The Nightmare Factory.

Thomas Ligotti.

FOREWORD.

Poppy Z. Brite.

Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?

You have a lot to answer for, but I've never been able to discover anything of substance about you. That's the way you seem to want it. Even in the single interview I managed to glean from the wasteland of the small press, you spoke exclusively about the craft of writing. Don't mistake my meaning; there is no one I'd rather read upon the craft. But not a scrap of personal information escaped those lines of print. As someone who gives numerous, messy, highly personal interviews that I suspect I may yet live to regret, I wonder how you are able to do it.

I was twenty, on my first trip to San Francisco, when a friend first handed me your work Songs of a Dead Dreamer, the Silver Scarab limited edition with Harry O. Morris illustrations that approached the fabulousness of the stories. My interest was aroused at least partly by the fact that Ramsey Campbell, then and now one of my favourite writers, had seen fit to pen an introduction; so being asked to write this introduction has a certain poignancy.

Riding stoned in the back seat of a car across the Bay Bridge, I opened the book at random and read a sentence that will haunt me all my days, a sentence I'd give a thumb to have written: We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some galactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums...my awe-struck little deer and I have gone frolicking.

from 'The Frolic'

The glittering panorama of San Francisco, a city I already suspected of harbouring deep mystery from Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, became inextricably linked in my mind with this prose jewel. For me, those black-foaming gutters and back alleys (not to mention the Street of Wavering Peaks) will always be just across the bay from Berkeley.

Will you hate me if I confess that I photocopied the entire book? I'd promised to send it back to my friend, and I am no book thief. But I could not bear to part with your words, and I could not find another copy anywhere; those few precious copies had been snapped up and hoarded.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer has since been released by major publishers on at least two continents. I have three editions myself. But, until it was destroyed in a flood last year, I still had the looseleaf binder with that pathetic photocopy in it too.

I have followed your career since then-nearly a decade-and I still know nothing more of you than your fiction reveals. Though I know that fictional self-revelation can be considerable, I also know that it is frequently misinterpreted by the reader. If you were to call up and invite me over for coffee, I would expect to meet a slightly dissipated aesthete, sarcastic and decadent and wry, given to odd word-associations, with a taste not just for the macabre but for the truly, nakedly gruesome. (Let the critics blather on about subtle half-hidden horrors; you make me see it all.) But perhaps I would encounter someone else entirely. I suspect I'll never know.

You have a lot to answer for, Thomas Ligotti. For every score of horrorheads who don't 'get' your work, there will always be the one who is profoundly impressed and appalled by it, for it seems as though you have reached into his dreaming brain and pulled out the stuff of intensely private nightmares. I am one of those readers. Upon reading your stories, I often experience two distinct sensations: a faint deja vu, not as if I've read the words before, but as if the images have already appeared somewhere in the murk of my subconscious; and a sense of Lovecraftian awe shading into existential nausea. More than any other author I can think of, you write decidedly weird fiction. And I can only marvel. Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?

I believe I've just answered my own question.

INTRODUCTION:.

THE CONSOLATIONS OF HORROR.

Darkness, we welcome and embrace you.

Horror, at least in its artistic presentations, can be a comfort. And, like any agent of enlightenment, it may even confer-if briefly-a sense of power, wisdom, and transcendence, especially if the conferee is a willing one with a true feeling for ancient mysteries and a true fear of the skullduggery which a willing heart usually senses in the unknown.

Clearly we (just the willing conferees, remember) want to know the worst, both about ourselves and the world. The oldest, possibly the only theme is that of forbidden knowledge. And no forbidden knowledge ever consoled its possessor. (Which is probably why it's forbidden.) At best it is one of the more sardonic gifts bestowed upon the individual (for knowledge of the forbidden is first and foremost an individual ordeal). It is particularly forbidden because the mere possibility of such knowledge introduces a monstrous and perverse temptation to trade the quiet pleasures of mundane existence for the bright lights of alienage, doom, and, in some rare cases, eternal damnation.

