Thomas Ligotti.
Many believe Thomas Ligotti is the heir to the thrones of both Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, and some will insist he's better than either one. People who enjoy the works of Thomas Ligotti have very strong opinions about his work.
Like Poe and Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti is primarily known for his short fiction. His story collections—from Songs Of A Dead Dreamer to Grimscribe: His Lives And Works to The Nightmare Factory and more—are noted for their nightmarish Gothic surrealism. Even though the majority of his stories take place in the present day, they have a timeless quality to them. They could be set in the 1800s or even 500 years from now.
In Thomas Ligotti's twilight dreamworlds, the past, present and future all blur together, and nothing is as it seems.
We thank Thomas Ligotti, always a busy man with many projects in the works, for taking a break from his creative endeavors to speak with us.
You worked in Detroit for over two decades. Did seeing those all of those abandoned, decayed buildings influence your dark, brooding fiction?
Thomas Ligotti: I would say they inspired me more than influenced me. I've never been one for realism, so what I rendered in a number of my stories was the impressionistic effect on me of Detroit's desolation rather than its details. In the "The Chymist" I mention several locales that I fabricated but which have their counterparts in Detroit. Same thing with "The Red Tower" and "The Bungalow House." And I mentally set the whole of My Work Is Not Yet Done in Detroit, although I never name the city. There's a book called American Ruins by Camilo José Vergara that features a number of Detroit's most desolate spots. Vergara proposed to the Detroit City Council that a section of the city's downtown area be set aside as an "urban ruins theme park." They thought he was crazy, of course, and dismissed the idea.
Whoever wants to get a sense of what a run-down marvel Detroit has become should rent the movie Narc, which is set entirely in Detroit. And at the end of Transformers, when all the robots have their battle royal, much of that is set in Detroit. I didn't know this before I saw the movie, but I immediately recognized the downtown district where these scenes were shot. Later I verified that they were indeed filmed in an area of Detroit where I worked for over 20 years.
From your fiction, one might imagine that you grew up in gloomy Gothic surroundings, like the House of Usher. How close is that fanciful notion to reality?
Thomas Ligotti: I lived in Detroit for the first couple years of my life, and I visited my grandparents there quite often during my childhood. They lived in a bungalow house. I also spent a lot of time in the '60s hanging out in a dope house district of Detroit's east side. For the most part, though, I was raised in an upper-class suburb of Detroit called Grosse Pointe. My family didn't live in one of those grand old piles down by Lakeshore Drive, but I had friends who did. It's a shame that every one of the original Victorian mansions in Grosse Pointe was torn down before I was born, but their replacements were still architecturally daunting.
Tell us about your inspirations for your short story collection Grimscribe.
Thomas Ligotti: There was no single inspiration for the stories in that collection. The publisher wanted to try and pass off a collection of stories as a sort of novel, so I went along with this really embarrassingly transparent ruse. It would be too boring for the majority of the readers of this interview to go through the stories one by one.
The stories in that book are all fascinating and far from boring, but you're right—at first glance, it does look like a novel. Recently, the story "The Frolic" from your collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer was made into a short film. How did that opportunity arise? Did they approach you?
Thomas Ligotti: My script collaborator Brandon Trenz and I knew a producer named Jane Kosek. She used to work with us at a publishing company in Detroit. Then she lit out for Hollywood. She and Brandon went to see an agent in LA about shopping some of our scripts around, but that led nowhere. She'd worked with a number of directors and suggested to one of them doing "The Frolic" as a short film. That didn't work at all because the director had all these loopy ideas for the film. Some years later, she showed the story to another director, Jacob Cooney, and he was amenable to doing something that was closer to what Brandon and I had in mind for the film version.
Have any of your other works been optioned for movies? Which one(s), do you think, has the best chance of being turned into a film?
