I took a short break between reading Songs of a Dead Dreamer and launching into the second book, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, mostly because, well, my day job is customer service in a retail capacity, and by the end of those hours my PermaSmile has stretched into a ghastly rictus and my faith in humanity has often already been shaken to its foundations. To indulge further in any investigation of nihilism or societal doom (in any of its forms), especially when rendered in Ligotti’s evocative prose, would be inadvisable, perhaps even staining the day ahead before I have a chance to suit up for another shift.
That being said, I found the second half of this omnibus far more preferable to the first, oddly enough. The stories in this section struck me as far more mature than those that preceded it, often dealing with similar themes, but examining them in a way that felt intelligently layered and deeply symbolic in a way that only a few entries did prior. I found a lot of similarities in tone, description, and yes, even in the character’s voices, which is appropriate, because Grimscribe is divided into sections titled thusly:
THE VOICE OF THE DAMNED
THE VOICE OF THE DEMON
THE VOICE OF THE DREAMER
THE VOICE OF THE CHILD
THE VOICE OF OUR NAME
It is also worth noting that Grimscribe comes with a short introduction, one which is written in an elliptical, sly manner, at first from a first-person point of view, but by the end of it has morphed into what feels like a ‘collective,” concluding with the following lines:
“But until then, everyone needs a name. Everyone must be called something. So what can we say is the name of everyone?
Our name is GRIMSCRIBE.
This is our voice.”
A lot of this Introduction feels oblique, intentionally difficult to understand, but, to my mind, Ligotti is intentionally presenting a perversion of the classical Invocation to the Muse. The beginnings of poems and most ‘presented fiction’ from antiquity were often preceded by a prayer or orison exhorting an external entity (to wit, the ‘other end’ of the conduit, through which inspiration flows) to metaphorically grant them voice, and this is precisely what I feel is happening here. Of course, Ligotti’s “muse” is no benign spirit, certainly no ethereal maiden in flowing gowns and a curious smile; his is something darker, something malevolent and inimical.
If Songs for a Dead Dreamer was a puppet, though, Grimscribe is a ventriloquist’s dummy, and this introduction reads like a dummy turning to the voice that speaks for it, to ask of it questions. Obviously, this is impossible—a dummy’s very existence is predicated on the fact that it can’t speak for itself—and it is this paradox which becomes a base note for the dissonant choir to follow.
Our first voice, one of the quartet of the Voices of the Damned, is “The Last Feast of Harlequin.” I was immediately drawn into this story—the descriptions of Miroclaw are vivid and immediate, the frequent use of the color green deepening the uncanniness already present. Once again, Ligotti uses the Holiday season (see: “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise,” in Songs of a Dead Dreamer) as backdrop, with all of its attendant rituals—and then imagines a further, darker, ritual. The length of the story felt comfortable—Ligotti allows himself to stretch out a bit in the persona of an anthropologist-cum-investigator and spends a glorious amount of time delving into the setting. The voice is often wry, and very obviously self-aware, but not quite self-aware enough to avoid ending up where he does. This is also the first time Ligotti brings clowns/Clowning to the fore (I had kind of been wondering when he would deviate from puppets and dummies to clowns), and the descriptions of the protagonist entering into that role are delightfully unnerving. All that being said, I do feel like this took the road more traveled by the end of the story—despite this, it is still an exemplar exhibit of the folk horror genre. Oh, and it was nice to see a little overlap in stories (a new layer develops!): Dr. Thoss (see: “The Troubles of Dr. Thoss,” in Songs of a Dead Dreamer) makes a reappearance.
