Salt City Sinner

posted on 2/14/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Love! The stuff of legends; of fleets launched, genocides committed or averted, friends betrayed and loyalties upheld. It’s also the stuff of commerce, serving as a high-fructose additive to movies, music, and other entertainment that might otherwise be too intellectually nutrient-dense for folks to stomach. As such, even those of us sworn to darkness can’t seem to avoid it this time of year. Consider pink glitter to be an appropriate synecdoche; “romance” winds up getting into everything, unavoidably and infuriatingly cluttering up, jamming, and grinding to a halt the everyday enjoyment of life. Now, I’m not here to cast aspersions on pair-bonding, necessarily. There are certainly advantages to such a lifestyle choice, and the vast, vast majority of humans live their lives that way. I’ve even heard rumors (too unspeakable to repeat here) that coupling up is in some way related to the perpetuation of the human species, although,...

posted on 2/12/2019 by the Salt City Sinner I hope that, at some point, Thomas Ligotti’s literary interest in dolls and manikins has extended to Matryoshka dolls – the famous Russian “nesting dolls” that sit, hollow, inside each other in a recursive cascade that (reassuringly) ends with the smallest, solid doll at the center. Ligotti frequently constructs narratives in the style of a Matryoshka. He nests characters, narratives, and themes inside of each other. My favorite example of this technique (and, additionally, one of my favorite Ligotti stories, period) is “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” which is three versions of a horror story hidden inside a single story about a horror author that sits within an essay on the art of writing horror fiction. It’s quite brilliant, and unlike anything I’ve read in the way of avante garde or experimental fiction, let alone “genre” fiction. “Notes” contains no overt references to dolls, puppets, or homunculi – making...

posted on 2/7/2019 by the Salt City Sinner The towering influences of writers like Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mary Shelley extend well beyond the boundaries of horror and into the wider realm of literature proper, a point that has been belabored enough that I don’t need to make it again here. Less explored (and perhaps more interesting) are the occasions on which writers who are well-loved and respected outside of the cobwebbed graveyard of macabre literature have slipped through the gates of that cemetery for a midnight jaunt. My favorite example might be the short story “the Comet” by William E.B. DuBois , a brilliant writer not usually known for his ghost stories. “The Comet” can be read as many things – an early science fiction story, a sharp-eyed tale about race, class, and American society, and – with its necropolitan flair -- an excellently-crafted horror tale. I think it is best understood as all and none of these, and a great example of how fluid and arbit...