The Nightmare Factory

by Thomas Ligotti

  The experience is extremely disconsoling but nonetheless exhilarating.

  But for a movie to convey such intense feeling for the supernatural is rare. (This one of course is a scrupulously faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s unarguably excellent novel.) The thing that is quite common, especially with fiction, is the phenomenon that produced the single-sentence paragraph above; in other words—the horror story’s paradox of entertainment. The thumping heart of the question, though, is what really entertains us? In opposition, that is, to what we only imagine entertains us. Entertainment, whatever we imagine its real source, is rightly regarded as its own justification, and this seems to be one of the unassailable consolations of horror.

  But is it? (This won’t take long.)

  Another test case

  We are reading—in a quiet, cozy room, it goes without saying—one of M.R. James’ powerful ghost stories. It is “Count Magnus,” in which a curious scholar gains knowledge he didn’t even know was forbidden and suffers the resultant doom at the hands of the count and his betentacled companion. The story actually ends before we have a chance to witness its fabulous coup de grace, but we know that a sucked-off face is in store for our scholar. Meanwhile we sit on the sidelines (sipping a warm drink, probably) as the doomed academic meets a fate worse than any we’ll ever know. At least we think it’s worse, we hope it is…deep, deep in the subcellars of our minds we pray: “Please don’t let anything even like that happen to me! Not to me. Let it always be the other guy and I’ll read about him, even tremble for him a little. Besides, I’m having so much fun, it can’t be all that terrible. For him, that is. For me it would be unbearable. See how shaky and excitable I get just reading about it. So please let it always be the other guy.”

  But it can’t always be the other guy, for in the long run we’re all, each of us, the other guy.

  Of course in the short run it’s one of life’s minor ecstasies—an undoubted entertainment—to read about a world in which the very worst doom takes place in a restricted area we would never ever wander into and befalls somebody else. And this is the run in which all stories are read, as well as written. (If something with eyes like two runny eggs were after your carcass, would you sit down and write a story about it?) It’s another world, the short run; it’s a world where horror really is a true consolation. But it’s no compliment to Dr. James or to ourselves as readers to put too much stock in ghost stories as a consolation for our mortality, our vulnerability to real-life terrors. As consolations go, this happens to be a pretty low-grade one—demented complacency posing as beatitude.

  So our second consolation lives on borrowed time at best. And in the long-run—where no mere tale can do you much good—is delusory.

  (Perhaps the stories of H.P. Lovecraft offer a more threatening and admirable role to those of us devoted to doom. In Lovecraft’s work doom is not restricted to eccentric characters in eccentric situations. It begins there but ultimately expands to violate the safety zone of the reader (and the non-reader for that matter, though the latter remains innocent of Lovecraft’s forbidden knowledge). M.R. James’ are cautionary tales, lessons in how to stay out of spectral trouble and how nice and safe it feels to do so. But within the cosmic boundaries of Lovecraft’s universe, which many would call the universe itself, we are already in trouble, and feeling safe is out of the question for anyone with some brains and chance access to the manuscripts of Albert Wilmarth, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, or Prof. Angell’s nephew. These isolated narrators take us with them into their doom, which is the world’s. (No one ever gives a hoot what happens to Lovecraft’s characters as individuals.) If we knew what they know about the world and about our alarmingly tentative place in it, our brains would indeed reel with revelation. And if we found out what Arthur Jermyn found out about ourselves and our humble origins in a mere madness of biology, we would do as he did with a few gallons of gasoline and a merciful match. Of course Lovecraft insists on telling us things it does no good to know: things that can’t help us or protect us or even prepare us for the awful and inevitable apocalypse to come. The only comfort is to accept it, live in it, and sigh yourself into the balm of living oblivion. If you can only maintain this constant sense of doom, you may be spared the pain of foolish hopes and their impending demolishment.

  But we can’t maintain it; only a saint of doom could. Hope leaks into our lives by way of spreading cracks we always meant to repair but never did. (Oddly enough, when the cracks yawn their widest, and the promised deluge comes at last, it is not hope at all that finally breaks through and drowns us.)

  Interlude: see you later, consolations of doom

  So when a fictional state of absolute doom no longer offers us possibilities of comfort—what’s left? Well, another stock role casts one not as the victim of a horror story but as its villain. That is, we get to be the monster for a change. To a certain extent this is supposed to happen when we walk onto those resounding floorboards behind the Gothic footlights. It’s traditional to identify with and feel sorry for the vampire or the werewolf in their ultimate moment of weakness, a time when they’re most human. Sometimes, though, it seems as if there’s more fun to be had playing a vampire or werewolf at the height of their monstrous, people-maiming power. To play them in our hearts, I mean. After all, it would be kind of great to wake up at dusk every day and cruise around in the shadows and fly on batwings through the night, stare strangers in the eye and have them under your power. Not bad for someone who’s supposed to be dead. Or rather, for someone who can’t die and whose soul is not his own; for someone who—no matter how seemingly suave—is doomed to ride eternity with a single and highly embarrassing obsession, the most debased junkie immortalized.

