PENGUIN CLASSICS
SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER and GRIMSCRIBE
THOMAS LIGOTTI was born in Detroit in 1953. Considered one of the foremost authors of supernatural horror stories, he began publishing in the early 1980s. Following a tradition established by Edgar Allan Poe and perpetuated by H. P. Lovecraft, Ligotti is noted for his portrayals of characters who are outsiders to ordinary life, depictions of otherworldly dimensions, and uniquely dark vision of human life. His works are often praised by critics for their richly inventive imagination and evocative prose. Ligotti’s first collection of tales, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was published in 1985, and its follow-up, Grimscribe, in 1991. Among his other publications are the collections Noctuary and Teatro Grottesco as well as an influential philosophical work, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. Ligotti has received several awards, including the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for his omnibus collection The Nightmare Factory and his short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done. He lives in Florida.
JEFF VANDERMEER’S most recent fiction is the New York Times–bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, TheAtlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. VanderMeer has edited or coedited many iconic fiction anthologies, taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, lectured at MIT and the Library of Congress, and serves as the codirector of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp located at Wofford College. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer.
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Copyright © 1986, 1989, 1991, 1996, 2010, 2011 by Thomas Ligotti
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Jeff VanderMeer
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Songs of a Dead Dreamer was first published in the United States of America by Silver Scarab Press in 1986. A revised edition with a different selection of stories was published in Great Britain by Robinson Publishing in 1989 and in the United States by Carroll & Graf in 1990. A second revised version with different content was published in Thomas Ligotti’s The Nightmare Factory by Carroll & Graf in 1996. A third revised version was published in the United States by Subterranean Press in 2010.
Grimscribe was first published in Great Britain by Robinson Publishing in 1991 and in the United States by Carroll & Graf in 1991. A revised version was published in The Nightmare Factory by Carroll & Graf in 1996. A second revised version was published by Subterranean Press in 2011.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Ligotti, Thomas.
[Short stories. Selections]
Songs of a dead dreamer: and, Grimscribe / Thomas Ligotti ; foreword by Jeff Vandermeer.
pages ; cm.—(Penguin classics)
ISBN 978-0-698-40928-6
I. Ligotti, Thomas. Grimscribe. II. Title. III. Title: Grimscribe.
PS3562.I4546A6 2015
813'.54—dc23
2015018805
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover illustration: © Chris Mars/Chris Mars Publishing, Inc.
Version_1
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Forward by JEFF VANDERMEER
SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER
DREAMS FOR SLEEPWALKERS
The Frolic
Les Fleurs
Alice’s Last Adventure
Dream of a Manikin
The Nyctalops Trilogy:
I. The Chymist
II. Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes
III. Eye of the Lynx
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story
DREAMS FOR INSOMNIACS
The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise
The Lost Art of Twilight
The Troubles of Dr. Thoss
Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie
Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech
Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror
DREAMS FOR THE DEAD
Dr. Locrian’s Asylum
The Sect of the Idiot
The Greater Festival of Masks
The Music of the Moon
The Journal of J.P. Drapeau
Vastarien
GRIMSCRIBE
Introduction
THE VOICE OF THE DAMNED
The Last Feast of Harlequin
The Spectacles in the Drawer
Flowers of the Abyss
Nethescurial
THE VOICE OF THE DEMON
The Dreaming in Nortown
The Mystics of Muelenburg
In the Shadow of Another World
The Cocoons
THE VOICE OF THE DREAMER
The Night School
The Glamour
THE VOICE OF THE CHILD
The Library of Byzantium
Miss Plarr
THE VOICE OF OUR NAME
The Shadow at the Bottom of the World
Foreword
Over the past thirty years, Thomas Ligotti has produced an extraordinary body of work in the short story form—evidenced herein by his first two collections, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1985) and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Songs was first published by Harry O. Morris’s Silver Scarab Press in a three-hundred-copy edition with cover art and illustrations by Morris and an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. The book received its due acclaim after a wider release in 1989, but the first edition remains a jewel within our book collection. I remember leafing through it and feeling as if I were looking at an artifact that had slipped through from another universe. Grimscribe was, at the time of publication, seen by some as a typical second book, as if Ligotti had taken a step back in quality. Over time, however, readers and critics have recognized that the collection is, if anything, richer, more focused, and more mature than Songs.