So we not only wish to know the worst, but to experience it as well.

Hence that arena of artificial experience, supposedly of the worst kind-the horror story-where gruesome conspiracies may be trumped up to our soul's satisfaction, where the deck is stacked with shivers, shocks, and dismembered hands for every player; and, most importantly, where one, at a safe distance, can come to grips (after a fashion) with death, pain, and loss in the, quote, real world, unquote.

But does it ever work the way we would like it to?

A test case.

I am watching Night of the Living Dead. I see the ranks of the deceased reanimated by a double-edged marvel of the modern age (atomic radiation, I think. Or is it some wonder chemical which found its way into the water supply? And does this detail even matter?). I see a group of average, almost documentary types holed up in a house, fighting off wave after wave of hungry ghouls. I see the group hopelessly losing their ground and succumb each one of them to the same disease as their sleepwalking attackers: A husband tries to eat his wife (or is it mother tries to eat child?), a daughter stabs her father with a gardener's trowel (or perhaps brother stabs sister with a bricklayer's trowel). In any case, they all die, and horribly. This is the important thing.

When the movie is over, I am invigorated by the sense of having rung the ear-shattering changes of harrowing horror; I've got another bad one under my belt that will serve to bolster my nerves for whatever shocking days and nights are to come; I have, in a phrase, an expanded capacity for fear. I can really take it!

At the movies, that is.

The fearful truth is that all of the above brutalities can be "taken" only too well. And then, at some point, one starts to adopt unnatural strategies to ward off not the bogey but the sand man. Talking to the characters in a horror film, for instance: Hi, Mr. Decomposing Corpse lapping up a lump of sticky entrails, Hi! But even this tactic loses its charm after a while, especially if you're watching some "shocker" by yourself and lack an accomplice to share your latest stage of jadedness and immunity to primitive fright. (At the movies, I mean. Otherwise you're the same old vulnerable self.) So after a devoted horror fan is stuffed to the gills, thoroughly sated and consequently bored-what does he (the he's traditionally out-number the she's here) do next? Haunt the emergency rooms of hospitals or the local morgues? Keep an eye out for bloody mishaps on the freeway? Become a war correspondent? But now the issue has been blatantly shifted to a completely different plane-from movies to life-and clearly it doesn't belong there.

The one remedy for the horror addict's problem seems this: that if the old measure of medicine is just not strong enough-increase the dosage! (This pharmaceutical parallel is ancient but apt.) And thus we have the well-known and very crude basis for the horror film's history of ever-escalating scare tactics. Have you already seen such old classics as Werewolf of London too many times? Sample one of its gore-enriched, yet infinitely inferior versions of the early 1980s. Of course the relief is only temporary; one's tolerance to the drug tends to increase. And looking down that long open road there appears to be no ultimate drugstore in sight, no final pharmacy where the horror hunger can be glutted on a sufficiently enormous dose, where the once insatiable addict may, at last, be laden with all the demonic dope there is, collapse with sated obesity into the shadows, and quietly gasp: "enough."

The empty pit of boredom is ever renewing itself, while horror films become less tantalizing to the marginally sadistic movie-goer.

And what is the common rationale for justifying what would otherwise be considered a just barely frustrated case of sadomasochism? Now we remember: to present us with horrors inside the theater (or the books, let's not forget those) and thereby help us to assimilate the horrors on the outside, and also to ready us for the Big One. This does sound reasonable, it sounds right and rational. But none of this has anything to do with these three R's. We are in the great forest of fear, where you can't fight real experiences of the worst with fake ones (no matter how well synchronized a symbolic correspondence they may have). When is the last time you heard of someone screaming himself awake from a nightmare, only to shrug it off with: "Yeah, but I've seen worse at the movies" (or read worse in the books; we'll get to them)? Nothing is worse than that which happens personally to a person. And though a bad dream may momentarily register quite high on the fright meter, it is, realistically speaking, one of the less enduring, smaller time terrors a person is up against. Try drawing solace from your half-dozen viewings of the Texas Chain-Saw Massacre when they're prepping you for brain surgery.