The second Voice of the Damned is “Spectacles in the Drawer,” which is another first-person led story—this felt like it hearkened back to such stories as “The Nyctalops Trilogy” and “Les Fleurs,” with its arrogant, even pretentious, narrator—but this one had a different effect on me. For some reason, the combination of the voice of the protagonist—a dry, self-aware hypocrite and charlatan—and the narrative arc of the story felt very satisfying for me. I also enjoyed the traditional “comeuppance” that was delivered; and man—the audacity, the absurdity!—in naming a character “Plomb!” Brian Evenson, eat your heart out. Also, more eye stuff. This is a theme carried over from “The Music of the Moon” (see: Songs) and seen again in a later entry here. I liked this piece—once again, its extended length seemed to suit Ligotti’s prose very well. Perhaps I’d just gotten used to his particularly arch cadence, but I feel like there is an ease in the writing that allowed me to breathe a bit, mentally speaking, as I was reading.
The third Voice of the Damned is “Flowers of the Abyss.” I enjoyed this story—especially its late-narrative pivot in point of view, but I found the dialogue surrounding the “madness of things” less inspired. Nevertheless, the heightened descriptions of the garden and flowers were vivid and quite beautiful, despite what they stood for.
And the final Voice of the Damned: “Nethescurial,” is broken into sections, ostensibly from a letter being written by the narrator as they encounter an insidiously invasive manuscript. (Though the reader is informed of this “letter’s” provenance in a tiny italicized aside, from an unknown author, which is a delightful layering and a canny device on Ligotti’s part.) This was one of the highlights of this first grouping for me, a welcome return to Borgesian “Tlön” territory (also invoked to a similar degree in “Vastarien” (see: Songs), melded with the fragmentary journaling of “The Journal of JB Drapeau,” but to much more effect here. I enjoyed the beginning of this story far more than the end of it, which defaulted again to the ongoing trope of puppets/puppetry and felt misplaced here, even if it was thematically appropriate.
Another quartet rises in the second section of Grimscribe, and they meld together to form the Voice of the Demon. I find it interesting that Ligotti has chosen the singular ‘Demon’ here instead of the plural, yet the section comprises four stories. Does this mean that each story is meant to add up to a Demon? Does it mean that each story is a Demon unto itself? Does it mean that the Demon is employing a kind of ventriloquism, and that each story is representative of the same Demon, but casting itself individually into a different pitch and timbre?
First, there is “The Dreaming in Nortown.” If this were to be assigned a vocal range, I might say that is a tenor. Able to sound both resonant and high-fluted, a tenor can indicate either innocence or villainy in the same piece, and this is evident here in no less than Ligotti’s customary perspective shift toward the end of the story. Most of Ligotti’s first-person narratives, to my mind and to this point, have been cast in the role of hapless victim (or else arrogant predator), and the prose here leads us to believe the same. There’s a detachment in the narrator’s tone, displaying a sort of lofty intellect—a “professional” curiosity, which serves as the driving force behind the events of the story…or so we think.
As our protagonist describes his journeys around the rapidly-decaying suburb of Nortown, following his mysterious roommate, the reader becomes complicit as witness (and perhaps more) when the roommate is shown to be slowly descending into a kind of occult madness. However, it is not until the final paragraph that the reader discovers the narrator is not what they seem, and neither is the secondary character. This effect uses so much of what I’ve seen before in Ligotti’s work, but does in a far more satisfying way.
The next of the Voice of the Demon, “The Mystics of Muelenberg,” felt to me very much like a soprano. While high in tone and archly philosophical (including a variety of discursions on mystical precepts, as well as the nightmare of logic (“sense”) becoming slowly unraveled) I found this entry to be a little bit less compelling than others. I confess that, whenever Ligotti’s characters become somewhat vague in their rantings about chaos and insanity (like ‘the madness of things,’ in “Flowers of the Abyss”), I get a little lost in the long-winded dialogue. Here, Ligotti posits the following thesis, in the opening lines of the story:
“If things are not what they seem—and we are forever reminded that this is the case—then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing.”
Maybe it’s something about the way Ligotti states this thesis that makes it hard for me to really grasp—perhaps it’s as granular as the choice of the word ‘seem,’ or even ‘things.’ What exactly is Ligotti trying to say here? What things? What (or whose?) seeming? This statement feels weak to me, broadly-stated and vague, yet it is constructed in a conditional syntax—even axiomatic—and bookends the entire story. Despite some beautiful description, this entry was not one of my favorites.