Thomas Ligotti: All of the stories in The Nightmare Factory are part of an exclusive option-to-buy agreement with Fox Atomic. So they can do pretty anything they want with them until the option runs out. That's how the comic-book versions of some of my stories came about. I think that My Work Is Not Yet Done is the most viable thing I've written for the purposes of a movie adaptation. Actually, the story was originally conceived as a film script. A paperback version of the book is coming out early next year from Virgin Books.
The Nightmare Factory has a crumbling asylum in it. Was that based on a real facility?
Thomas Ligotti: No. The title of that book was just something I came up with. Later I discovered that same title had been used for a poetry collection by Maxine Kumin.
The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales is a very hard book to find these days. What inspired you to write about the world's most famous mad scientist?
Thomas Ligotti: A woman named Tina Said was doing a fanzine that used only short prose. She asked me to contribute something and I wrote "One Thousand Painful Variations Performed upon Divers Creatures Undergoing the Treatment of Dr. Moreau, Humanist." Then I wrote two more pieces for a fanzine called Grimoire that the prose poet Thomas Wiloch, another friend of mine from work, was doing and that we ended up putting out together. After that I just kept writing miniature variations on famous horror stories and films until I got tired of doing them. I tried to take the variations into even more tragic and nightmarish territory than the originals. One critic described the pieces in Agonizing Resurrection an "apotheosis of torment." That's what I was going for—the absolute worst doom that I could imagine for the main characters in these stories—although most readers thought they were just jeux d'esprits. Some of them were published by Harry Morris in his Silver Scarab Press edition of my first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer.
What was the first horror movie you ever saw?
Thomas Ligotti: The Tarantula.
How often do you watch horror movies? What was the last one you watched?
Thomas Ligotti: I rent horror movies whenever I think they might be good, or at least watchable. The last one I rented was The Ruins. The author of the book on which the movie was based did the screenplay, so I thought there was a chance it would be OK, since he also adapted his previous book, A Simple Plan, into a terrific movie. There was a lot of "intense gore" in The Ruins, but I don't respond to that sort of thing no matter how intense it is. They're only movies, after all. I don't think I would have rented The Ruins at all if I didn't get it out of one of the "movie cubes" at the local supermarket for a buck. On the whole, I'm not a fan of horror movies. I'd rather watch political thrillers, courtroom dramas, caper films, plain old suspense, and the like.
What was the inspiration for My Work Is Not Yet Done? Do you see a lot of yourself in the protagonist Frank Domino? Why did you pick the last name Domino?
Thomas Ligotti: The character's surname is actually Dominio. It's only his boss who mockingly mutilates his name into Domino. I used this moniker because in one of its meanings a domino is a kind of hooded costume that resembles the figure of death. At the time I wrote My Work Is Not Yet Done I was having some troubles at work very similar to those of the protagonist. Naturally, these situations, which are very common in workplaces, inspire certain fantasies. Rather than just fantasizing, I wrote a story in which I took those fantasies several steps further than anyone could in real life. None of the characters in My Work Is Not Yet Done is based on the persons I was having trouble with. But I did think of Frank Dominio as a psycho killer version of myself, although he didn't start out that way. The whole experience taught me that forgetting is the best revenge. I also concluded that murder is a really lame form of vengeance. Nonexistence is just too good for some people.
"My Work Is Not Yet Done" and your story "The Shadow At The Bottom Of The Bottom Of The World" are thematically similar. Tell us about those stories. Do you see them as companion pieces?
Thomas Ligotti: I really don't see the resemblance myself. "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World" is a horror hymn to autumn, or that's the way I thought of it. "Shadow" is one of those stories in which the people of a small town share the same barbaric impulse, although the reason for this impulse is left a mystery. It would have undermined the point of the story to give the reason for this blood-thirsty impulse. There is no reason I could have given anyway because it's wholly irrational. Blood sacrifice in certain ancient cultures seemingly had a profit motive in appeasing gods or whatever.