In all truth, frequenters of horror films are a jumpier, more casually hysterical class of person than most. We need the most reassurance that we can take it as well as anyone, and we tend to be the most complacent in thinking that seventeen straight nights of supernatural-psycho films is good for the nerves and will give us a special power which non-horror-fanatics don't have. After all, this is supposed to be a major psychological selling point of the horror racket, the first among its consolations.

It is undoubtedly the first consolation, but it's also a false one.

Interlude: so long, consolations of mayhem.

Perhaps it was a mistake selecting Night of the Living Dead to illustrate the consolations of horror. As a delegate from Horror-land this film is admirably incorruptible, oozing integrity. It hasn't sold out to the kindergarten moral codes of most "modern horror" movies and it has no particular message to deliver: its only news is nightmare. For pure brain-chomping, nerve-chewing, sight-cursing insanity, this is a very effective work, at least the first couple of times or so. It neither tries nor pretends to be anything beyond that. (And as we have already found, nothing exists beyond that anyway, except more and more of that.) But the big trouble is that sometimes we forget how much more can be done in horror movies (books too!) than that. We sometimes forget that supernatural stories-and this is a very good time to boot nonsupernatural ones right off the train: psycho, suspense, and the like-are capable of all the functions and feelings of real stories. For the supernatural can serve as a trusty vehicle for careening into realms where the Strange and the Familiar charge each other with the opposing poles of their passion.

The Haunting, for example. Besides being the greatest haunted house film ever made, it is also a great haunted human one. In it the ancient spirit of mortal tragedy passes easily through walls dividing the mysteries of the mundane world from those of the extra-mundane. And this supertragic specter never comes to rest in either one of these worlds; it never lingers long enough to give us forbidden knowledge of either the stars or ourselves, or anything else for that matter. To what extent may the "derangement of Hill House" (Dr. Markway's diagnosis) be blamed on the derangement of the people who were, are, and probably will be in it? And vice versa of course. Is there something wrong with that spiral staircase in the library or just with the clumsy persons who try to climb it? The only safe bet is that something is wrong, wherever the wrongness lies...and lies and lies. Our poor quartet of spook-chasers-Dr. Markway, Theo, Luke, and Eleanor-are not only helpless to untie themselves from entangling puppet strings; they can't even find the knots!

The ghosts at Hill House always remain unseen, except in their effects: savagely pummeling enormous oak doors, bending them like cardboard; writing assonant messages on walls ("Help Eleanor come home") with an unspecified substance ("Chalk," says Luke. "Or something like chalk," corrects Markway); and in general giving the place a very bad feeling. We're not even sure who the ghosts are, or rather were. The pious and demented Hugh Crane, who built Hill House? His spinster daughter Abigail, who wasted away in Hill House? Her neglectful companion, who hung herself in Hill House? None of them emerges as a discrete, clearly definable haunter of the old mansion. Instead we have an undefined presence which seems a sort of melting pot of deranged forces from the past, an anti-America where the very poorest in spirit settle and stagnate and lose themselves in a massive and insane spectral body.

Easier to identify are the personal specters of the living, at least for the viewer. But the characters in the film are too busy with outside things to look inside one another's houses, or even their own. Dr. Markway doesn't acknowledge Eleanor's spooks. (She loves him, hopelessly.) Eleanor can't see Theo's spooks (she's lesbian) and Theo avoids dwelling on her own. ("And what are you afraid of, Theo?" asks Eleanor. "Of knowing what I really want," she replies, somewhat uncandidly.) Best of all, though, is Luke, who doesn't think there even are any spooks, until near the end of the film when this affable fun-seeker gains an excruciating sense of the alienation, perversity, and strangeness of the world around him. "It should be burned to the ground," he says of the high-priced house he is to inherit, "and the earth sown with salt." This quasi-biblical quote indicates that more than a few doors have been kicked down in Luke's private passageways. He knows now! Poor Eleanor, of course, has been claimed by the house as one of its lonely, faceless citizens of eternity. It is her voice that gets to deliver the reverberant last lines of the film: "Hill House has stood for eighty years and will probably stand for eighty more...and we who walk there, walk alone." With these words the viewer glimpses a realm of unimaginable pain and horror, an unfathomable region of aching Gothic turmoil, a weird nevermoresville.

