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The Dollcraft of Thomas Ligotti




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 arbitrary the boundaries that separate so-called “genre fiction” from so-called “literature” can be.

We live in an age when the lines between genre fiction and mainstream fiction have never been blurrier, nor the contributions of genre writers more widely appreciated. Thus, I’m a little surprised that Thomas Ligotti isn’t a bigger deal than he is. The short fiction of Thomas Ligotti, after all, might be most easily compared to the writing of Franz Kafka. Ligotti constructs environments in which dread and anxiety are explored as a form of architecture – a feature as much of the environment as of the internal landscape or moral struggles of the unfortunate protagonists (take, for example, “the Glamouur,” which explores this dissociative affect directly: "How difficult to say anything precise about this mood that overcame me, because it seemed to belong to my surroundings as much as to myself.").



In the narratives Ligotti constructs, there is usually no clear cause-and-effect, no dream of ordered life waiting to be disrupted by the boogeyman of change or chaos (and then subsequently restored to comforting order). In Ligotti’s stories, our protagonist is awakened in the middle of the night by a malign presence, or she is visited by a mysterious medical professional, or sets out in search of ritual clowns or magic pants or morbid amusements that, if we’re lucky, will be left to our febrile imaginations. But the running theme is not blessed normalcy placed temporarily (if hideously) out of joint, to be enjoyed anew once a monster is vanquished.

No, Ligotti does not deal in the rupturing of the peaceful life. In his stories, dread is inescapable, because dread is the environment in which we live. Dread is expressed in the light, which in his descriptions is ever watery and uncertain and does not behave as it should. Dread is in the shape of objects, the shadows they cast, their very four-dimensional existence as they grate against one another, never quite resolving into sense or order. Ligotti’s attention to this atmospheric wrongness so thoroughly confuses the relationship between the objects and subjects of his tales that the real question – the central question – of much of his fiction is not “how can I cope with the unreal,” as it is in much of horror and weird fiction, but rather “am I real?”



The answer, to the abiding horror of Ligotti’s unfortunate menagerie of maniacs and paranoids, is often “no,” and this dissociative break with autonomy is often represented by the use of dolls and manikins, either as metaphorical descriptors or as unsettlingly literal participants in the story. In this way, Ligotti works the fertile soil of the uncanny valley, but he’s after something deeper than just that. More than merely exploiting the unsettling “reality” of facsimile humans, Ligotti attempts to undermine our confidence – our faith – in such a distinction’s very existence. We are dolls, he writes, with delusions of humanity, of specialness, of separation from the world of objects and elevation to the world of subjects.

(To be concluded in Part 2 – stay tuned!)

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