Thus it seems impossible to overstress the importance of Lovecraft to Ligotti, not just as a writer whose works he loves, but as a human being with whom he feels a deeply personal sense of kinship. Ligotti himself has stated the matter definitively: “H. P. Lovecraft has been, bar none other, the most intense and real personal presence in my life” (Paul and Schurholz 18). “I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t discovered Lovecraft” (Wilbanks).
II. Notes on the Horror of Writing: Lovecraft in Ligotti’s Work, and vice versa
What remains is the question of whether and how Lovecraft’s influence can be seen in Ligotti’s actual writing. Darrell Schweitzer offered a typical observation, and one that echoes Ramsey Campbell’s sentiment expressed above, when he told Ligotti that “your stories only resemble Lovecraft’s in the most tenuous manner, in that you too seem to depict a bleak and uncertain universe in which human assumptions don’t apply very far. But the more overt Lovecraftisms, from the adjectives to the tentacular Things From Beyond, are conspicuously absent” (Schweitzer 25). This amounts to saying that Ligotti’s stories recall Lovecraft purely in terms of mood and worldview, and for the most part this is correct, although a number of Ligotti’s stories do incorporate specific Lovecraftian names and themes. One example is “The Sect of the Idiot,” in which Ligotti mentions Azathoth, the deity or cosmic principle which Lovecraft created to symbolize the ultimate ontological horror. Another is “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” the earliest-written of Ligotti’s published tales, whose plot motifs explicitly recall Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Festival,” and which ends with a dedication “To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft.” But even in these and the few other stories in which definite Lovecraftian elements can be discerned—e.g., “Nethescurial,” “The Tsalal,” “Dr. Locrian’s Asylum”—Ligotti does not mimic Lovecraft’s prose style or call out a litany of fictional gods and monsters in the manner that has come to typify Lovecraftian “mythos” fiction. Instead, he returns to the same psychological/spiritual source of nightmarish horror that animated Lovecraft’s stories, and works it outward into original tales told in an original style. This style itself may be decidedly non-Lovecraftian—Ligotti’s stylistic masters, let it be recalled, are Poe, Nabokov, Burroughs, Schulz, and the like—but the spirit is Lovecraftian to the core.
And this is all to say that Ligotti nowhere apes Lovecraft, but instead, in a certain (purely metaphorical) sense, embodies him, or at least a version of him (see below). In my essay “Thomas Ligotti’s Career of Nightmares,” I have speculated that Ligotti’s writing may be taken “as a kind of distillation and expression in contemporary terms of what was best in Lovecraft” (Cardin 16). Regarding what qualifies as Lovecraft’s “best,” Ligotti has expressed a definite preference for the earlier, more poetic, dreamlike tales over the later, longer ones such as “The Shadow out of Time” and At the Mountains of Madness in which Lovecraft attempted to build a combined atmosphere of cosmic horror and scientific/documentary realism. “I find Lovecraft’s fastidious attempts at creating a documentary style ‘reality’ an obstacle to appreciating his work,” he has said. “To me, reading a horror story should be like dreaming and the more dreamlike a story is, the more it affects me” (Ford 33).
Given such a literary predilection, we can appreciate why Ligotti has designated Lovecraft’s dreamlike “The Music of Erich Zann” as his favorite amongst Lovecraft’s works. “To me,” he has said, “it was in ‘Erich Zann’ that Lovecraft came up with the perfect model of horror story” (Ayad). He has described this story as “Lovecraft’s early, almost premature expression of his ideal as a writer: the use of maximum suggestion and minimal explanation to evoke a sense of supernatural terrors and wonders” (Ligotti 2003, 82). “Erich Zann” has long been recognized as one of Lovecraft’s most successful stories, and for our purposes here, it is important to recall that Lovecraft wrote it in 1921, only four and a half years into his mature fiction-writing career, which had begun in 1917 with “The Tomb.” When we recall his famous assertion from 1936, just a little over a year before his death, that “I’m farther from doing what I want to do than I was 20 years ago” (SL 5.224) and put this together with Ligotti’s claim that he himself has “tend[ed] to take more cues from Lovecraft’s earlier work” (Bryant), we can at last understand what it really means to say that Ligotti’s writing distills the essence of Lovecraft’s best. Lovecraft himself felt that he had produced his best writing early on, and Ligotti agrees. Considering the deep affective kinship between the two men, it seems reasonable to regard Ligotti’s writing as a continuation of the type of writing Lovecraft produced early his fiction writing career, before he made the changes in his approach which hindsight later represented to him as a misstep.
