Fantastic Metropolis

Neddal Ayad: Did you keep your early, not-ready-for-publication, stories?

Thomas Ligotti: No. I destroyed them all. Dozens of them. They were pretty bad.

Neddal Ayad: Do your stories share a common geography? For example, I get the feeling that “I Have a Special Plan for This World”, “The Night School”, and The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” all take place in the same region with “The Night School” and “I Have a Special Plan…” being set in different parts of the same city and “The Shadow…” being set in a farming community in the area just outside the city.

Thomas Ligotti: I’ve been obsessed with the settings of my stories since I began writing. I knew that I didn’t want to use actual places and place names for the most part. At the same time, I didn’t want to invent fictional settings that paralleled actual places or worlds that were wholly fantastic and scrupulously detailed like those of Mervyn Peake or James Branch Cabell. But I especially didn’t want the burden of trying to emulate reality. I don’t know much about reality in the conventional sense anyway—I can’t remember things the way realistic writers seem so adept at doing. I’ve been agoraphobic since I was 17, so I haven’t seen much of the world. And I really deplore research as stage in writing fiction. What I wanted, ultimately, was to set my stories in places as I saw them in my imagination rather than describing them from personal observation. So, in the sense that my stories are set in my head rather than in any detailed world either real or fantastic, I suppose they are all part of the same geography.

Neddal Ayad: Many of the characters or presences in your stories have striking names, Dr. Locrian, Miss Plarr, Dahla D., etc… Where do you look for inspiration when naming your characters? I’m going to take a wild guess that “Locrian” comes from the locrian mode?

Thomas Ligotti: You got it. The “darkest” mode. I took two years of music theory in college, which demonstrates that these names can come from anywhere. Plarr is borrowed from the surname of the 1890s poet Victor Plarr. Dahla D. is a typical Nabokovian name. A lot of the names I use signify the nothingness of the character who bears the name and have the word “no” buried in them. That’s stolen from Beckett. Dr. Thoss was used in two stories and is taken from the abbreviation of my own name.

Neddal Ayad: You’ve done some translations. From what to what?

Thomas Ligotti: One short story and several poems from French. The short story was based on the Ripper murders and was possibly one of the first on that subject, having appeared in the Mercure de France in 1888, although it was supernatural. The poems were from obscure French decadent poets in obscure French decadent journals.

Neddal Ayad: Your story “Alice’s Last Adventure” features one of your rare female narrators. Do you have any difficulty writing from the point of view of a female character?

Thomas Ligotti: “Alice’s Last Adventure” was a special case. The character wasn’t presented as significantly female, just as my male characters aren’t presented as significantly male in a socially conventional manner. She was an elderly, alcoholic writer of spooky children’s stories. I thought this was the best way to approach a story inspired by Carroll’s Alice books. It never occurred to me before or since to write a horror story from the viewpoint of a female character. Anyway, I don’t think there are too many writers who would have a problem doing a story from the perspective of someone outside their personal experience, especially if it’s just a genre story.

Neddal Ayad: Incidentally, do you notice much of a gender split in your readership?

Thomas Ligotti: It’s pretty much all maladjusted guys with advanced university degrees, although there are some outstanding female exceptions with advanced degrees and literary talents. They’re not what people think of as nerds living in their parents’ basements. The ones with whom I’ve been in contact over the years live far more normal lives than I do. In any case, I’d like to put in a good word for nerds living in their parents’ basement—they’re an undeservedly maligned subculture that I’m proud to count among my readers if they’re out there.

Neddal Ayad: Finally, I’m going to give you a list of authors who you have stated were influential on your writing or whose work you admire. I wonder if, for each, you’d talk about one work that you either consider their best, or if not their best, the most influential on your own work…

H. P. Lovecraft…

Thomas Ligotti: So many writers have alluded to the insignificance of the human race in a dizzyingly inscrutable universe ruled by forces incomprehensible to our species. They make these allusions, whether they’re to the fates or the gods or whatever, and then move on to tell their story on the level of a soap opera. For example, Macbeth has a moment of revelation that life is a tale told by an idiot. This realization, however, in no way prevents him from moving on with the plot of the play, which is simply the story of an up-and-coming gangster who kills his boss and takes over the business, only to be brought to justice in the end. But for Lovecraft, unlike Shakespeare, the revelation of life as an idiot’s tale is the alpha and omega of his work. He doesn’t just pay passing lip service to what is the most profound and obvious fact of life—he makes it the core of his work. At the heart of it all is a blind idiot “god,” whether it’s designated as Azathoth or the Colour Out of Space or the groaning blackness looming beyond the Rue d’Auseil in “The Music of Erich Zann.” To me, it was in “Erich Zann” that Lovecraft came up with the perfect model of horror story.