Literature Is Entertainment or It Is Nothing
An Interview with Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti is North America’s pre-eminent writer of weird horror fiction. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies. In 1997, his collection The Nightmare Factory won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection. “The Red Tower,” a story in The Nightmare Factory, won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction. His novella “My Work Is Not Yet Done” won the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction and the 2002 International Horror Guild Award, Long Form category.
His most recent works are the screenplay Crampton (2003), the chapbook Sideshow and Others (2003), and the poetry collection Death Poems (2004). An intensely private person, Mr. Ligotti usually lets his work speak for itself. This interview was conducted throughout July, August and early September 2004.
I would like to thank Matt Cardin for facilitating this interview, and would point to two excellent sites devoted to Mr. Ligotti’s work: Thomas Ligotti Online and The Art of Grimscribe.
Neddal Ayad: Do you read much non-fiction? If so, what sort of non-fiction appeals to you?
Thomas Ligotti: I’m completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel in sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world. For instance, I just finished reading an essay called “The Last Messiah” by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. It was written the 1930s and is the only work by Zapffe to be translated into English. In Zapffe’s view, human beings in general and human consciousness in particular are a mistake of nature and that the human species should stop reproducing as soon as possible in order to put an end to the tragic horror of our lives as conscious beings who spend all our time deceiving ourselves that life is worth living. This is a very concise statement of the sort of attitude that I find in authors who have most attracted my interest, including Schopenhauer, Lovecraft, E. M. Cioran, and certain Buddhist writers.
Neddal Ayad: In an interview with Thomas Wagner for The Art of the Grimscribe website, you stated that, “Let’s say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft—not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Franz Kafka—were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of “outsider artists.” That’s where the future development of horror fiction lies—in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction.”
Who, in your opinion, are some modern (say post-WWII) writers that fall into that category?
Thomas Ligotti: I can’t think of any post-World War II writers in the horror genre that fit that description.
Neddal Ayad: I wasn’t thinking in terms of horror writing in particular. I meant fiction in general. I’m sure that a lot of writers not considered “horror” writers now, will be retroactively assigned to the category.
Thomas Ligotti: I can’t think of a case of an author being retroactively demoted to the genre of horror. Poe was solidly in the Gothic tradition that was more than 50 years old before he was born.
Neddal Ayad: Do you consider yourself a horror writer? I see your writing and the writing of some of your contemporaries, DF Lewis and Mark Samuels come to mind, as forming part of a continuum of the weird, but not necessarily what most people think of as horror writing that has its roots in (on this side of the pond) in Poe and Lovecraft.
Thomas Ligotti: It’s interesting you should mention the above two authors, because I had considered mentioning them with respect to this question. However, I don’t know enough about either of them to pronounce them as troubled in the sense that Poe and Lovecraft were. Lewis has a family, something that pretty much disqualifies him from the degree of alienation required to be included in the group of authors I mentioned, none of whom were breeders.
As for whether or not I consider myself a horror writer, I would assert, for better or worse, that I’m one of the few living individuals who actually is a horror writer—and nothing else!
Neddal Ayad: What is it about novels that turns you off? That novels need morals?
Thomas Ligotti: Something like that. People will accept a short horror story that ends badly. They won’t accept this in a horror novel… not after they’ve read so many hundreds of pages. Horror stories in the short form are like campfire tales or urban legends that are just a way of saying “Boo.” They have nothing to do with the real world in the minds of most readers. Nevertheless, I think there’s a great potential in horror fiction that isn’t easily available to realistic fiction. This is the potential to portray our worst nightmares, both private and public, as we approach death through the decay of our bodies. And then to leave it at that—no happy endings, no apologias, no excuses, no redemption, no escape.