Where within the fictional cosmos do Ligotti’s stories exist? The same fixed, timeless position as those of Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka.* Like that of Poe and Kafka, his fiction is transformative by virtue of the author’s unique way of seeing the world and because it is innovative in ways both visible (formal experimentation) and invisible (stealth experiments that reveal their presence only by how they affect the reader). Unlike with Poe’s fiction, this quality in Ligotti’s work cannot be emulated in any meaningful way and ferociously resists commodification by the marketplace. Unlike in Kafka’s stories, Ligotti’s prose is too uncomfortably visceral and (although deeply absurdist at times) too hostile to a certain kind of playfulness to enter into the traditional canon. But in all three cases, a unique voice at the right distance from its subject matter prevents the work from becoming dat
ed. A deliberate lack of specificity follows from the author’s natural preoccupations. Unnamed narrators and nameless towns, for example, allow for a corresponding vagueness of either character or setting that, perversely, creates the necessary anchor for even a reader a century from now, traveling beneath strange stars, to be held in thrall.
Perhaps these qualities also reflect that although Ligotti came out of the weird and uncanny genres, he was always passing through those regions. Recalling the horror scene in the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, I remember that it was marked by a certain conservativism and a general devotion to naturalism. In its most extreme manifestations, this worship of pragmatic causality became the hyperrealism of subgenres devoted to depicting explicit violence and sex. Set against such trends were a handful of unique voices, including writers like Kathe Koja, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, and Clive Barker, who at times added elements of the surreal, Decadent, New Gothic, or genuinely transgressive body horror.
Did Ligotti come out of this community? Not really. His work, sui generis, just happened to be published in those environs during that time period. To suggest otherwise would be like saying there is huge significance to the neighborhood in which a physicist lives when he has a eureka moment due to research at his laboratory. In this sense Ligotti is allied with iconoclasts like Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami, the aforementioned Kafka, Alfred Kubin, and, to some extent, the great Bruno Schulz. Indeed, brilliant one-off texts like Sakutaro¯ Hagiwara’s dreamlike “The Town of Cats” (1935) and Eric Basso’s preternaturally Proustian “The Beak Doctor” (1977) seem oddly Ligotti-esque even if they are not direct influences—precisely because, like Ligotti’s work, they exist in a unique space between horror and the surreal, between the visceral and the philosophical. It is a special place, found on no map, where the supernatural resists being labeled and every attempt at naming leaves the formal inquest flummoxed as to whether a particular shadow or reflection was part of the natural or unnatural worlds.
In Ligotti’s work, the supernatural exists in support of ideas that serve as a sharp interrogation of the way we live, evoking comparisons to literary realists as different as John Cheever and Shirley Jackson. That may seem an audacious idea, but if we pluck Ligotti from the clutches of weird fiction, we find that his universality exists at an unexpected level—not because weird fiction doesn’t deal with complex issues and ideas, but because the weird fiction context places the emphasis squarely on the uncanny, obliterating our ability to see anything else. Ligotti’s fiction, temporarily unhooked from the weird, is best understood as a continuing interrogation of the legitimacy of our modern lives. He is exploring the underbelly of modernity—personal and societal. His interest is in the blight beneath, whether it occurs solely in the mind or is expressed through actions. For this reason, the films of David Lynch and the fiction of Thomas Ligotti sometimes speak to each other in interesting ways.
Ligotti launches into this exploration, this kind of Blue Velvet approach, from the very first story collected in Songs, “The Frolic.” The banal start of this story set in the suburbs could be the beginning of the average New Yorker tale—and if Ligotti had wanted to he could have reinforced the truth of the surface of modern life; he could have written a story of a husband and wife at odds, with the husband’s work serving merely to add fuel to their arguments. Instead, Ligotti serves notice that he’s interested in subversion: the window of the rational is smashed to bits by the irrational. One might even make the case that the window is smashed by the fears of the husband, which in a strange way become a kind of perverted wish.
One of Ligotti’s first forays into formal experimentation, “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” seems like the metafictional version of a smashed window at first, but accretes viscosity and layers of realism as the tale progresses. As in Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Leonardo,” Ligotti tells the reader that he is assembling certain fictional elements to convey his story . . . and then, like Nabokov, proceeds to make the reader forget a story is being read, the “fictive dream” closing around with a cocoonlike sense of claustrophobia. At the same time, “Notes on the Writing of Horror” mercilessly sends up certain approaches to supernatural fiction—it is caustically funny; funny with a sneer and a giggle. It gets under the skin in part because, miraculously, it earns the sneering. As a kind of veiled statement of intent from Ligotti, the story is a fierce, uncompromising work, and a proverbial high-wire act on the page. I can only imagine it as a cuckoo’s egg laid in the nest of the horror field as it existed at the time.
These kinds of subversions continue in a more gentle fashion with stories like “Alice’s Last Adventure,” in which Ligotti uses a smidgeon of Lewis Carroll to send up the “twee fey” of both Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson. The element of play is found not in the appropriation of childhood grotesqueries, but in the voice of the elderly author juxtaposed with a series of unnerving encounters. Once the window is broken, not only can things come through, but you can get out. Except, what is there to get out to? A plausible interpretation of the story could be that it is about the irrationality and contradictions of aging. A tweak here or there and this interpretation would be the surface of the story, not just part of the subtext.
