a tremulous tenor in the choir of sleeping grotesques
reacting to the stories comprising Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer
You may have heard of Thomas Ligotti. Perhaps his name has been mentioned in the same breath as one HP Lovecraft, or perhaps you’re a devotee of True Detective, or maybe your erudite friends have extolled his nihilism to the cringing moon and back—or maybe you just found one of his black-spined collections on some musty bookseller’s shelf, tugging at you remorselessly in the same way that a black hole does when viewed from the quivering lip of the event horizon.
A few years back, I attempted to pick up the omnibus collection of Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe, after visiting a few of the stories in Teatro Grottesco. I immediately fell for the first story, “The Frolic,” which was a hideous chamber play of a tale involving madness, depravity, and the attempt to install logic and order into a world of fundamental chaos. Sadly, though, the second story (“Les Fleurs”) just didn’t do it for me, and as a result of this, I put the collection down and vowed to try again another time.
There’s something that I find intensely enervating about Ligotti’s prose. I don’t think this effect is due necessarily to the density of his writing, nor the remarkable nihilism that the author brings to bear on his hapless, beleaguered characters, as I’ve read many a story involving these elements prior, and I’ve only ever found one other author who requires this level of diligent patience, and that’s Robert Aickman. It took me nearly three months to get through the entirety of Aickman’s collection The Wine-Dark Sea, and when I emerged, I wore a mask fashioned of wonder and awe, much like the one I now wear having completed Songs of a Dead Dreamer.
I would like to share my collected thoughts on this fascinating clutch of stories. I discovered that it was best to pick up the book just prior to sleeping, and I found that it was best digested two at a time. If I even ventured to turn the page into a third story, I felt a sort of crazed exhaustion, like someone who has been running through an endless labyrinth with no hope of ever finding either a center nor an exit. Unlike the protagonists in this stories, however, I could simply close the book and return to it again the next night, or perhaps the night after . . .
(Note: I have not yet opened the second half of this omnibus, the one entitled Grimscribe, though I do intend to. The entries there seem to be much, much longer, and I am curious to see if I am able to bear the slings & arrows of Ligotti’s nihilism in this form as well as I bore the salvos of the first half.)
The collection opens into a section entitled DREAMS FOR SLEEPWALKERS, with “The Frolic,” as mentioned prior. This remains one of my favorite Ligotti stories, even after re-reading it for a third or perhaps fourth time. It is a masterclass in unease and mounting dread, projected onto a domestic scrim. The framing of the tale is its primary strength—Ligotti’s clever juxtaposition of domestic and carceral environments deliriously heightens the chilling events that unfold. I could easily see this done as a stage play: the underlying, interpersonal tension is straight out of Harold Pinter—and as with that playwright’s work, it's what's left unsaid that frightens; what is implied. To open the collection with this story is like being in a grocery store and hearing an over-filled balloon pop—in the ensuing silence, you can see everyone wildly looking around for the gun that just went off, pupils dilated in terror.
The second story, “Les Fleurs,” however, feels like a huge misstep. Told from the perspective of an obsessive erotomaniac, the story is framed as entries from his journal. This story felt like an obvious trope to me, weighted down by flights of discursive fancy, and though there is cleverness in the telling, the tale itself left me rather cold. It’s maybe a personal thing: perhaps I glutted myself on these kinds of stories in my youth with such novels that do the same thing (albeit with much lazier prose/style) by Dean Koontz and his ilk, but this story did very little for me.
“Alice’s Last Adventure,” on the other hand, renewed my flagging interest in the collection. This is brilliant and sly, nearly Borgesian in tone, filled to the brim with discursive meditations on aging, art, and identity. Dare I say that Ligotti even seems to be having some fun in this entry? There’s a strange authorial joy to the prose here, to my ear, with continued references to the work of Lewis Carroll as well as some chuckle-worthy wordplay (“Preston Penn” being the name of the protagonist’s fictional creation). All of this, however, is only one of the surface layers—there is definite horror here as the “fictional” begins to infiltrate the “real,” but the very canny use of an unreliable narrator makes even the boundary between the reader and the very text of this story feel porous, seeding the reader’s own mind and causing this entry to become delightfully meta-fictional in the best way. It is an author reflecting on authorship, a writer writing about writing, and Ligotti is smart enough to use this as a further meditation on nostalgia, longevity, and even immortality—as well as its inherent terrors.
