TEATRO GROTTESCO - THOMAS LIGOTTI

AVAILABLE: This one came brother recommended and it, frankly, had a lot of strikes against it from the beginning. First of all, it’s horror, which is not a genre I read a lot of or know alot about. Books, frankly, aren’t that scary. I’ve read some Poe, some King, some Barker and a lot of H.P. Lovecraft but that’s basically it (outside of things like Frankenstein, i.e. horror who’s cultural footprint reaches outside of the genre). Additionally, this book is a series of short stories, another genre I don’t really care for. However, despite these prejudices I held against TEATRO going in, this book came through and surprised me. The stories share a lot with Lovecraft in that they mostly chronicle a descent into madness. In Lovecraft, this downward spiral is typically precipitated by a character coming into contact with some sort of monstrous, cosmic being, most famously Cthulhu. In Ligotti it’s a sense of meaninglessness and pessimism that enters into a character’s life and slowly destroys them. Ligotti isn’t trying to invoke terror as much as hopelessness, bleakness and sorrow. Characters are constantly learning that life means nothing, that it’s a cruel joke. There’s lots of clown/carnival/puppet imagery (the only other Ligotti book I’ve read had a clown on the cover) to drive home this particular angle. There’s not a lot of big scares or even horrific Barker-esque images (one of the exceptions being a really gross, awful sounding human-spider hybrid) just this sense that life means nothing and that everything we experience is either stupid, fleeting pleasure or pointless misery. Lots of stories feature artists and writers, which is typically a trope that bothers me in novels (it implies to me that the novelist cannot imagine the lives of anyone but their artists friends and their lives) but it consistently works here. The art pieces that Ligotti describes fit right in with the larger themes of the book and are compelling in their own right. Reading Ligotti’s Wikipedia, I discovered that he’s a socialist. At first this seems bizarre since, to my mind, all leftism requires some belief in people and humanity, but you can actually read this inclination into several of the stories. One of the great strength of the book is that it features unconventional horror villains. There aren’t vengeful ghosts or psychopathic serial killers or anything like that. Often there are evil businesses and factories that spring up from nowhere and destroy people’s lives or government agencies that turn entire towns into nightmarish carnivals. Socialism without any hope perhaps. Either way, I really enjoyed it, it’s impressively dark, like turning your headlamp off in a cave. 13 evil clowns.