  But maybe you could make it as a werewolf. For most of a given month you’re just like anybody else. Then for a few days you can take a vacation from your puny human self and spill the blood of puny human others. And once you return to your original clothes size, no one is any the wiser…until next month rolls around and you’ve got to do the whole thing again, month after month, over and over. Still, the werewolf’s lifestyle might not be so bad, as long as you don’t get caught ripping out someone’s throat. Of course, there might be some guilt involved and, yes, bad dreams.

  Vampirism and lycanthropy do have their drawbacks, anyone would admit that. But there would also be some memorable moments too, moments humans rarely, if ever, have: feeling your primal self at one with the inhuman forces around you, fearless in the face of night and nature and solitude and all those things from which mere people have much to fear. There you are under the moon—a raging storm in human form. And you’ll always be like that, forever if you’re careful. Being a human being is a dead end anyway. It would seem that supernatural sociopaths have more possibilities open to them. So wouldn’t it be great to be one? What I mean, of course, is: is it a consolation of horror fiction to let us be one for a little while? Yes, it really is; the attractions of this life are sometimes irresistible. But are we missing some point if we only see the glamour and ignore the drudgery in the existence of these free-spirited nyctophiles? Well, are we?

  The last test

  Test cancelled. The consolation is patently a trick one, done with invisible writing, mirrors, and camera magic.

  Substitute consolation: “The Fall of the House of Usher, or Doom Revisited”

  Did you ever wonder how a Gothic story like Poe’s masterpiece can be so great without enlisting the reader’s care for its characters’ doom? Plenty of horrible events and concepts are woven together; the narrator and his friend Roderick experience a fair amount of fear. But unlike a horror story whose effect depends on reader sympathy with its fictional victims, this one doesn’t want us to get involved with the characters in that way. Our fear does not derive from theirs. Though Roderick, his sister, and the visiting narrator are fascinating companions, they do not burden us with their individual catastrophes. Are we sad for Roderick and his sister’s terrible fate? No. Are we
happy the narrator makes a safe flight from the sinking house? Not particularly. Then why get upset about this calamity which takes place in the backwoods, miles from the nearest town and everyday human concerns?

  In this story individuals are not the issue. Everywhere in Poe’s literary universe (Lovecraft’s too) the individual is horribly and comfortably irrelevant. During the reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher” we don’t look over any character’s shoulder but have our attention distributed god-wise into every corner of a foul factory which manufactures only one product: total and inescapable doom. Whether a given proper noun escapes this doom or is caught by it is beside the point. Poe’s is a world created with built-in obsolescence, and to appreciate fully this downrunning cosmos one must take the perspective of its creator, which is all perspectives without getting sidetracked into a single one. Therefore we as readers are the House of Usher (both family and structure), we are the fungi clustering across its walls and the violent storm over its ancient head; we sink with the Ushers and get away with the narrator. In brief, we play all the roles. And the consolation in this is that we are supremely removed from the maddeningly tragic viewpoint of the human.

  Of course, when the story is over we must fall from our god’s perch and sink back into humanness, which is perhaps what the Ushers and their house are doing. This is always a problem for would-be gods! We can’t maintain for very long a godlike point of view. Wouldn’t it be great if we could; if life could be lived outside the agony of the individual? But we are always doomed and redoomed to become involved with our own lives, which is the only life there is, and godlikeness has nothing at all to do with it.

  But still, wouldn’t it be great…

  Darkness, you’ve done a lot for us

  At this point it may seem that the consolations of horror are not what we thought they were, that all this time we’ve been keeping company with illusions. Well, we have. And we’ll continue to do so, continue to seek the appalling scene which short-circuits our brain, continue to sit in our numb coziness with a book of terror on our laps like a cataleptic predator, and continue to draw smug solace, if only for the space of a story, from a world made snug and simple by absolute hopelessness and doom. These consolations are still effective, even if they don’t work as well as we would prefer them to. But they are only effective, like most things of value in art or life, as illusions. And there’s no point attributing to them powers of therapy or salvation they don’t and can’t have. There are enough disappointments in the world without adding that one.

  Perhaps, though, our illusion of consolation could be enhanced by acquiring a better sense of what we are being consoled by. What, in fact, is a horror story? And what does it do? First the latter.

  The horror story does the work of a certain kind of dream we all know. Sometimes it does this so well that even the most irrational and unlikely subject matter can infect the reader with a sense of realism beyond the realistic, a trick usually not seen outside the vaudeville of sleep. When is the last time you failed to be fooled by a nightmare, didn’t suspend disbelief because its incidents weren’t sufficiently true-to-life? The horror story is only true to dreams, especially those which involve us in mysterious ordeals, the passing of secrets, the passages of forbidden knowledge, and, in more ways than one, the spilling of guts.