“Dream of a Manikin” returns to the willful obsession of psychoanalysts: to wit, their attempts to impose some semblance of logic and meaning on primal disorder—as if trying to bridle chaos—that was first brought to the fore in “The Frolic,” but with a bit more emphasis on the surreal landscape of dreams. In Ligotti’s work, dreams press into the soft wax of our consciousness, leaving the signet mark of their disorder on our waking selves. The metaphor of animate versus inanimate (and vesting the inanimate with anima) is used extensively here, and to great effect, though I admit that the ending (with an abrupt shift in narrator, signified by italics) left me slightly cold. Overall, though, I found this to be a great story, from a uniquely voiced narrator, with some genuinely terrifying moments, even if the framing device of direct address didn't quite work for me. I especially enjoyed how much cerebral exercise is involved in the reading of this story—especially given that the point-of-view is that of an analyst's—which also directly informs and heightens the dissolution of sanity/reality by story's end.
The Nyctalops Trilogy, a loosely-linked triad of stories all revolving around the loss of consent, all delivered by predatory narrators with a supernatural ability to subjugate the unwilling. I noticed many parallels between these stories and the earlier "Les Fleurs," and like that one, I found them stylistically intriguing but otherwise, not really to my taste. The first of the three, 'The Chymist,' was the strongest, to my mind, even if I didn’t really enjoy the archly boorish tone of the narrator. ‘Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes,’ the second installment, involved some interesting investigations of mesmerism and legerdemain, but I loathed the unwieldy, pretentious-sounding title despite the beautiful prose inside the story itself. The third entry in the Trilogy, ‘Eye of the Lynx,’ with its depiction of sadomasochism and sexual depravity, bored me for the most part, though again, I think is probably due to personal predilection more than anything.
The final entry in DREAMS FOR SLEEPWALKERS, “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” continues to intrigue and enchant me to this day. I first read this at the urging of a friend many months ago, so it was interesting to revisit it in the context of the other stories. Here, Ligotti takes an absurd example (very much in the method of Queneau’s Exercises du Style) and ratchets up the surreality of the situation to portray the meta-fictional in a way that’s so recursive, the “Story” almost eats itself, sipping on its own saliva to quench its thirst after the conclusion. What I like about this is how seamlessly Ligotti blends essayistic prose into a more fictional framing—as if listening to a professor drone interminably on (a kind of mesmerism itself!) the reader hardly even notices when the lecture suddenly melts into narrative, and that story itself is bristling with metaphor and illusive thinking. Again, beneath all the obvious uncanniness surrounding this entry, like a cloud of buzzing flies heard just out of the corner of one’s ear, I noted a certain savage joy, a playfulness, that I did not expect to find in a collection so commonly branded with words like “bleakness” and “nihilism.”
In the second section, titled DREAMS FOR INSOMNIACS, I really found myself quickening to Ligotti’s storytelling. First of all, how great is that title? This jarring contradiction sets the stage for a clutch of fascinating entries, most of which I loved immediately. Much of the first section, to me, felt oddly sequenced and kind of haphazard, and I had varying degrees of impatience with the voices of the protagonists therein. That feeling was lessened by a huge magnitude in this second section, for a number of reasons.
The first “dream” we encounter here is “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise,” subtitled “A Story of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe,” and I was fascinated to discover that this quickly became one of my favorite stories in the collection. This was foggy, irresolute, but wound through with a terror of familial ritual, illuminated by the too-bright lights of the Holidays. Inside this smartly-wrapped present was absolutely gorgeous prose, and—to my personal joy—the use of architecture as horror element. The one caveat I make here is the same drawback I pointed out in “Dream of a Manikin”—an abrupt shift in narrator for the final paragraph felt like a cheap way out of the story. That being said, I found that this shift worked a thousand-fold better in this entry, due to the framing device of a story being related—rather than having the intercession of a new voice, this felt more like returning, and thus was more satisfying, to my feeling.