But it's quite apparent that people of all times have been drawn to murder in any form, real or fictional. This is no great psychological or sociological observation. It's only a fact. We are lovers of havoc and evil. A tranquil existence is intolerable to us. Think of the famous cuckoo clock soliloquy spoken by the character Harry Lime in the movie The Third Man. The rest of the world holds in contempt any country that is not populated by ambitious blood-letters. Think of all the jokes about Canadians or Scandinavians. Of course, the citizens of these lands once had their day. I suppose that since My Work Is Not Yet Done exults in supernatural mayhem, it's another example of this impulse. But this impulse is also explored as a force beyond our control in the form of a Schopenhauerian Will that is at the source of what we are when we're not playing at being "civilized." Frank Dominio gradually comes to realize this in the course of the narrative.
My Work Is Not Yet Done is 42,000 words, the closest you've come so far to writing a novel. Have you ever thought about expanding it into a novel?
Thomas Ligotti: After I abandoned doing MWINYD as a screenplay, my plan was to write it as a novel of 300 pages or so. But that would entail far too much material that is extraneous to the core of the narrative. In its present form, MWINYD is a short novel, which is a separate genre from a novella. It has the structure of a novel, but not what most people would consider the length. Plenty of books that readers think of as novels are really short novels. Albert Camus' The Stranger, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Robert Lewis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jeklly and Mr. Hyde, Ray Bradbury's Fareheit 451, Thomas Pychon's The Crying of Lot 49, J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Voltaire's Candide, Lovecraft's novels, William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland, and the list goes on. The short story is still the best form for horror fiction, but the short novel isn't bad either. It keeps horror writers from letting the kernel of their narratives wander too far out of sight. The American poet and short novelist Howard Nemerov wrote an interesting study of the short novel in a collection of his critical essays. I mean, I don't care if MWIND is called a novella, a short novel or roach trap. But there is such a thing as a short novel.
Your work has been compared many times to that of H.P. Lovecraft. How do you feel about the comparison? If Lovecraft were still alive, do you think you two would get along?
Thomas Ligotti: I think the comparison with Lovecraft is always meant to be a compliment to me. I would say there is a likeness between Lovecraft and me in that our narratives are focused on a supernatural or weird element and nothing else. Lovecraft said as much of his own stories, and I feel intuitively that he was right. As for getting along with Lovecraft, it wasn't too long ago that I had a conversation with Jason Van Hollander about this. Both of us agreed that we would probably find Lovecraft a difficult person to be around because his gentlemanly behavior would get on our nerves. Of course, I can't be sure of that because Lovecraft had such a great sense of humor, and my own views are compatible with his on just about every subject. But if Lovecraft visited me, and think I would have to watch my words and not say anything like, "Fuck me, I ran out of cigarettes." It's not that I think Lovecraft was prudish. From reading his letters, one can tell that he wasn't shockable. He just had firm ideas about how people should present themselves, and that didn't include using profane language or tobacco, two things I find impossible not to do. I can't fault him for that.
Dreams play an important role in so many of your stories. What do you dream about?
Thomas Ligotti: It's been my experience that mostly I dream about what I've seen and what I've done. So I have a lot of dreams about things like not being able to find my car in a parking garage. But I also have the kind of strange dreams that everyone has. The first "dream monologue" in "The Bungalow House" where the protagonist feels a sense of ecstatic terror while standing in the dim and rank living room of the eponymous structure and sensing all those insects around him was based on a dream I had. I also dreamed about those weird locales in "Gas Station Carnivals." And the literally feculent building in "The Night School." Perhaps the most affecting dream I've ever had was the one that led to my writing "The Cocoons." I'd had recurrent dreams for some time about humans being transformed into some bizarre life form that served as food for other bizarre life forms. When I woke up from that dream I felt I had gone mad and would remain that way.
