The Nightmare Factory
by Thomas Ligotti

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Book Reviews of The Nightmare Factory

Book Review: A superb collection of fictions
Summary: 5 Stars

Supernatural horror story writers operate in a dialectic of hope and despair. Depending on scope and intent, their stories show individuals or humanity or the universe itself threatened by evil which, again depending on their outlook, can or cannot be defeated. Stoker's Dracula can be put down by vigilant Victorian savants, but in Lovecraft the entire universe is poised to devolve into the blind idiocy of Azathoth, and his protagonists' only hope is to live out a quiet life and die quietly before the descent begins. The figures that populate Ligotti's stories don't even have that option. The mask is already slipping, and it is impossible in any case to pretend to separate oneself from the general horror. The limit that Ligotti comes up against is just that the horror story DOES exist in and as a dialectic. This is an issue that he takes up, rather playfully, in his introduction on "The Consolations of Horror," wherein he identifies among other things, catharsis and emotional inoculation, schadenfreude and sadism, and even just sheer entertainment as the "consolations" or virtues of horror fiction.

What Ligotti ultimately calls the consolation of this fiction seems to be a kind of Existential revelry in bleakness. But what he mentions, veers away from, comes back to, and generally dances around is a matter that he sets forth in his first sentence: transcendence. Because he weights his version of the dialectic so heavily to nihilism and despair, it is clearest in his fiction that there IS a dialectic. The universe may be wretched and debased, pain in its essence and its end, but it is transcendentally so. If it is meaningless, it is a transcendent meaninglessness, not the meaninglessness of the final stage of entropy. The supernatural horror story intimates that there are mysterious depths, if no unimaginable heights, a unity however foul, forbidden knowledge that grounds itself in reality. In this universe, consciousness can be at the center of things even if it is just as the punchline to a cosmic joke. Thinking along these lines, the horror story is the last refuge of Tragedy. But what if reality is only surfaces, unity is less than an illusion, and all knowledge is local knowledge?

Not that I am suggesting that Ligotti is blind to something. If there is anything to what I have said, I am sure that this supremely self-conscious writer is already aware of it. In interviews, Ligotti has clearly stated that he has made choices in the service of putting over a particular vision of pessimism and nihilism: the authors he has chosen to take after, his notable and much-noted style, his steadfast adherence to shorter forms -- Ligotti himself has derived a lineage from the essay/fiction/prose poem genre that Poe perfected in stories like "The Fall of the House of Usher." I would put him in the grand tradition of the rant, which may sound trivializing but is not truly meant so. It is a tradition that I admire, even down to Lovecraft's breathless italics, and which I think takes in writers as distant as Pope and his Dunciad or Henryson and his Confession. In any case, Ligotti has ably defended himself against criticisms, dismissing claims that his writing tends to be plotless as the unwillingness of readers to look past the foreground; Ligotti refers to his plots as submerged. This appears to be brilliantly true in a story like "Conversations in a Dead Language," although in fairness to the critics it does seem that sometimes his fictions are set pieces forcibly yoked by atmosphere and thematics.

Summary of The Nightmare Factory

For more on Ligotti, see reviews of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe: His Life and Works, and Noctuary.

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