Fantastic Metropolis

Neddal Ayad: Bruno Schulz…

Thomas Ligotti: As opposed to Bernhard’s repetition, Schulz exemplifies the other major road to stylistic distinction—that of metaphor. Like Nabokov, he uses metaphor in a way that is magical, even when the stories he’s telling are as banal as a greasy rivulet of drainage flowing beneath the rotten boards of a backyard fence. That metaphor, or one very much like it, was the first thing I read of Schulz’s when I happened upon his book The Street of Crocodiles and opened it somewhere in the middle pages. This was one of those rare occasions when I knew I had struck gold. I didn’t need to read another sentence—I just bought the book. Along with Poe and Lovecraft, Schulz is another of the great sick men of literature, if that’s the sort of thing that attracts you. There’s a word used to describe Schulz’s writing that turns up occasionally in Lovecraft’s writing. That word is “febrile.” This quality seems to me essential for all literature of nightmare, especially horror fiction.

Neddal Ayad: William S. Burroughs…

Thomas Ligotti: Definitely febrile. Even more than Poe or Lovecraft, Burroughs is the one whose writing provides that measure of fever, nightmare, and the grotesque by which all other American writers who aspire to representing these qualities in their work should be judged. Even in his last novel, The Western Lands, he writes of the smell of rotting metal. That’s sick genius if there ever was such a thing. Now, this whole business about febrility and sickness and negativism might raise the question in some people’s minds: if that’s the sort of thing you like, then why don’t you just read case histories of psychos and psychotics, suicide notes, and books like Memoirs of My Nervous Illness? As I mentioned earlier, it’s principally a matter of style, of entertainment, and of expression. I know that a lot of people are very interested in real life misery. The evening news is testimony to that. I don’t care for the evening news.

Real life misery is a mess or a bore or simply too heartbreaking to tolerate. And there’s no coherence to it—no vision. As Mark Twain said, “Life is just one damn thing after another.” I don’t want to be a spectator to this any more than I must be. I want to attend to the words of someone who will stand up and say, “Life is just one damn thing after another,” not some grinning idiot who presents this fact as a kind of pornography because corporate knows they can use this kind of stuff to sell advertising minutes. Everyone knows that this is the case. Everyone knows that this is an abomination. Everyone is, more or less, a scumbag. As for Mark Twain, forget Huckleberry Finn and read Letters from the Earth.

Thomas Ligotti will explore some of these themes in greater depth in a long essay entitled The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: Notes on Horror, to be published by Mythos Books in 2005.