The experience is extremely disconsoling but nonetheless exhilarating.

But for a movie to convey such intense feeling for the supernatural is rare. (This one of course is a scrupulously faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson's unarguably excellent novel.) The thing that is quite common, especially with fiction, is the phenomenon that produced the single-sentence paragraph above; in other words-the horror story's paradox of entertainment. The thumping heart of the question, though, is what really entertains us? In opposition, that is, to what we only imagine entertains us. Entertainment, whatever we imagine its real source, is rightly regarded as its own justification, and this seems to be one of the unassailable consolations of horror.

But is it? (This won't take long.).

Another test case.

We are reading-in a quiet, cozy room, it goes without saying-one of M.R. James' powerful ghost stories. It is "Count Magnus," in which a curious scholar gains knowledge he didn't even know was forbidden and suffers the resultant doom at the hands of the count and his betentacled companion. The story actually ends before we have a chance to witness its fabulous coup de grace, but we know that a sucked-off face is in store for our scholar. Meanwhile we sit on the sidelines (sipping a warm drink, probably) as the doomed academic meets a fate worse than any we'll ever know. At least we think it's worse, we hope it is...deep, deep in the subcellars of our minds we pray: "Please don't let anything even like that happen to me! Not to me. Let it always be the other guy and I'll read about him, even tremble for him a little. Besides, I'm having so much fun, it can't be all that terrible. For him, that is. For me it would be unbearable. See how shaky and excitable I get just reading about it. So please let it always be the other guy."

But it can't always be the other guy, for in the long run we're all, each of us, the other guy.

Of course in the short run it's one of life's minor ecstasies-an undoubted entertainment-to read about a world in which the very worst doom takes place in a restricted area we would never ever wander into and befalls somebody else. And this is the run in which all stories are read, as well as written. (If something with eyes like two runny eggs were after your carcass, would you sit down and write a story about it?) It's another world, the short run; it's a world where horror really is a true consolation. But it's no compliment to Dr. James or to ourselves as readers to put too much stock in ghost stories as a consolation for our mortality, our vulnerability to real-life terrors. As consolations go, this happens to be a pretty low-grade one-demented complacency posing as beatitude.

So our second consolation lives on borrowed time at best. And in the long-run-where no mere tale can do you much good-is delusory.

(Perhaps the stories of H.P. Lovecraft offer a more threatening and admirable role to those of us devoted to doom. In Lovecraft's work doom is not restricted to eccentric characters in eccentric situations. It begins there but ultimately expands to violate the safety zone of the reader (and the non-reader for that matter, though the latter remains innocent of Lovecraft's forbidden knowledge). M.R. James' are cautionary tales, lessons in how to stay out of spectral trouble and how nice and safe it feels to do so. But within the cosmic boundaries of Lovecraft's universe, which many would call the universe itself, we are already in trouble, and feeling safe is out of the question for anyone with some brains and chance access to the manuscripts of Albert Wilmarth, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, or Prof. Angell's nephew. These isolated narrators take us with them into their doom, which is the world's. (No one ever gives a hoot what happens to Lovecraft's characters as individuals.) If we knew what they know about the world and about our alarmingly tentative place in it, our brains would indeed reel with revelation. And if we found out what Arthur Jermyn found out about ourselves and our humble origins in a mere madness of biology, we would do as he did with a few gallons of gasoline and a merciful match. Of course Lovecraft insists on telling us things it does no good to know: things that can't help us or protect us or even prepare us for the awful and inevitable apocalypse to come. The only comfort is to accept it, live in it, and sigh yourself into the balm of living oblivion. If you can only maintain this constant sense of doom, you may be spared the pain of foolish hopes and their impending demolishment.

