work makes its impact from its ideas, from convincing you that it is describing your reality, not from the actual nuts and bolts of its own construction.
Two of Ligotti's "Corporate Horror" stories begin the second section, Deformations. In addition to the two stories here, I'd add The Town Manager from the first section to the list of the collection's corporate horror; though it does not share the setting of the other two, it uses the same general techniques to establish the same feel.
The Town Manager depicts a small town where all work is assigned and directed by a Manager. As managers appear and disappear, the town disintegrates and the jobs grow bizarre, grueling, and reward-less. The disappearance of the first manager in the story is marked by the townspeople's obsession with the Manager's light bulb. Throughout the collection, characters fixate on either small details or seemingly insignificant objects, unable to look away while the world changes around them.
The surreal imagery and disquieting oddities of the town are excellently depicted, but it's the stories climax - the realization that there is no escape possible, and that the narrator's town is only remarkable in how open it is in its purposeless manipulation - that cements the tale's power
My Case for Retributive Action is one of the collection's strongest tales. The narrator is a nervous and broken individual from over the border, forced to work for the Quine Corporation to afford the medicine that he needs to keep functioning. The doctors, however, all work for the Quine corporation, as does everyone else on this side of the border (and, perhaps, on the other), and there's no escape possible once the job is taken on. The familiar odors of cigarettes are banned in Quine's storefront offices, while the smell of pickles permeates everything, further hammering home the senselessness of it all. Like in many of Ligotti's stories, My Case for Retributive Action is plagued with a slippery and untrustworthy timescale, here crystallized with the "indefinite hours" that govern the schedules of Quine's workers, those working in a workplace that (like ours?) has come to not only dominate, not only define, but become their lives.
The final corporate horror story, Our Temporary Supervisor, is one of the two stories in the collection that I found lacking. Like in the prior tale, our narrator takes what he assumes to be a temporary job with the Quine corporation, viewing the work as an unfortunate stepping stone on his way to bigger and better things (though what those bigger and better things are is as unknown to us as it is to him, a vagueness that many of Ligotti's narrator's goals seem to share). At the beginning, the corporation seems almost normal, but, as we progress, the emergence of the indefinite hours and endlessly frantic pace of the previous story emerges, and the narrator's attempts to distance himself from the system are inconsequential in the face of its inescapable, unguided, and unnecessary productivity.
And yet, the very inevitability of the story plays against it. Deprived of even the possibility of another outcome, the monotony of ceaseless work becomes - well, monotonous. The supernatural aspect of the story, the temporary supervisor of the title that waits in a seemingly empty office as a "dark ripple" that may or may not have "arm protrusions" and "head protrusions" (p. 115, Our Temporary Supervisor), is an initially interesting image but ultimately feels undeveloped and never manages to instill a sense of fear or unease. In the end, Our Temporary Supervisor is somewhat interesting but wholly lacking in emotion, retreading the ground of the prior two corporate stories without making half of their impact.
The final story of the second section is In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land, the second of the two mosaic stories, previously published as its own collection of four stories. This is the most abstract piece of the entire collection, almost wholly devoid of actual motion or characterization, instead relying almost wholly on language and ambiance. The four interconnected stories are about a "northern border town" (the same border that was crossed in the Quine stories?) that seems to lie between death and life.
Names take on a very special significance here, as they do in many of the other stories in the collection. Especially in the first story, His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House, the people of the town seem to understand the world around them only through names, through attempts to quantify the unknown into the manageable and easily identifiable. Epithets abound here, characters introduced through their prior deeds without the slightest hint of what lies within them.
IAFTIAFL is about what's beyond. Beyond the setting and the rare recurring character, the stories are united only by their mood. The stories each approach that theme in different ways and with different central characters, while just what is beyond is itself shifting. These are expository in nature, contemplation and "metaphysical lectures" drifting about a core established by vivid and bizarre imagery:
"Now I could see the parade approaching. From the far end of the gray, tunnel-like street, the clown creature strolled in its loose white garments, his egg-shaped head scanning the high houses on either side. Read more ›
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting collection, but it falls short.
Ligotti writes about nihilism...over and over and over again. I'm not against that idea--I figured that's what I was getting into. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Andrew E. Mendelson
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Mind of a Generation.
Thomas Ligotti changes the business of writing artistic horror as much as Lovecraft did.
Most of his stories may be challenging to read, but they reward the reader with... Read more
Most of his stories may be challenging to read, but they reward the reader with... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Axel Kohagen
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lovecraft Meets Twighlight Zone
I first discovered Thomas Ligotti in the pages of Weird Tales and was happy to see this collection available. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Matt Cole
3.0 out of 5 stars
3.5 Stars... Can't Hit That Bulls-Eye Every Time
First of all, I'd like to start by saying that Thomas Ligotti absolutely deserves his reputation as the greatest living American horror writer and several of the stories collected... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Z. E. Lowell
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Living Short Form Horror Writer of our Day
Although he's not the most prolific of writers, Thomas Ligotti's horror offerings are among the finest I have ever read. Read more
Published 21 months ago by George
1.0 out of 5 stars
Scary? Absolutely not!
I'm not a fan of short reviews but I'm going to make an exception this time. If you're looking for good old fashioned stories of the unknown, stories to make you ponder your own... Read more
Published on January 4, 2011 by Daniel A. Longoria
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book gave me nightmares-in a good way
How have I not discovered Thomas Ligotti until now??? This writer has tapped into that mystic big doom that made Lovecraft an eternal favorite. Read more
Published on December 30, 2010 by Chap Walker
4.0 out of 5 stars
Master of the Short Form
Thomas Ligotti seems destined to go to his grave as an underappreciated author. Too frequently these days such speculation seems reserved for writers who really aren't all that... Read more
Published on November 16, 2010 by Kealan Patrick Burke
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Tales of extraordinary doom" (p. 197)
-- not for the suicidal. This is my first exposure to the author's incisively bizarre imagination which is expressed in precise and clinically sterile language typical of a... Read more
Published on September 4, 2010 by hanyi ishtouk
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Seminal Collection from THE Contemporary Master of Weird Fiction
The names of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe are invoked on the back cover of this reprint of Teatro Grottesco, and when one opens this book it becomes clear that these are far... Read more
Published on August 28, 2010 by M. Richardson
