I’m a little obsessed by this story right now. And I think there are several reasons for that. First, it gives me a thrill similar in nature and, more remarkably, extremity to that I felt during my first encounters, in my late teens, with Borges, Kafka, Beckett, Marquez, Calvino, Ionesco… these writers who blew my mind – it really doesn’t seem an exaggerative expression here – with their stories so far off the tracks of anything I’d thought up to then. Other stories have had that kind of effect on me since, but rarely to such an extent.
Then also, I feel that in every little twist of this story’s plot there is great political acuity. I feel that, in its poetic, dream-like way, it captures so well elements of how the political dimension of our lives really feels and even is at this point in history.
Finally, the figure of Ligotti causes me to do a bit of a double take… This is a man who has written, as well as these wonderfully intense philosophical horror stories, a non-fiction book exploring and basically advocating strong pessimist, nihilist and antinatalist views, and containing the claim that “the world is a malignantly useless potato-mashing network”*. Part of me wonders if he’s for real. Part of me feels very sorry for him. Part of me wonders if he’s essentially entirely right. I’d so love to talk to him. Also I’d so love to take part in a multidisciplinary symposium where we’d consider side-by-side – and with a focus on any overlapping or corresponding themes and subjects and ideas we could find – the stories of Ligotti and of, say, Wodehouse.
*Yes, it makes more sense in context, but still!
First published in Weird Tales magazine in 2003, and then collected in Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco in 2006)
A Personal Anthology 