“The Lost Art of Twilight,” ostensibly a story about vampires, immediately reminded me of another story—by the aforementioned R. Aickman—”Pages from a Young Girl’s Diary,” in the collection Cold Hand in Mine. Like that story, I felt largely that this was a genre tale, gussied-up with beautiful prose and the personal observations of the protagonist. However, the finale of this story is what made it all worthwhile to me. When the antagonists, only referenced obliquely and through mentions of their long history throughout the early parts of the story, finally make their arrival, Ligotti takes pains to describe the “language” that they speak as a guttural, dusty thing, something that is far beyond the ken of even our narrator, who exists in the dusky world (twilight!) between human and vampire. I felt that this story also directly paid homage to Bram Stoker’s version of Dracula in both its tone and the meticulous pace of its unfolding, but in the end, I felt slightly underwhelmed by the narrative arc of the protagonist and his eventual transfiguration.
Moving into “The Troubles of Dr. Thoss,” I found myself hearkening back to good old HP Lovecraft—a loner in a seaside town, haunted by a local legend (and described as a kind of plagiarist of artistic merit) discovers his doom at the hands of the realizing of said legend. This was the first entry that I felt really hit on a kind of ‘parable’ feeling, which would continue to pervade through many of the future stories—and actually come to inform most of my favorites from the collection as a whole. I found a lot to enjoy here, noting especially Ligotti’s seeming scorn for ‘derivation’ when it comes to art, as well as the dramatic conclusion where the oddly-named “Alb Indys” meets his end.
“Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie,” one of the longer entries in this section, sees Ligotti delving into more of a classic fantasy mode, something more akin to Lord Dunsany or Robert E. Howard, but resolutely its own beast. The title gave me pause: what does it mean? The word ‘sword’ could mean either the weapon, or the one who bears it. To my mind, it’s more likely the latter case, because of the word ‘dead’ used to describe it. Then I have to consider the word ‘masquerade’—is it being used to describe a gathering of those so masked, or is it describing the solo masking of this so-called ‘dead sword’? The more you stare at the title, the more layers there seem to be. I certainly don’t know of any sword-shaped masks—nor can I think of a reason why a weapon should be thus masked. Perhaps I should also consider that Ligotti is making a pun worthy of Celebrity Jeopardy, and the title is meant to slyly imply “Masquerade of a Dead S-Word”? In this case, which “S” word is Ligotti referring to? It could be any, or many, or none.
But all that aside—this is a grandiose, epic story, told in three parts, and the style of it immediately recalled for me the opulent structures of Mervyn Peake in his Gormenghast trilogy. It is built like a classic “tragedie,” too, and feels almost like a perverse morality play, a riff on the Jacobean dramatics of Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe. Ligotti’s irrepressible instinct to flip the script, as it were, on his scheming and mildly hubristic protagonist, reveals itself at the last, and finally doom—doom and a reversal of fortune—comes to visit Faliol. (I suspect, given the titles of the stories in Grimscribe, that this is not the last time we will hear mention of his ‘spectacles,’ either)
The next unfolding dream for the sleepless is the delightful “Dr Voke and Mr Veech,” which returns anew to Ligotti’s thematic echoes of puppetry, not to mention the inanimate versus the animate, and what twisted realms of consciousness might lie in between. This story also returned to that ‘parable’ feeling that I got from reading “The Troubles of Dr Thoss,” which I am finding a much more accessible mode of narrative when it comes to Ligotti, thus far, in my explorations. I very much enjoyed the by-play between the two titular characters, and found that the dialogue in this story felt much more assured and natural here than in any story prior (excepting the stilted rigors on display in “The Frolic,” which I assume was intentional).
Unfortunately, this section ends for me on a weak note: “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror.” Much like the prior “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” this entry takes a didactic approach to the fictional realm of horror, but unfortunately does not do so with the same aplomb or intelligence. This felt like filler, writing that was left on the cutting room floor (perhaps even originating from the other story) and only spliced in here as B-side material. It’s a shame, because this is otherwise an excellent section, and I found something to admire in everything else within it.
The final section is titled DREAMS FOR THE DEAD, and it opens with “Dr. Locrian’s Asylum.” In this piece, Ligotti returns to familiar themes already explored in earlier stories, but melds them together in an even more satisfying way. Here, madness is merged with analysis—in the narrative given to the protagonist by the titular doctor—whose grandfather, instead of trying to exorcise the insanities afflicting the inmates of the asylum, sought to exacerbate those symptoms, or to follow them to their logical extremes, due to the man’s own fascination with the occult and mysteries Beyond. This purported “doctor” seems to have studied at the same university as Josef Mengele, with similar inhuman theories. I felt that this story ended on a bit of a weak note, though, despite the setup.
