Fantastic Metropolis

Some horror writers have done this consistently, but not very many. I’ve been entertained by the works of these writers—it’s all show business after all—and beyond that I’ve felt a momentary satisfaction that someone could be so audacious as to speak ill of the precious gift of life when we’re all brainwashed from childhood never to utter a discouraging word. Of course, it’s not really possible to avoid affirming life, even when you’re writing a horror story defaming it. The act of writing is an affirmation, as is the act of suicide. Both are vital and idealistic gestures. Joseph Conrad said that he shunned the supernatural because it wasn’t necessary to depict the horror of existence. I wish he hadn’t. Because the supernatural is the metaphysical counterpart of insanity—the best possible vehicle for conveying the uncanny nightmare of a conscious mind marooned for a brief while in this haunted house of a world and being slowly driven mad by the ghastliness of it all. Not the man’s-inhumanity-to-man sort of thing, but a necessary derangement, a high order of weirdness and of desolation built in to the system in which we all function. Its emblem is the empty and inexplicable malignity that some of us see in the faces of dolls, manikins, puppets, and the like. The faces of so many effigies of our own shape, made by our own hands and minds, seem to be our way of telling ourselves that we know a secret that is too terrible to tell. The horror writer has the best chance of expressing something of that secret. It’s really a lost opportunity, or perhaps a blessing, that so few take advantage of this potential that lies in horror fiction. Instead, they do the opposite: they discover all the secrets… and how trivial they are. A stake through the heart. A silver bullet. An exorcism. We win. All is well. Nighty-night.

Neddal Ayad: Do you see your writing as necessarily subversive?

Thomas Ligotti: Fiction can’t be subversive. If the reader feels threatened, then he’ll stop reading. The reader will only continue reading if he is being entertained. Subversion in any art form is impossible. Even nonfiction can’t be subversive. It may be used to serve some person or group’s preconceived purposes, usually to gain power, but its ideas will be recast and deliberately skewed. Freud, Marx, and all religious doctrines are obvious examples of this.

Neddal Ayad: I ask because the view has been put forward that horror writing is necessarily conservative.

Thomas Ligotti: Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.

Neddal Ayad: Have you read any science fiction at all? Philip K. Dick seems like someone whose work would appeal to you.

Thomas Ligotti: From what I had read about Dick’s fiction, I wanted to like it and so I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which seemed a good place to start. I think it would make a great movie, as a number of Dick’s books and short stories have, but I couldn’t stand Dick’s pulpy prose style. There’s no doubt that the man had a formidable imagination, but so do a lot of writers.

As for science fiction in general, my only other experience with the genre was in a college course devoted to it. The first thing we read was a story called “Affair with a Green Monkey” by Theodore Sturgeon, which turned out to be a sociological fable about an alien with a really large penis. The next thing we read was Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. That was also a sociological fable. I got to about page twenty of Le Guin’s novel and decided that if I wanted to read sociology I would take a class in it. So I dropped the science fiction course.

Neddal Ayad: Has your move to Florida had any influence on your writing?

Thomas Ligotti: Not at all.

Neddal Ayad: I seem to call that in another interview you said that the idea of being anywhere “south” repulsed you. You really can’t get much further south in the U.S. than Florida. What changed your mind?

Thomas Ligotti: Personal circumstances. I still loathe warm climates and the societies, not to mention the sickening flora and fauna, that breed in such places. When the German filmmaker Werner Herzog was filming Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon, he commented on the location by saying, “There is a harmony here, but it is the harmony of collective murder. Even the stars look like a mess.”

Neddal Ayad: Looking back at your time in Detroit, how much of an impact did the city have on your work? Has there been anything that’s jumped out at you since leaving that you might not have noticed or may have taken for granted during your time there?

Thomas Ligotti: I was born in Detroit, but I aside from my earliest childhood years I didn’t live there. I grew up in an upper-class suburb that bordered on Detroit. However, during high school in the 1960s I spent some time hanging out in dope houses in Detroit’s ghettos, and I worked in downtown Detroit for 23 years. I always enjoyed the spectacle of abandoned, decaying, and burned-out buildings and houses. In my first horror story to see publication, “The Chymist,” I tried to express my fascination with this world of ruins. This also applies to a lesser extent to my short novel “My Work Is Not Yet Done”, which is set in an unnamed city patterned after Detroit. The wallpaper on my computer is a photograph of an abandoned house on Detroit’s east side. In many of my stories, I’ve tried to articulate an aesthetic of decay in both small towns and cities. I equate decline and decrepitude with a kind of serenity, a tranquil abandonment of the illusions of the future.