But we can't maintain it; only a saint of doom could. Hope leaks into our lives by way of spreading cracks we always meant to repair but never did. (Oddly enough, when the cracks yawn their widest, and the promised deluge comes at last, it is not hope at all that finally breaks through and drowns us.)

Interlude: see you later, consolations of doom.

So when a fictional state of absolute doom no longer offers us possibilities of comfort-what's left? Well, another stock role casts one not as the victim of a horror story but as its villain. That is, we get to be the monster for a change. To a certain extent this is supposed to happen when we walk onto those resounding floorboards behind the Gothic footlights. It's traditional to identify with and feel sorry for the vampire or the werewolf in their ultimate moment of weakness, a time when they're most human. Sometimes, though, it seems as if there's more fun to be had playing a vampire or werewolf at the height of their monstrous, people-maiming power. To play them in our hearts, I mean. After all, it would be kind of great to wake up at dusk every day and cruise around in the shadows and fly on batwings through the night, stare strangers in the eye and have them under your power. Not bad for someone who's supposed to be dead. Or rather, for someone who can't die and whose soul is not his own; for someone who-no matter how seemingly suave-is doomed to ride eternity with a single and highly embarrassing obsession, the most debased junkie immortalized.

But maybe you could make it as a werewolf. For most of a given month you're just like anybody else. Then for a few days you can take a vacation from your puny human self and spill the blood of puny human others. And once you return to your original clothes size, no one is any the wiser...until next month rolls around and you've got to do the whole thing again, month after month, over and over. Still, the werewolf's lifestyle might not be so bad, as long as you don't get caught ripping out someone's throat. Of course, there might be some guilt involved and, yes, bad dreams.

Vampirism and lycanthropy do have their drawbacks, anyone would admit that. But there would also be some memorable moments too, moments humans rarely, if ever, have: feeling your primal self at one with the inhuman forces around you, fearless in the face of night and nature and solitude and all those things from which mere people have much to fear. There you are under the moon-a raging storm in human form. And you'll always be like that, forever if you're careful. Being a human being is a dead end anyway. It would seem that supernatural sociopaths have more possibilities open to them. So wouldn't it be great to be one? What I mean, of course, is: is it a consolation of horror fiction to let us be one for a little while? Yes, it really is; the attractions of this life are sometimes irresistible. But are we missing some point if we only see the glamour and ignore the drudgery in the existence of these free-spirited nyctophiles? Well, are we?

The last test.

Test cancelled. The consolation is patently a trick one, done with invisible writing, mirrors, and camera magic.

Substitute consolation: "The Fall of the House of Usher, or Doom Revisited".

Did you ever wonder how a Gothic story like Poe's masterpiece can be so great without enlisting the reader's care for its characters' doom? Plenty of horrible events and concepts are woven together; the narrator and his friend Roderick experience a fair amount of fear. But unlike a horror story whose effect depends on reader sympathy with its fictional victims, this one doesn't want us to get involved with the characters in that way. Our fear does not derive from theirs. Though Roderick, his sister, and the visiting narrator are fascinating companions, they do not burden us with their individual catastrophes. Are we sad for Roderick and his sister's terrible fate? No. Are we happy the narrator makes a safe flight from the sinking house? Not particularly. Then why get upset about this calamity which takes place in the backwoods, miles from the nearest town and everyday human concerns?

