Crampton

I first came across the work of Thomas Ligotti in Cardiff Central Library in 1993, when I picked up his debut short-story collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The jacket copy placed him as a successor of Poe’s and Lovecraft’s: mixed signals to my mind, as I love EAP but care little for HPL. I was curious, nevertheless; all the more so as this came at a time when I cultivated a keen appetite for literary morbidity and grotesquerie.

Integrated natures consider themselves their own masters, if the question even arises in their ‘minds’. To actually feel that one is a puppet requires the pull of conflicting forces. Then you know about the wires that hold you together, and afterward you can never free yourself from the ‘sense of strings.’

I was soon sucked into the book. I found that I had such an affinity with Ligotti’s pessimistic worldview, that my own perception of things was altered and expanded as a consequence of reading his work. I feel I owe him a great deal. In the years that followed, I found his second book, Grimscribe in the ‘Forbidden Planet’ bookshop in London, and picked his third, Noctuary, from a dodgy mail-order catalogue. In an interview a few years ago, Ligotti explained his motivation thus:

Since I was a child I‘ve had a morbid and melodramatic imagination. I went to see every horror movie at the local theaters and stayed up late to watch midnight horror movies on TV. As a teenager I had a tendency to depression. To me, the world was just something to escape from. I started escaping with alcohol and then, as the sixties wore on, with every kind of drug I could get. In August of 1970 I suffered the first attack of what would become a lifelong anxiety-panic disorder. Not too long after that I discovered the works of H. P. Lovecraft. I found that the meaningless and menacing universe described in Lovecraft’s stories corresponded very closely to the place I was living at that time, and ever since for that matter. I was grateful that someone else had perceived the world in a way similar to my own view. A few years later, when I took an interest in writing fiction, there was never a question that I would write anything else other than horror stories.

His is a rich and evocative style, eminently quotable, which is lent strength and consistency by a sophisticated, albeit quasi-nihilistic philosophical skeleton that underlies the skin of his prose. Sometimes he over-reaches, or falls flat, but given the exotic weirdness of the effects he conjures with, this can easily be forgiven him. Ligotti, it seems, strives in his tales not so much to horrify, nor to frighten, or revolt; but rather to demand recognition of the ruinous and malign locales he delineates, and concordance with the fatalistic outlooks his creations espouse or epitomise.

Anyone with a thorough understanding of existence is either silent or raving mad.

He has also collaborated with the band Current 93 on a number of pieces combining his words with their music, and, in recent years, has branched out into scriptwriting. His latest book, Crampton, co-written with Brandon Trenz, began life as a screenplay for an X-Files episode that was never made. I received my copy last week, and read it that same evening. On closing the book, a characteristically intense and disconcerting piece, I experienced what is by now a familiar sensation of having stumbled out from a very dark place, as though my eyes were blinking, unaccustomed to the light.

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

The Ligotti quotations above were taken from this page.

Posted by misteraitch at June 10, 2003 12:20 PM | TrackBack