  What distinguishes horror from other kinds of stories is the exclusive devotion of their practitioners, their true practitioners, to self-consciously imagining and isolating the most demonic aspects and episodes of human existence, undiminished by any consolation whatever. For here no consolation on earth is sufficient to the horrors it will struggle in vain to make bearable.

  Are horror stories truer than other stories? They may be, but not necessarily. They are limited to depicting conditions of extraordinary suffering, and while this is not the only game in town, such depictions can be as close to truth as any others. Nevertheless, what simple fictional horror—no matter how grossly magnified—can ever hold a candle to the complex mesh of misery and disenchantment which is merely the human routine? Of course, the fundamental horror of existence is not always apparent to us, its constantly menaced but unwary existers. But in true horror stories we can see it even in the dark. All eternal hopes, optimistic outs, and ultimate redemptions are cleared away, and for a little while we can pretend to stare the very worst right in its rotting face.

  Why, though? Why?

  Just to do it, that’s all. Just to see how much unmitigated weirdness, sorrow, desolation, and cosmic anxiety the human heart can take and still have enough heart left over to translate these agonies into artistic forms: James’ stained glass monstrosities, Lovecraft’s narrow-passaged blasphemies, Poe’s symphonic paranoia. As in any satisfying relationship, the creator of horror and its consumer approach oneness with each other. In other words, you get the horrors you deserve, those you can understand. For contrary to conventional wisdom, you cannot be frightened by what you don’t understand.

  This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and—like it or not—peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

  To the memory of my aunt

  and godmother, Virginia Cianciolo

  PART 1

  from Songs of a Dead Dreamer

  THE FROLIC

  In a beautiful home in a beautiful part of town—the town of Nolgate, site of the state prison—Dr. Munck examined the evening newspaper while his young wife lounged on a sofa nearby, lazily flipping through the colorful parade of a fashion magazine. Their daughter Norleen was upstairs asleep, or perhaps she was illicitly enjoying an after-hours session with the new color television she’d received on her birthday the week before. If so, her violation of the bedtime rule went undetected due to the affluent expanse between bedroom and living room, where her parents heard no sounds of disobedience. The house was quiet. The neighborhood and the rest of the town were also quiet in various ways, all of them slightly distracting to the doctor’s wife. But so far Leslie had only dared complain of the town’s social lethargy in the most joking fashion (“Another exciting evening at the Munck’s monastic hideaway”). She knew her husband was quite dedicated to this new position of his in this new place. Perhaps tonight, though, he would exhibit some encouraging symptoms of disenchantment with his work.

  “How did it go today, David?” she asked, her radiant eyes peeking over the magazine cover, where another pair of eyes radiated a glossy gaze. “You were pretty quiet at dinner.”

  “It went about the same,” said David, without lowering the small-town newspaper to look at his wife.

  “Does that mean you don’t want to talk about it?”

  He folded the newspaper backwards and his upper body appeared. “That’s how it sounded, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, it certainly did. Are you okay today?” she asked, laying aside the magazine on the coffee table and offering her complete attention.

  “Severely doubting, that’s how I am.” He said this with a kind of far-off reflectiveness.

  “Anything particularly doubtful, Dr. Munck?”

  “Only everything,” he answered.

  “Shall I make us drinks?”

  “That would be much appreciated.”

  Leslie walked to another part of the living room and from a large cabinet pulled out some bottles and some glasses. From the kitchen she brought out a supply of ice cubes in a brown plastic bucket. The sounds of drink-making were unusually audible in the living room’s plush quiet. The drapes were drawn on all windows except the one in the corner where an Aphrodite sculpture posed. Beyond that window was a dese
rted streetlighted street and a piece of moon above the opulent leafage of spring trees.

  “There you go, doctor,” she said, handing him a glass that was very thick at its base and tapered almost undetectably toward its rim.

  “Thanks, I really need one of these.”

  “Why? Aren’t things going well with your work?”

  “You mean my work at the prison?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You could say at the prison once in a while. Not always talk in the abstract. Overtly recognize my chosen professional environment, my—”

  “All right, all right. How’s things at the wonderful prison, dear? Is that better?” She paused and took a deep gulp from her glass, then calmed a little. “I’m sorry about the snideness, David.”

  “No, I deserved it. I’m blaming you for long realizing something I can’t bring myself to admit.”

  “Which is?” she prompted.

  “Which is that maybe it was not the wisest decision to move here and take this saintly mission upon my psychologist’s shoulders.” This remark was an indication of even deeper disenchantment than Leslie had hoped for. But somehow these words did not cheer her the way she thought they would. She could distantly hear the moving vans pulling up to the house, but the sound was no longer as pleasing as it once was.

  “You said you wanted to do something more than treat urban neuroses. Something more meaningful, more challenging.”

  “What I wanted, masochistically, was a thankless job, an impossible one. And I got it.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Leslie inquired, not quite believing she asked the question with such encouraging skepticism about the actual severity of the situation. She congratulated herself for placing David’s self-esteem above her own desire for a change of venue, important as she felt this was.