However, this story was followed by what I think might be my favorite entry in the entire collection—”The Sect of the Idiot,” Ligotti’s paean to the Lovecraft entity of chaos, Azathoth, who is referred to in a brief epigraph at the beginning of this story as “…the blind idiot god.” In this piece, Ligotti once again mines familiar themes, but goes one step further. What if the external locus of control that governs our existence is also governed, just as much a drooling puppet as we are, and what if that superseding governor is also an idiot? The chilling part to this then of course comes when the protagonist wakes from a dream wherein this realization strikes him, and it begins to color his waking life, seeming to emanate from him and eventually corrupting the entire town in which he lives . . . or at least, that’s his perception. As the story concludes, Ligotti deftly blends surreality (harkening back to elements introduced in the beginning of the story) into the warp of the narrative, tainting the narrator’s reality with the tendrils of his dreaming.
This, much like the following story, “The Greater Festival of Masks,” was another of those shorter entries which had about them the feeling of a parable. “Masks,” written in the third-person, concerns another hapless bystander who is caught up in the whirlwind of the uncanny, snarled in ritual, during a ‘carnival’ time where a city appears to be caught up in an unknown, depraved revelry. The whole outing has the intangible feeling of a dream, so unfamiliar are the contours of the environment and the nature of the rituals being enacted, but the discomfort is palpable throughout.
In “Masks,” too, once again Ligotti draws in a theme of uncanny architecture, seen prior in many of the earlier stories, and then doubles down on this in “The Music of the Moon,” concerning a nested narrative in which a man named Tressor recounts an odd experience involving musicians and their eerie art—a passing reference to someone’s eyes becomes heightened and given new dimension by the end of the story, though the protagonist must travel through a variety of interior chambers to arrive at his eventual destination. This reminded me quite strongly of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s seminal story “The Sandman,” in which enucleation provides a terrifying, multi-layered symbol reflecting the desires and sins of the characters—though Ligotti doesn’t take this to that level, preferring instead to lapse more into the monstrous. It is effectively disturbing, but when the nested narrative concludes, the story seems to collapse in on itself, resting on the laurels of someone who has been frightened by something and now experiences a kind of paranoid pareidolia, so affected were they by the telling.
The next entry, “The Journal of J.P. Drapeau,” sadly left me quite cold. Returning to the format of journal entries, Ligotti seeks to invoke the uncanniness of the old city of Bruges, in Belgium. It appears that these fragments are an attempt to conjure a sort of meta-horror at discovering a fictional representation of one’s own reality, and the dissonance that exists between the two states, but to my mind, this felt like filler material, despite the always-beautiful prose.
Finally, we reach the end with “Vastarien,” which I have been thinking about for hours now since I read it. Invoking the Borgesian here (I instantly thought of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” upon reading this), Ligotti spins a taut and well-crafted story, shifting effortlessly from the ‘present moment’ (left cannily undescribed and vague) as an in medias res structure—so effortlessly, in fact, that it’s almost easy to miss (though the clever reader will pick up on certain verbal cues to determine the narrator’s location)—panning quickly to an unknown time beforehand, wherein the protagonist comes across a certain book, not to mention some rather disturbingly surreal characters to spur his doomed journey along. I really enjoyed this, and I think it stands on its own merits alongside Borges’ “Tlön” in its depiction of the blending between the fictional and the “real.”
And so the Songs fade out, their notes still lingering in the cavernous amphitheater of my mind. I am sure that I will hear their discordant melodies again at some point in the near future—throughout, even in the stories that I didn’t find as much to my liking, the prose is viscerally stunning in a way that belies the anhedonia to which Ligotti professes suffering. I find it utterly fascinating that this level of beauty in writing can originate from someone whose worldview is based on the idea of nihilism and anti-natalism, and this is surely something I will devote more time to studying. I turn my eyes now to Grimscribe, and its first entry, easily three times as long as any in Songs, with mild trepidation and wariness, even though those feelings war with a rabid excitement to see what other horrors and existential maladies Ligotti can investigate, and in which scintillating prose he will render them. After Grimscribe, I think I will revisit Teatro Grottesco, in which I have found more stories similar to those that I enjoyed in this collection—among them, “The Town Manager,” “Sideshow,” and of course, “The Red Tower.”
And if you see me, my body hunched over a notebook, laughing deliriously as I scribble madly across the page, maybe don’t ask me to turn around.
You might not like what you see—even if it’s only a mask.