Perhaps this is the appropriate point to highlight the obvious fact that not everyone agrees with Ligotti’s preference for Lovecraft’s earlier work, and thus not everyone agrees that Ligotti’s own authorial choices have been for the best. In the world of horror literature and entertainment at large, most people associate Lovecraft with, and venerate him for, the branch of his writing typified by “The Call of Cthulhu,” At the Mountains of Madness, “The Shadow out of Time,” and his other, longer stories told in a realistic tone and mounted as documentary-type expositions of cosmic and/or supernatural themes, as opposed to the earlier stories that Ligotti values most. S. T. Joshi is one prominent figure who believes that Lovecraft produced his most significant work in this later “supernatural realist” mode and that, moreover, this mode has characterized the greatest works in the supernatural horror genre as a whole. “Ligotti’s own tastes notwithstanding,” he has said, “few will doubt that Lovecraft initiated the most representative phase of his career when he adopted the documentary realism of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ in 1926; if he had stopped writing before that point, we would have little reason to remember him” (Joshi 1993, 152). By contrast, Ligotti believes that Lovecraft “was at his worst when he tried to be ‘convincing’ in the manner derived from the late 19th century realist-naturalist writers,” and that these attempts failed to achieve the effect Lovecraft had intended. “Lovecraft,“ he says, “always veered off into a highly unrealistic, as well as highly poetic style,” and it is this very deviation from the ideal of realism that Ligotti finds most laudable and valuable (Schweitzer 26). The upshot of the matter, generally speaking, is that Ligotti thinks Lovecraft was at his worst in the very stories where Joshi thinks he was at his best.
What we have here is a case of methodological and even philosophical disagreement, the details of which come out most clearly in the two men’s respective assessments of “The Music of Erich Zann.” Joshi, like Ligotti, notices something distinctive about this story. On the one hand, he praises it, saying that it “justifiably remained one of Lovecraft’s own favourite stories, for it reveals a restraint in its supernatural manifestations (bordering, for one of the few times in his entire work, on obscurity), a pathos in its depiction of its protagonist, and a general polish in its language that Lovecraft achieved in later years.” And yet he also expresses a reservation, already hinted at in the parenthetical aside quoted above, about “the very nebulous nature of the horror involved” in the narrative. “There are those,” he writes, “who find this sort of restraint effective because it leaves so much to the imagination; and there are those who find it ineffective because it leaves too much to the imagination, and there is a suspicion that the author himself did not have a fully conceived understanding of what the central weird phenomenon of the story is actually meant to be. I fear I am in the latter camp.” Although Joshi, like Ligotti, thinks Lovecraft was sometimes a bit too overexplanatory in his later stories, “in ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ I cannot help feeling that he erred in the opposite direction” (Joshi 1996, 271, 272). But this is of course the complete opposite of Ligotti’s opinion, since Ligotti, as we have seen, regards the same story as a masterpiece precisely because of its use of “maximum suggesti
on and minimal explanation” to evoke a specific type of philosophical-aesthetic response. For him, the story’s refusal to give any hint of explanation regarding the precise nature of its central horror, in tandem with the skill of its telling, “suggest[s] to us the essence, far bigger than life, of that dark universal terror beyond naming which is the matrix for all other terrors” (Ligotti 2003, 80), whereas for Joshi the same quality merely hints at the author’s underdeveloped conception of his own theme.
