Fantastic Metropolis

Neddal Ayad: Have any recent works, in any media, influenced or impacted your writing?

Thomas Ligotti: No. A couple years ago, I tried to imagine how I could replicate in language the effect of certain music. But I found that it just isn’t possible. At least not for me.

Neddal Ayad: Who are some of your favorite artists?

Thomas Ligotti: You mean visual artists? I have what I would call a tin eye for the visual arts. I appreciate the talents of certain artists like Alfred Kubin or horror illustrators like Harry Morris or Jason Van Hollander. But I can look at visual images for only about thirty seconds before I get bored.

Neddal Ayad: Have you attempted other modes of writing other than horror or weird fiction?

Thomas Ligotti: Absolutely not.

Neddal Ayad: Is there something tangible about a writer’s style that holds your interest or is more of an instinctual thing?

Thomas Ligotti: Style in literature is incredibly misunderstood. Most people think of it at the level of pure language and view the poles of literary style as ranging from the dry, impersonal narratives of popular novelists to the juicy, lyrical style of experimental and “artistic” writers like Nabokov, Lovecraft, Bruno Schulz, and so on. I’m really interested in style exclusively as an expression of a peculiar kind of consciousness as opposed to the mere gaudy use of language. I mean, Ronald Firbank and James Branch Cabell wrote with tons of what people usually consider style—with verbal flourishes and curlicues all over the place—but I don’t care about their works because I don’t share their rather whimsical, even if sometimes cynical, view of the world. Style is the intersection between an author’s choice of subject matter and what he does with that subject manner. This is what reflects a writer’s consciousness and therefore his style. For example, compare two examples of novels of possession—The Exorcist and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In the world of Blatty’s novel, certain characters are set up for doom and others for salvation. In the end, good wins the battle over evil. The two priests die good deaths while trying to save Regan’s soul, so that’s okay. The film director who is murdered by the demonically possessed Regan is a not a terribly sympathetic character, so it really doesn’t matter what happens to him. He serves the function of a killable character that won’t upset the reader too much. This is the sort of style that readers prefer. After some scary things happen, they want to be reassured that ultimately everything is all right with human life.

In Lovecraft’s autobiographical novel, the whole universe is in the hands of forces that are indifferent to human life, just as it is in the real world. Good and evil have no objective reality, just as it is in the real world. And the idea of human beings as creatures with souls, whatever those are, is ludicrous. Everyone, especially the hapless protagonist of the book, exists in the shadow of a world that is pure nightmare through and through.

Lovecraft doesn’t want to take you on an emotional roller-coaster ride, at the end of which he tells you to watch your step as your car slows down and you settle back onto steady ground. He wants to shoot your brain into the blackness of the void, whence it will never return. The interesting part is that both Blatty and Lovecraft are perfectly sincere about the worldview that underlies their individual styles. The difference is that Blatty really believes in the supernatural powers on which he based his novel, and so do most readers, not to mention most people in the Western world. This allows him to write in a way that will appeal to a wide audience. He doesn’t need to strain the bounds of language to draw readers into his story. Everybody already lives there. In fact, his readers would be put off by any excellence in the use of language or breaking of the rules of mass-market fiction.

On the other hand, Lovecraft can’t avoid the demands of expressive language and the shattering of conventional thought because his is a rare vision—which, of course, has nothing to do with the supernatural—that is shared by very few people. And in order to give that vision power he must use words in a powerful and inventive manner. And that is why The Exorcist bored me and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward didn’t. It’s a matter of the reader’s style as much as it is the writer’s.

Neddal Ayad: Has the internet had any impact on your writing?

Thomas Ligotti: The online Merriam-Webster dictionary makes it easier to look up words that I want to spell correctly. Otherwise, no.

Neddal Ayad: Were you surprised when fan sites started popping up?

Thomas Ligotti: Writers are egoists. The only thing that surprises them is when they don’t command the attention of fans or win awards or have editors begging to publish their work.

Neddal Ayad: Do you read the academic work that’s been done on your stories?

Thomas Ligotti: It doesn’t take long to read what’s been written about my horror stories, and indeed I’ve read it.

Neddal Ayad: Do you ever get the urge to write something pseudonymously about your own work?

Thomas Ligotti: No. Why would I?

Neddal Ayad: Curiosity. Contrariness.

Thomas Ligotti: I think I see what you mean. It would be a chance to say things about my own stories that wouldn’t occur to other people