In this story individuals are not the issue. Everywhere in Poe's literary universe (Lovecraft's too) the individual is horribly and comfortably irrelevant. During the reading of "The Fall of the House of Usher" we don't look over any character's shoulder but have our attention distributed god-wise into every corner of a foul factory which manufactures only one product: total and inescapable doom. Whether a given proper noun escapes this doom or is caught by it is beside the point. Poe's is a world created with built-in obsolescence, and to appreciate fully this downrunning cosmos one must take the perspective of its creator, which is all perspectives without getting sidetracked into a single one. Therefore we as readers are the House of Usher (both family and structure), we are the fungi clustering across its walls and the violent storm over its ancient head; we sink with the Ushers and get away with the narrator. In brief, we play all the roles. And the consolation in this is that we are supremely removed from the maddeningly tragic viewpoint of the human.

Of course, when the story is over we must fall from our god's perch and sink back into humanness, which is perhaps what the Ushers and their house are doing. This is always a problem for would-be gods! We can't maintain for very long a godlike point of view. Wouldn't it be great if we could; if life could be lived outside the agony of the individual? But we are always doomed and redoomed to become involved with our own lives, which is the only life there is, and godlikeness has nothing at all to do with it.

But still, wouldn't it be great...

Darkness, you've done a lot for us.

At this point it may seem that the consolations of horror are not what we thought they were, that all this time we've been keeping company with illusions. Well, we have. And we'll continue to do so, continue to seek the appalling scene which short-circuits our brain, continue to sit in our numb coziness with a book of terror on our laps like a cataleptic predator, and continue to draw smug solace, if only for the space of a story, from a world made snug and simple by absolute hopelessness and doom. These consolations are still effective, even if they don't work as well as we would prefer them to. But they are only effective, like most things of value in art or life, as illusions. And there's no point attributing to them powers of therapy or salvation they don't and can't have. There are enough disappointments in the world without adding that one.

Perhaps, though, our illusion of consolation could be enhanced by acquiring a better sense of what we are being consoled by. What, in fact, is a horror story? And what does it do? First the latter.

The horror story does the work of a certain kind of dream we all know. Sometimes it does this so well that even the most irrational and unlikely subject matter can infect the reader with a sense of realism beyond the realistic, a trick usually not seen outside the vaudeville of sleep. When is the last time you failed to be fooled by a nightmare, didn't suspend disbelief because its incidents weren't sufficiently true-to-life? The horror story is only true to dreams, especially those which involve us in mysterious ordeals, the passing of secrets, the passages of forbidden knowledge, and, in more ways than one, the spilling of guts.

What distinguishes horror from other kinds of stories is the exclusive devotion of their practitioners, their true practitioners, to self-consciously imagining and isolating the most demonic aspects and episodes of human existence, undiminished by any consolation whatever. For here no consolation on earth is sufficient to the horrors it will struggle in vain to make bearable.

Are horror stories truer than other stories? They may be, but not necessarily. They are limited to depicting conditions of extraordinary suffering, and while this is not the only game in town, such depictions can be as close to truth as any others. Nevertheless, what simple fictional horror-no matter how grossly magnified-can ever hold a candle to the complex mesh of misery and disenchantment which is merely the human routine? Of course, the fundamental horror of existence is not always apparent to us, its constantly menaced but unwary existers. But in true horror stories we can see it even in the dark. All eternal hopes, optimistic outs, and ultimate redemptions are cleared away, and for a little while we can pretend to stare the very worst right in its rotting face.

Why, though? Why?

Just to do it, that's all. Just to see how much unmitigated weirdness, sorrow, desolation, and cosmic anxiety the human heart can take and still have enough heart left over to translate these agonies into artistic forms: James' stained glass monstrosities, Lovecraft's narrow-passaged blasphemies, Poe's symphonic paranoia. As in any satisfying relationship, the creator of horror and its consumer approach oneness with each other. In other words, you get the horrors you deserve, those you can understand. For contrary to conventional wisdom, you cannot be frightened by what you don't understand.

This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and-like it or not-peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

To the memory of my aunt.

and godmother, Virginia Cianciolo.