The third Voice of the Demon, “In the Shadow of Another World,” resonated more for me: I would categorize this voice as a kind of contralto, wavering between voices and investigating the territory of the liminal. Concerning the efforts of a first-person narrator who comes into contact with another world via mirrors and glass (held at bay with ideographic glyphs) inside a house that is curiously immaculate. Ligotti goes to great lengths in this story to describe how sterile and inert the interior of the domicile is. Through the dialogue of the owner, we discover that the previous owner (never named) intentionally created a “spiritually antiseptic” environment, acting like a black hole’s so-called ‘quiet zone’—and, like that zone, it is demarcated by an event horizon.
This is a portal story, at its core, but Ligotti inverts the traditional narrative.
“As I had thought, these windows were for looking in as well as out. And from where I stood, the sights were now all inside the house, which had become an edifice possessed by the festivities of another world.”
Deliriously, Ligotti spends a great deal of time discoursing on these ‘sights,’ even when only seen from the other side; his prose makes it quite easy to believe the intense allure of opening the door—even if this door happens to only be a shard of glass, and even if it allows something else entrance.
The fourth and final Voice of the Demon comes in the form of “The Cocoons,” which is a return to Ligotti’s distaste for the iatrogenic. In our little quartet, this is the basso: much of this story takes place in a cellar, and though the three characters are all male, there is also a quivering frustration in the walls of this piece. Based on the eventual dénouement, I feel as though there’s something a bit Freudian going on here, which almost feels predicated on the biological male’s inability to procreate . . . under normal circumstances, that is.
As a brief aside: I have noticed that in every single story featuring a “doctor” of any sort to this point, said physician is either involved in unorthodox (and inhumane) practices (see: “Dr. Locrian’s Asylum,” also “Vastarien”) or is a hapless victim of eventual madness (see: “The Frolic,” also “Dreams of a Manikin”). Also worth noting: Raymond Thoss, who has appeared in two stories, is also given the honorific of doctor, and has met with his own grisly fate. In “The Cocoons,” we have Dr. Dublanc (Fr., “of white”—don’t think that escaped my notice) who is administering a ‘cure’ to our anxiety-ridden narrator: that being an introduction to a former patient of his (also denoted as a “doctor of sorts—a brilliant scientist, in fact”), Mr. Catch. Mr. Catch shows our narrator a putrid, Cronenbergian film, then vanishes, and our dear doctor finally explains everything—revealing that madness is, indeed, a cure for anxiety.
As the collection continues, I can’t help but notice that the number of stories in each “Voice” begin to shrink. Both The Voice of the Damned and the Voice of the Demon included four stories—now, in The Voice of the Dreamer, there are only two entries, which is the same for the following section, The Voice of the Child. Are the Voices beginning to fade? Quite the opposite, to my mind—the following sections contain some of my favorite entries to date.
The Voice of the Dreamer begins with “The Night School,” which opens with the narrator just having been to the movie theater, then closes with him returning to the movie theater again the next night. It’s interesting to note here that the prior story, “The Cocoons,” also involved the use of movies/film; the following story also includes it, which makes this piece related to both—I like to think that the narrator ‘saw’ “The Cocoons” at the theater, ‘experienced’ the events of this story, and then ‘saw’ “The Glamour” the next night. I also like to think that the ‘narrator’ might even be the same person throughout the two of these stories, at least—perhaps even the ‘Dreamer’ who has been given voice in the section’s title?
“The Night School,” however, is concerned primarily with yet another existentially-plagued intellectual who has begun to take classes with a certain Instructor Carniero. My first thought here was maybe the Spanish root of ‘carne,’ meaning “meat,” but the Instructor is described (at multiple points during the story) as being Portuguese. “Carneiro” is Portuguese for ‘sheep,’ and I wonder if there is some kind of wordplay going on here between the two.