I have to say that I find dreaming to be among the most wretched experiences forced on human beings. It denies you the relief of sleep, which is supposed to knit up the raveled sleeve of care. But if you always wake up with a dream in your head, it feels like you've been dreaming all night, and that you've never gotten any respite from conscious existence. Every time I go to bed, I think, "What kind of inane or traumatizing trash am I going to get into tonight?" But if I thought too much about dreaming I'd never get to sleep. To top it off, I have night terrors in which I'm awake but am paralyzed and feel as if I'm having a heart attack. The only way I can wake up is by screaming, which takes a lot of effort. And then there are those dreams in which I find myself in a place that's supercharged by the presence of something evil that never makes an appearance. How anyone can tell someone to have "Sweet Dreams"? I know that there are dreams that are pleasant and that one regrets awaking from. And that is regret indeed.
Puppets and dolls also figure into your fiction with some frequency. Do you personally find them frightening?
Thomas Ligotti: I did when I was a child, but not since. However, I still find puppets to be uncanny things. For me, the puppet emblemizes the entrapment and manipulation of human beings by forces beyond our control. Obviously, there are a lot of things that people are aware they cannot control in their lives. As the Firesign Theatre brilliantly said, "Your brain is not the boss." In my world, this is an everyday experience because I've been long besieged by abnormal psychological states that cause me to be constantly aware that I have no control over who I am and how I'll act. Most people don't feel this way, or they don't notice the controlling forces because they're very subtle. Having any kind of control over your actions or feelings is everybody's illusion. No one can make themselves what they are. It's a totally absurd notion, because if you could make yourself what you are you'd first have to be a certain way and be able to choose what that way would be. But then you'd also have to be able to choose to choose what way you would be, and on into infinity. There are always determining powers, and those make us what the way we are whether or not we realize it. I realize that there are philosophers who have reconciled determinism with free will on paper, and that everyone feels as if they're in control of themselves and take responsibility for their actions. But how many of us can say that we're always, or even often, in control of our thoughts? And if you're not in control of your thoughts, that what are you in control of?
If you doubt this, just see if you can attain an empty mind in the course of meditating. It can be done, I know, because I did it for about 30 years. But it's not easy, and I never found it to do anything more than effect a state of temporary relaxation. And many people can't do it at all because they can't control their thoughts. If anyone out there has achieved a significant alteration in their consciousness due to meditation, I'd love to hear about it. Initially I practiced Transcendental Medication. You have a mantra that you run through your head to keep thoughts from interfering with your meditation. The mantra is supposed to be a secret word that only you're supposed to know. Then one day some Hari Krishna guy came up to me on the street and told me my mantra. He used to teach Transcendental Meditation and said that it was all a hoax. Then he tried to convert me to his form of hoax. But I kept meditating using what were more traditional and supposedly more effective methods.
Do angels or demons exist?
Ligotti: Not in my experience. But I can imagine someone becoming involved in spiritualism of one kind or another to the extent that he or she would start to believe in all kinds of supernatural things and experience their presence. I once took a series of classes in reading other people's minds, and sure enough I was able to read other people's minds. It's hard not to give in to the influences that are brought to bear in an environment like that. The only thing you can do to break free is to remove yourself from that environment, or have someone else remove you from it. As Blaise Pascal said, "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." I've tried as hard as I can to become sane, but I've never gotten there.
Which of your books would you consider to be your personal best?
Thomas Ligotti: My latest collection Teatro Grottesco, no doubt. I realize that writers often think that the manuscript in the bottom drawer of their desk is their best work. It's a form of self-hypnosis.
Are you a techno-savvy person? Do you "do" cell phones, iPods, Blackberries?
Thomas Ligotti: I have no use for any of those devices, but if I did I would use them. I can't imagine living without a computer with a high-speed modem. There is so much great stuff out there to keep one from thinking about suffering and death.
What's in the glass when Thomas Ligotti is enjoying his favorite beverage? Absinthe? Red wine? Coffee? Or just plain water?
Thomas Ligotti: I can only tolerate mild stimulants, so I drink coffee and green tea.
What's on the horizon for you?
