Penguins on Parade: Thomas Ligotti!

Some Penguin Classics quite inadvertently prompt somber thoughts. That’s been a bit of a theme in this particular Week O’ Penguins, and it continues with another of their latest volumes, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, by cult horror-writer and bolt-eyed loon Thomas Ligotti. This is true not only because Ligotti is cut from the same cloth as Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont, although he is (he has more literary ability than both of them combined, but that’s not saying much, now is it?), but also because Ligotti is not only still alive but still well south of decrepit. There’s a peculiar chill that runs through your ventricles when the Penguin Classics line inducts an author who’s younger than you are. Natural orders feel inverted. The whole idea of what constitutes a “classic” begins to wobble.

Because surely whatever combination of elements go into making a classic, one of the most important of them all is time? I can name you five bestsellers and five cult figures (and five more bestselling cult figures) from the literary world of, say, 1968 – half of whom are still alive, two-thirds of whom are still writing – but their sales and status are just two gauges of the work they’re doing, right? Part of what we mean when we call something a “classic” is its ability to find readers in states unborn and accents yet unknown; when cheesy book-reviewers call something an “instant classic,” they’re expressing a hope rather than bestowing a benediction, and yet what is induction into the revered Penguin Classics line if not a literary benediction (we’ll say nothing, therefore, about the recent said induction of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club – there aren’t words, even in Klingon …)? Thomas Ligotti was born in 1953, for cripe’s sake! He only started publishing his stuff in 1981. Even calling him successful feels a bit presumptuous, but calling him a classic?

Nevertheless, that’s what Penguin is now doing, and they’ve enlisted Jeff Vandermeer, author of the popular “Southern Reach” trilogy, to do the Preface-writing honors. And he wastes no time in getting right down to business, hyperventilating from here to Penobscot Bay about strengths Ligotti doensn’t possess and stylistic resonances he’s never displayed and may never yet display:

In Ligotti’s work, the supernatural exists in support of ideas that serve as a sharp interrogation of the way we live, evoking comparisons to literary realists as different as John Cheever and Shirley Jackson. That may seem an audacious idea, but if we pluck Ligotti from the clutches of weird fiction, we find that his universality exists at an unexpected level – not because weird fiction doesn’t deal with complex issues and ideas, but because the weird fiction context places the emphasis squarely on the uncanny, obliterating our ability to see anything else.

“Ligotti’s fiction, temporarily unhooked from the weird, is best understood as a continuing interrogation of the legitimacy of our modern lives,” Vandermeer writes. “He is exploring the underbelly of modernity – personal and societal.”

He’s actually not doing anything of the kind, and even if he somehow were, that still wouldn’t salvage a contention that if you unhook Ligotti’s work from the weird, he suddenly transmorgrifies into Eudora Welty or somebody … No, Ligotti is a writer of weird stories; if you unhook him from the weird, you’re left with some semi-colons and a couple of disaffected aunts.

He writes weird stories fairly well, however. They’re very firmly Lovecraftian – of all the absurd assertions Vandermeer makes, his assertion that Ligotti soaked up all the Lovecraft that interested him and then moved on is by far the most absurd – but they’ve got a stylish sense of pacing and some fun use of color. The beguile an interval of reading, which is more than can be safely said of our previous two new Classics. It’s true that Ligotti never trusts his readers enough to risk being subtle and instead smears on the purple prose with a garden trowel, as when the half-supernatural main character in “The Lost Art of Twilight” is contemplating himself:

Such is a thumbnail sketch of my half-toned existence: twilight after twilight after twilight. And in all that blur of time I never imagined that I would have to account for myself as one who existed beyond or between the clashing worlds of human fathers and enchanted mothers. But now I had to consider how I would explain, that is conceal, my unnatural mode of being from my visiting relatives.

But more often than not (and more often than Lovecraft, which is saying something), Ligotti falls back on hokey stagecraft to lurch his stories to their intensely predictable climaxes, as in one of the sharpest stories collected here, “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech”:

“I’ve done my best for you, Mr. Veech, and you’ve given me nothing but grief. I’ve tried to deliver you from the fate of your friends … but now I deliver you to it.”

At these words, Veech’s body began to rise in a puppet’s hunch, then soars up into the tenebrous rafters and beyond, transported by unseen wires. His arms and legs twitch uncontrollably during the elevation, and his screams … fade.

It’s good old-fashioned baroque melodrama steeped in fuzzily familiar horror cliches, by an author who’s barely into his 60s and probably has a lot more writing to do before he retires his laptop. So: more Penguin Classics in store? If it were up to me, I’d let the grandchildren of his current readers be the judges.