Ligotti spends a lot of time on the narrator’s wandering through the eponymous “night school,” and the images that unfold have a certain heightened, surreal aspect. The architecture of the ‘school’ is ostensibly built from a blueprint by Escher, and the students that the narrator encounters are rapt with a kind of academic ecstasy at the inculcations of this omnipresent (yet curiously, absent, except for in the narrator’s memories) Instructor. By the end of the Hellish excursion, the narrator declares that they have been cleansed of the “urge to know the fundament of things,” and they have reached a kind of existential equilibrium, blissful in their ignorance. I liked “The Night School” if only for its vivid depiction of an arcanely overreaching academia, and its jocularity in suggesting that the search for knowledge is not only useless, but that it is sometimes counter to our own best interests.
In the second of the Voice of the Dreamer, “The Glamour,” as mentioned prior, the narrator takes a trip to a movie theater in a heretofore un-investigated “part of town.” This area is described as bright and vibrant, each glowing shop filled with little worlds of their own—until the narrator arrives at the movie theater, which is showing a film with the same title as the story. There is something in the air, and in the narrator’s mood, as Ligotti tells it—an “acute anticipation . . . a possessing impulse without object,” and it is this that drives the protagonist into the theater. Here, Ligotti takes as much pleasure in describing the color purple as he did the color green back in “The Last Feast of Harlequin.” This purple is squirmingly vital, described almost exclusively using organic similes—though the organs/tissues used are invariably not in situ—they are being “freshly exposed” or as though “in an operating room where a torso lies open on the table” or the “labyrinth of a living anatomy.”
It becomes quite clear that this is a place of evil, and in a rare exception from his philosophical norm, Ligotti instead focuses on the hideousness unraveling reality around the narrator. Shed of these intellectual trappings (for the most part), I found myself enjoying the hell out of this story. There are still a lot of layers going on here, and I’m sure many ways to interpret the surreality—but this is also a “portal” story in the same fashion as “In the Shadow of Another World,” employing here as the ‘portal’ a movie theater’s screen. I left this story feeling like I’d seen a great horror movie, and the general tone of it reminded me very much of the same delight I had in reading Theodore Roszak’s excellent cursed-cinema novel, Flicker.
In the Voice of the Child, we have two narrators. For once, there is no mystery behind Ligotti’s naming of a section: both of the protagonists, when we meet them, are children, and both come in contact with the mysterious world that adults inhabit. Of course, both stories are related as memories, framed by hindsight, which allows Ligotti to maintain his traditionally intellectual viewpoint/voice. These two pieces are, however, interesting insofar as they describe a child’s experience from the perspective of an adult—as we all know, memory can be fickle, and introduce certain glassine obfuscations. Memory becomes fiction so quickly, especially when set at a remove, though interestingly enough, that is never addressed in either of these stories.
In “The Library of Byzantium,” the encounter for the child comes in the person of Father Sevich, an itinerant priest who is allowed entrance to the household by dint of the parents’ wishes for the narrator to enter the priesthood. However, this is not how the story begins—in fact, it begins with a creative yearning, and a frustration. The protagonist is a fledgling artist who cannot, no matter how hard they try, get the right expression of terror on the face of someone in one of their drawings. One might imagine how the story concludes, given this set-up, and they’d be right. When Father Sevich is left alone with our narrator, the priest takes out a very particular book, one which is not only filled with letters of “some exotic tongue of antiquity,” but is also illuminated by pictorial representations. It is through interpreting these visuals that the narrator gleans the mysterious book (whose binding is described as “extremely supple, even slippery” and whose pages are “incredibly thin . . . more like layers of living tissue than dead pulp”) is devoted to the theme of “salvation through suffering.”
This story’s intense, vivid descriptions were, for me, one of the highlights of Ligotti’s work thus far. When the book is snatched back out of the child’s hands by Father Sevich, the protagonist still has one of the leaves pinched between fingertips, and—horror of horrors to any bibliophile!—the page comes loose. I felt this moment intensely when I read it, and the sensation in my mind was so visceral that I almost felt a tingling in my own fingers. This accidental transgression sets the stage for what is to follow. A psychic link, of sorts (via the child’s artistic conduit) allows the narrator to ‘follow’ the peripatetic priest, who eventually returns the book to its ‘library,’ located in a distant city which Ligotti declines to name, save to say that it is “an ancient name, which, after all these years, seems no less fitting and no less ludicrous now than it did then.” One can only surmise that Ligotti, with his tongue planted firmly in cheek and via his narrator, is referring to the Byzantium of the title.