Thomas Ligotti: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short Life of Horror. In this book I tried to bind together themes from pessimistic philosophy and the horror genre into an exposition on the uncanny nature and ontological fraudulence of the human species. The springboard for these themes is a 1933 essay titled "The Last Messiah" by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, who made much of the conspicuous fact that we don't really like to think about the bad things in life and so we repress them out in various ways. For instance, by entertaining distractions and working toward a better future, an undertaking that is futile since there will always be a differential between what we have and what we want. Thus, we will be forever discontented with our lives, especially since they all end in some unpleasantness that we're very good at ignoring because if we weren't good at ignoring that unpleasantness our lives would be a nightmare.
A recent writer who has argued that the human race would be better off if it didn't exist is the South African philosopher of ethics David Benatar, whose book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence cogently lays out why nonexistence is preferable to existence. His argument is that there is an asymmetry between non-painful experience and painful experience which tips the scales in favor of nonexistence. For this reason, Benatar argues, it is immoral to produce children who would never know this imbalance, which often is a very severe imbalance, between non-painful experience and painful experience-not just necessarily extremely painful experience but any painful experience at all, which is sometimes called the Pinprick Argument. I've exchanged some emails with Benatar because I discuss his book in my Conspiracy Against the Human Race and wanted to take the opportunity to see if he thought I had misrepresented his ideas in any way. He told me that I had not violated his position in any of its major claims, although he did mention some fine points of disagreement between us.
The question that has sometimes arisen in the uniformly negative reviews of Benatar's book is why the author doesn't commit suicide. This is not a surprising reaction on the part of what are often called by non-pessimistic philosophers "healthy adults." Other healthy adults insist that producing a work that is negative on life shows its author to be a hypocrite, because the very act of writing is a sign of being activated by a vital impulse. The first point, that pessimistic thinkers should kill themselves in order to live up to their ideas, exhibits such an inadequacy of intellect and imagination that it really doesn't deserve a response. Just because someone has reached the conclusion that the amount of suffering in this world is so egregious that anyone would be better off never having been born doesn't mean he perforce must commit suicide. It only means that he has concluded that anyone would be better off never having been born. Others may disagree on this point as it pleases them, but they must accept that if they believe themselves to have a better case than the pessimist, then they are mistaken.
On the second point—that pessimists are hypocrites because the very act of writing is a sign of being activated by a vital impulse—all that can be said is that everything that anyone does is activated by a vital impulse. This is much the source of the catastrophe of being alive: we are pushed along day by day by vital impulses, even if some of them lead to suicide. Killing oneself is not a walk in the park by any means. It takes as much initiate as killing someone else, one of the most vital acts of all. Most people think that vitality is emblemized by such things as people in their seventies who water ski or nations that build empires. This way of thinking is simply naïve, but it keeps up our morale because we like to think that we'll be water-skiing when we're in our seventies or be citizens of a nation, or just partners in a business concern, that has built an empire.
Identical with religions that ask of their believers more than they could possibly deliver, pessimism is a set of ideals, not a lifestyle. Those who indict a pessimist either of hypocrisy or pathology are only faking their competence to riddle the mystery of why anyone is the way they are. And no one has yet done that. But to many would-be psycho-biographers, their subjects' pessimism has a two-fold inception: (1) life stories of tribulation, even if the pessimistic caste has no sorrows exclusive to it; (2) a diseased psychology, a charge that pessimists could turn against optimists if the argumentum ad populum were not the world's favorite fallacy.
If you could have dinner and a conversation with any person, living or dead, past or present (or future, for that matter) who would it be?
Thomas Ligotti: I'd like to talk to any intelligent person of adult age who was living on the brink of the extinction of the human race. This is assuming that we'll die out from natural causes and not a catastrophic event, the later of which will almost certainly be the case. This is also assuming that there will be any intelligent persons living on the brink of the extinction of the human race. So I guess I like to talk to the last living intelligent person. What I'd like to know is whether or not anything significant changed from our time to their time. As always, technology doesn't count as change.
Any last words?
Thomas Ligotti: How about Mozart's: "The taste of death is on my lips. I feel something not of this earth."
