MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE - THOMAS LIGOTTI

Man, when you hear the phrase “corporate horror” and the name Thomas Ligotti together, one can’t help but be excited. My brother recommended this to me. I believe he called it a novel, which is wrong. It’s 3 stories, basically a novella and two short stories, that all center around corporations and business and involve cosmic horror. I have only limited experience in the sort of Dilbert-style office shenanigans psychosexual, sadomasochistic power-games that such a setting inevitably engenders but I do share Ligotti’s loathing of meetings. Actually, that’s a huge overstatement, I don’t loathe anything as much as Ligotti loathes everything. I was a touch disappointed that he chose to go the obvious route and centers around a laid-off employee (an angry middle-aged YT guy) committing a mass shooting. Obviously, galactic horror intervenes and everything gets all cosmic and Lovecraft-y but the bones are pretty basic. It involves a lot of punishing enemies with thematically resonate torments; I’ll bet Se7en is Ligotti’s favorite movie. The title story is, like I said, a novella and takes up almost all of the book. The other two short stories at the end are both good but not top Ligotti. The middle story is about a evil yellow smog in a thinly veiled Detroit called, “Murder City”. Over the past few days I’ve really been listening to a lot of Rio Da Yung OG, who’s from Flint, along with a lot of other current Michigan rappers so I’m very in the headspace to consume art about how murderous Detroit is. Rio’s work is equally pessimistic but could certainly use a cosmic element. The final story is quite short and the most experimental, both in terms of form, it’s classifieds and memos and press releases that you have to piece together, and content. It centers around a company called Oneiricon, which is something like GloboChem from Mr. Show, that merges with everything on Earth until all that is left is to merge with the Nightmare Network. A pretty great Ligotti image, second only to “The Great Black Swine Which Wallows in a Great River of Blackness, that to us looks like sunrises and skyscrapers, like all the knotted events of the pas and the unraveling of these knots in the future” which might be peak Ligotti. So the highs in this book were pretty high but overall it fell short of my expectations. Following an aggrieved business-drone as he seeks violent revenge isn’t something I’m very interested in; there’s no shortage of that particular narrative and Ligotti doesn’t do something radical enough to not get tossed in with the rest. He might just be a victim of his own success, those first 2 short story collections are the best horror available. 3 mass shootings.