But this library is not for the faint of heart. In fact, because the book has been returned damaged, there will be hell—or worse—to pay. (One is put in mind of a very severe video-rental clerk, lips pursed, eyes narrowed, at the customer who was not KIND, and did not REWIND.) Of course, this hideous punishment is witnessed by the child, who is enveloped in a fever of some intensity, and lo—they suddenly have the inspiration to finish the drawing with which the story began. It is the perfect look of despairing terror.
This entry is, to my mind, touches on familiar themes: Ligotti’s frequent insistencwe that what is unknown might should stay veiled, that knowledge (and the grimoires it is kept within) should be locked up in a forbidding, inaccessible place. Even those who can, inexplicably, access it, are doomed to their own stupidity. No one, Ligotti seems to be saying, should be able to breach the walls of heavenly (or infernal) spheres—we simply do not belong. We are trespassers when we investigate the unknown, and we will be punished accordingly.
This thematic thread carries on through the second Voice of the Child, “Miss Plarr,” which also features a young narrator, who also seeks to understand the world via artistic medium. Knowledge comes in the form of an austere, stoic governess of sorts—with the child’s parents either absent or indisposed to be present for his rearing, the eponymous Miss Plarr arrives to fill the void. It is impossible to say whether or not Ligotti intended Miss Plarr as a figure of the uncanny, or if the intent was to show only snatches of a child’s imaginative renderings of a cipher. Miss Plarr is depicted as someone who has a “force of presence,” someone who appears to be constantly “listening,” though for what or to what, the narrator can only guess. It is only after the woman enters into the child’s life that inspiration strikes—in true Ligotti fashion—creeping in around the edges, from some unknown reservoir of things. The artistic conduit in Ligotti’s work is often corrupted in some way, I’ve noticed, either by psychic means, or otherwise, and this is no less true in “Miss Plarr.”
When the child’s drawings are noticed by the titular character, a tutelage is established, and soon the narrator comes to learn from Miss Plarr some things that, perhaps, should not have been learned. Using a fantastic range of sensory values, Ligotti sketches the outcome of this tutelage with bravado and finesse, never once losing the air of mystique and semi-rapture that comes with learning. In fact, the use of sound is one of the best aspects of this story, despite the context of it being words on a page. One can almost hear what the characters are hearing via Ligotti’s prose, which is integral to the story’s events, too. The child’s sketches are even described thus:
“And certainly I was unable to introduce into the menacing images any suggestion of certain sounds that seemed integral to their proper representation, a kind of aural accompaniment to these operatic stage sets. In fact, I was not able even to imagine these sounds with any degree of clarity. Yet I knew that they belonged in the pictures . . .”
Which, to my mind, is rather like Ligotti invoking ironic rebound: to wit, “don’t think of a pink elephant.” The more the child insists that the sounds must be heard, the more Ligotti insists that the sounds cannot even be imagined. But these sounds take an even more frightful effect as the story develops—Miss Plarr explains their provenance in Ligotti’s traditionally mystical and oblique manner, and the story culminates in a feverish, fog-filled, field trip. Along the way, there are casual metaphors that give the reader a sense that Ligotti is actively warning against the act of inculcation, that the transmission of pure knowledge from one to another is impossible, will always be corrupted in some way—perhaps by the tutor’s own perspective.
The final story in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, is singular, and stands out in more ways than one. It is the singular entry in a section entitled The Voice of Our Name, and it is by far the best Ligotti story I read, seeming to exude confidence, mystery, and terror, all the while displaying virtuosic levels of prose and expression. This story, “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World,” is ostensibly framed as folk-horror, and it is the only story that is written from the perspective of the first-person plural. This is told from “we,” from “us,” and though it does segue into more specifically pointed observations regarding the events of the story, it is never entirely clear who “we” are, other than the denizens of a rural town, somewhere far removed from the things of man.