In the same vein, Grimscribe’s major story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” creates its greatest effects as much through the mundane as through the uncanny. An anthropologist visits the town of Mirocaw out of curiosity about a pageantry festival that includes clowns. In a perfect deadpan tone that allows the author a tightrope walk between the absurd and the horrific, the metaphysical and the visceral, the anthropologist comes to realize he has made an irrevocable mistake. Much of the pleasure here comes from the narrator providing the reader with information previously left out and inquiries into clown activities that are often drily humorous. (Indeed, Ligotti has always been a very funny writer, a quality easier to enjoy once you become acclimated to his supernatural elements.)
But the story also expands on Ligotti’s interest in a kind of middle-class experience, or ordinary life, that is disrupted by the extraordinary, which puts a lie not only to the narrators’ view of their own selves but also to the idea that the ordinary is mundane, that the surface is also the subtext. In part, Ligotti here comments on modernity through the idea of ritual, and how ritual pervades our lives in both ordinary and outré circumstances. Ritual is a kind of mask that holds in check what happens in our most secret lives. Other stories in Grimscribe use objects as talismans to explore these same undercurrents, whether the eyeglasses of “The Spectacles in the Drawer,” the “madness of things” in the house in “Flowers of the Abyss,” or the idol/manuscript in “Nethescurial.”
When we encounter ritual enacted in a grotesque fashion (that to some extent ridicules our own repetitions) we may at first try to reconcile it with our own preordained patterns; thus the absurd element of politeness or reasonableness sometimes expressed in true-life extreme situations. But if instead we recoil, run shrieking, might it be not only because what we see is macabre but because, for a moment, we recognize that this strangeness partakes of the same wellspring as our own regimented lives? That our (unthinking) rituals are only attempts not to succumb to what is going on beneath the surface, within our minds, with regard to the intolerability of life (i.e., eventual death)?
• • •
I must confess I am loath to discuss other favorites among these stories. Each has at some point appeared sharp and pale out of the murky darkness, had its moment, and then receded from my sight again, such is the impressionistic flavor of these particular stories. “Ethereal” is a terribly overused and imprecise word to describe weird fiction, but it’s still the best description of how Ligotti’s fiction exists in the moment of individual sentences on the page. Every time you read these stories, not only do you reimagine them, but they seem to change shape and substance through some power rising from behind the words. These are not uncanny effects—they’re merely ano
ther manifestation of the universal in Ligotti’s fiction.
With Songs and Grimscribe, Ligotti burst fully formed onto the literary scene. Had just these two collections been published, Ligotti would still be hailed as a writer of the first rank. What occurs later in his career is not so much a maturing and a leaving aside of earlier work as an interesting shift of attention: from the general preoccupations with what lies beneath modernity, often expressed through Everyman and Man of No Qualities characters, to a specific focus on the modern workplace in such long stories as My Work Is Not Yet Done. Turning the gaze of weird fiction toward the modern work environment—pushing past the blatant emptiness of the cubicle world to truths ever more horrific, subtle, and darkly hilarious—is just a natural extension of Ligotti’s initial explorations in Songs and Grimscribe.
In writing about these more existential explorations, I don’t mean to suggest that the supernatural in Ligotti’s fiction is not convincing, terrifying, and cathartic in its own right. It is all of those things, and for another writer that might be the extent of our fascination, and quite enough for most readers. But the reason Ligotti lingers in our imaginations, why his work is so relevant to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is that so much else exists beneath the surface. Whether you are just now encountering Ligotti’s fiction or rereading it, I envy you this chance to encounter the work of one of our greatest dark imaginations.
JEFF VANDERMEER
To my parents, Gasper and Dolores Ligotti
DREAMS FOR SLEEPWALKERS
THE FROLIC
In a beautiful home in a beautiful part of town—the town of Nolgate, site of the state prison—Dr. Munck examined the evening newspaper while his young wife lounged on a sofa nearby, lazily flipping through the colorful parade of a fashion magazine. Their daughter Norleen was upstairs asleep, or perhaps she was illicitly enjoying an after-hours session with the new television she’d received on her birthday the week before. If so, her violation went undetected by her parents in the living room, where all was quiet. The neighborhood outside the house was quiet, too, as it was day and night. All of Nolgate was quiet, for it was not a place with much of a nightlife, save perhaps at the bar where the prison’s correctional officers congregated. Such persistent quiet made the doctor’s wife fidgety with her existence in a locale that seemed light-years from the nearest metropolis. But thus far Leslie did not complain of the lethargy of their lives. She knew her husband was quite dedicated to his new professional duties in this new place. Perhaps tonight, though, he would exhibit more of those symptoms of disenchantment with his work that she had been meticulously observing in him of late.