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Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

Research · October 2016

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Rafe McGregor
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Penguin Classics, 464pp, £9.99, May 2016, ISBN 9780143107767

Please cite published version: Rafe McGregor, “Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by

Thomas Ligotti”, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (19 October 2016), available at:

<http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.com/2016/10/songs-of-dead-dreamer-and-grimscribe-

by.html>.

In Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49 I reviewed Thomas Ligotti’s The Spectral Link (2014) and

described him as the most accomplished practitioner of weird fiction today. As such, it is

satisfying to see that he has finally been admitted to the canon of twentieth century horror

fiction by inclusion in the Penguin Classics series, which has recently taken an interesting

turn with the publication of relatively obscure works of classic pulp horror fiction, like Clark

Ashton Smith’s The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (2014). This is particularly satisfying

in Ligotti’s case as although he is in his fourth decade of publishing to great critical acclaim,

he has failed to achieve mainstream success – understood in terms of mass market paperback

sales. I think there are two reasons for this. First, while he has published sixteen books to

date (excluding the Penguin release, but not The Spectral Link), they have all been collections

of short stories, short novellas, or poetry rather than the novel so beloved by commercial

publishers. Second, there is the – and I know no better term – weirdness of the stories

themselves, which I imagine will not have an appeal beyond horror aficionados in the way

that, for example, Stephen King’s work does. Ligotti has nonetheless remained a firm

favourite of a limited audience and I was lucky enough to pick up Volume 9, Number 1

(1989) of the long-abandoned Crypt of Cthulhu magazine, with nine short pieces by him, at a

recent book fair. The price was very reasonable – too reasonable – and I wish there was more

demand for his work.

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Penguin have overcome the problem of the public’s preference for substantial volumes by

compiling Ligotti’s first two short story collections for their series. Songs of a Dead

Dreamer was first published in 1985 and contains nineteen stories and a curious (but

fascinating) lecture; Grimscribe was first published in 1991 and contains thirteen stories and

(an also curious but fascinating) introduction for a total of thirty-four short works preceded

by a foreword from Jeff VanderMeer. VanderMeer is best known for his Ambergris and

Southern Reach series and, with his wife Ann, as the foremost anthologist of weird fiction in

the twenty-first century. The foreword is everything one would hope from a preface:

laudatory without being slavish and informative without being pedantic. VanderMeer is

quick to mention ‘the author’s unique way of seeing the world’, which is precisely the reason

I differ from him in my description of Ligotti as a writer of weird tales. VanderMeer sees

Ligotti as ‘always passing through’ the weird to the literary, but I do not consider

classification as both weird (understood as a subgenre of horror) and literary as incompatible,

even if Ligotti’s work is uniquely classified as such.

In my previous review, I focused on two themes explored by Ligotti: the difference between

things as they really are and things as we perceive them and the sinister implications of the

meaning of “demoralization”. The first story in the collection, “The Frolic”, evinces both of

these, but it is the former that has the greater resonance in Ligotti’s oeuvre. In my review of

David Tallerman’s The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories (2016) in Theaker’s

Quarterly Fiction 55, I mentioned S.T. Joshi’s definition of weird fiction as embodying a

distinctive world-view by the author. There is a sense in which Ligotti’s distinctive world-

view is one that explores the deconstructive criticism that was so popular and so infamous

towards the end of the last century. There has been a great deal of nonsense written about

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(and some would say by) Jacques Derrida, who popularised the approach in the sixties, but

the basic idea behind deconstruction is simple: human beings (subjective experience) can

only gain access to the real world (objective reality) through concepts, which are articulated

through language. The worry, which stems from curiosities such as the fact that languages

not only use different words for the same concept, but have different concepts that cannot be

translated in their entirety, is that no human language and therefore no human conception

maps perfectly on to reality. There is obviously plenty of overlap – otherwise we would not

be able to build bridges, cure diseases, invent the internet, and fly to the moon – but there is

no identity relation between concept and reality. The space that this opens up is the

difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it really is, where aspects of

the latter are understood to remain permanently inaccessible to us. Ligotti takes this

difference and scrapes away at it, making it larger and more frightening. In “The Frolic”, a

prison psychologist states of his paedophile patient: ‘He says he just made the evidence look

that way for the dull masses, that what he really means by “frolicking” is a type of activity

quite different from, even opposed to, the crimes for which he was convicted.’ The actions of

the patient are even more horrific than they initially appear for they are not only a form of

torture, but a reminder that we live in a world that we are incapable of fully understanding.

One of the features of deconstructive criticism is that it undermines commonly accepted logic

and Ligotti’s tales follow suit. A basic principle of logic, for example, is the law of

noncontradiction, which states that something cannot be both true and false at the same time,

but the narrator of “The Frolic” demurs: ‘“It’s as if I know something and don’t know it at the

same time.”’ He is subsequently shown to both know and not know – knowing where the

evidence points and also knowing that his grasp of reality is subjective rather than objective.

And later, from “Dream of a Manikin”: ‘Accredited studies notwithstanding – as I’m sure

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you would contest – suppose the dreamer is not a man or butterfly, but both…or neither,

something else altogether.’ This is the most distinctive and the most disturbing element of

Ligotti’s horror, the way it deconstructs reality in the philosophical sense. Even if we have

good mental health, reality is revealed only through fallible conceptions and this lack of fit

between words and world is a frightening subject of contemplation, a gap through which

monsters of all kinds can enter. It is not that Ligotti’s monsters are more frightening than

those of other authors, but that he exposes our world as a place that remains essentially –

necessarily – unknown to us and, as H.P. Lovecraft proclaimed in “Supernatural Horror in

Literature” (1927), there is nothing more frightening than the unknown.

The influence of Lovecraft is strongly felt in many, if not most, of these stories – but this is a

genuine influence, of his cosmic futilitarianism rather than his strangely named gods and

books. Occasionally, it is explicit. The end of “The Last Feast of Harlequin”, for example,

reveals the story’s dedication to Lovecraft and is a re-writing of “The Festival” (1925)

without that story’s flaws (and also acknowledges the influence of Edgar Allan Poe with

mention of ‘the Conqueror Worm’). Mostly, the influence is implicit, from the suggestion of

an alien presence in “The Frolic” to the distant similarities between “The Dreaming in

Nortown” and “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936) and the more obvious similarities between

“The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” and “The Colour Out of Space” (1927). The latter

story by Ligotti, the last in Grimscribe, is particularly interesting in that it throws up one of

the two major differences between Ligotti and his predecessor: Ligotti is not only a much

better writer than Lovecraft, but where Lovecraft was fascinated by rural and far-flung

locales, Ligotti’s focus is on urban settings. This choice makes his writing even more

unnerving for it is in the towns and cities, where we have self-evidently shaped reality to our

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own ends, that we should feel most at home in the world – but where the cracks between

perception and reality are at their widest.

Rafe McGregor