Nowhere else does Ligotti touch upon the degradation of nature and the poisoning of the earth than here, in this entry—perhaps in “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” with its emphasis on the sickly shades of green that pervade the city’s festivities—but this is a spectrum beyond. In “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World,” the true terror is Nature itself—or what uses Nature as a mask with which to hide its hungers. As in other Ligotti stories, this ‘shadow’ is never fully understood, nor is it ever unmasked. True to form, Ligotti spends more time concentrating on the uncanniness of the mask itself, rather than the abject horror represented by the being or entity which has donned it, and it is this focus which makes this story nearly perfect in my mind.
The events are simple: “we” come across a very particular field, out at the outskirts of a rural farming town. There is something very wrong about this place, even outside of the lumpy, grotesque scarecrow posted as sentinel in the middle of it, and eventually rumors spring up around the town regarding this plot of land. During an investigation, “we” (including the landowner, an old farmer) destroy the scarecrow, ripping its stuffing out of its body, stripping its clothes off, only to discover that the ‘skeleton’ of the thing (which should’ve been two cross-wise planks) is actually something horrifically organic and misshapen, seeming to rise from the earth like a “dark stalk.”
Events spiral out of hand once this ghoulish realization is made: the old farmer takes an axe to it, declaiming its presence on “his” land—to ill effect—and slowly, a creeping madness takes hold of the town’s dreaming citizens. Pareidolia is described, of faces seen in everything from leaves to tree bark—the leaves on the trees should be dry, crisp and sere, and yet they burgeon with an illimitable light, a sickly rainbow where there should only be withered brown. Nature’s been corrupted, or else the mask of Nature is lifting, to show “us” the shadow at the bottom of the world.
I could talk about this story for days: its many layers, its radically first-person plural viewpoint, the folk-horror structuring—I don’t even think I’ve adequately processed how much there is to decode in this short story yet, and I am certain I will return to it over and over again in the future.
One of my favorite things about Grimscribe: His Lives & Works is how much I feel like I might have missed during this initial voyage across its pages. I have the distinct impression—even just looking back at some of the prose in reference while writing this reaction—that each new read will reveal something new between the lines. Ligotti is a master of gorgeously hideous prose—his descriptions beggar the imagination to come up with anything more appropriate, in terms of either metaphor or simile. It was fascinating to read through this collection, and I very much look forward to revisiting Teatro Grottesco in the future—though I may take a little bit of a break between that and this. I don’t think it’s entirely healthy to willingly lose oneself in Ligotti’s labyrinths for too long.
The Weird in fiction often makes use of the ambiguous to heighten its classification, I find, and whereas that’s all well and good, oftentimes—especially in more modern work—I’ve noticed that some stories tend to abstract themselves into nothingness, lacking a certain . . . resonance. Perhaps not all stories need this quality, but I feel most satisfied when I am reading along with a piece that harmonizes with itself—even if that harmony is evoking discord, such as what Ligotti does here. If I am to torture this musical metaphor any further, I would say that Ligotti is a master of the literary ‘overtone’—that mystical frequency which exists in a sphere of sound above the ‘fundamental frequency.’ Even if Ligotti’s timbre is that of creeping oblivion, I remain in awe of his technical skills in conveying and evoking that feeling.
Now, I will lapse into silence and let you take the echo of my thoughts along with you. I only hope that it is in some way amusing, or otherwise entertaining—or, at the very least, that it inspires you to check out some of Ligotti’s work. I would be the poorer for not having read him. Despite his professed anhedonia and deep, cynical outlook vis-a-vis antinatalism, this is a writer of uncannily profound beauty.
Perhaps the true paradox, which lingers with me as I finish up this summation, is that a writer of such beautiful prose is so adamant that humanity is blighted and doomed when his work alone serves as proof of the opposite’s truth.