In light of this, we should not be surprised that Joshi has criticized Ligotti’s stories for falling short of the ideal of supernatural realism. In 1993 Joshi expressed concern at the fact that Ligotti “seems, apparently by design, not to care about the complete reconciliation of the various supernatural features in a given tale,” which, in conjunction with several other problems Joshi perceives in Ligotti’s style (including obscurity, excessive self-consciousness and self-referentiality, and a lack of “spontaneity and emotional vigour”), prevents his work from ranking with the best in the supernatural horror genre. Joshi opined that Ligotti needs to produce more completed tales, as opposed to vignettes and such, and more work in the supernatural realist mode of the later Lovecraftian stories “if he is to join the ranks of Lovecraft, Blackwood, Dunsany, Jackson, Campbell, and Klein, as he is on the verge of doing.” Among Ligotti’s works that already fulfill this order, Joshi counted “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” “Nethescurial,” and “Vastarien” (Joshi 1993, 151–52).1
Ligotti, for his part, is quite self-aware about the choices he has made in matters of style and authorial philosophy. He has even employed a metafictional approach to incorporate his thoughts about such matters into some of his stories. “Nethescurial” is one such story, and ironically (in light of Joshi’s praise), we can find within it an answer to Joshi’s criticism of Ligotti’s supposed over-vagueness. “Nethescurial” is constructed as a series of frame stories, and the narrator of the topmost frame is portrayed as possessing a certain savvy about the field of supernatural horror. In commenting on the contents of a manuscript he has found, which forms one of the lower-level frames, and which purports to give an account of a supposedly true quasi-supernatural/metaphysical horror story, he says, “The problem is that such supernatural inventions [i.e. the god Nethescurial, a “demonic demiurge”] are indeed quite difficult to imagine. So often they fail to materialize in the mind, to take on a mental texture, and thus remain unfelt as anything but an abstract monster of metaphysics—an elegant or awkward schematic that cannot rise from the paper to touch us” (G 82).
Although in this passage the narrator/Ligotti is talking not about the problem of authorial vagueness, but instead the ontological and affective barrier that separates the world of written words from the world of existential reality, we may still read these thoughts as addressing the former issue as well. This is especially true since the “demonic demiurge” Nethescurial, which forms the story’s central metaphysical horror, remains fully and fundamentally as unexplained in the end as does the nameless horror confronted by Lovecraft’s Erich Zann. Ligotti’s concluding words at the end of the passage quoted above may thus be taken not only as an apologia for the power of literary horror to move us, but also for the power of a minimally explained supernatural premise to have a similar impact: “Even if we are incapable of sincere belief in [the various stock narrative elements found in supernatural horror stories like the tale of the island cult of Nethescurial], there may still be a power in these things that threatens us like a bad dream. And this power emanates not so much from within the tale as it does from somewhere behind it, someplace of infinite darkness and ubiquitous evil in which we may walk unaware” (G 82).
Not incidentally, these thoughts were prefigured, and Ligotti’s low opinion of the value and effectiveness of supernatural realism was given clear expression, in his words to interviewer Carl Ford in 1988, three years before “Nethescurial’s” first publication:
I discovered some time ago that I am not necessarily interested in fictional confrontations between the so-called everyday world and the world of the supernatural. If I am affected by a writer’s vision, it is never because he has caused me to believe during the course of reading that there is truth to a given supernatural motif. . . . What seems important to me is . . . the power of the language and images of a story and the ultimate vision that they help to convey. . . . Lovecraft’s Cthulhu aided his expression of certain sensations that were profoundly important to him. The pure idea of such a creation—not if it exists or doesn’t—is the only thing of consequence. That idea may be rendered poorly or with great power, and beyond that—nothing matters. (Ford 33)
Obviously, Joshi is correct in believing that Ligotti cares nothing for “the complete reconciliation of the various supernatural features in a given tale.” What matters to Ligotti is the evocation of mood and the conveyance, preferably with consummate literary skill, of an overwhelming artistic-horrific vision. In fact, we could substitute “Nethescurial” for “Cthulhu” in the above quotation to arrive at a viable statement from Ligotti about his own guiding philosophy as a writer. (For more on the parallels between Ligotti’s personal aesthetic as a writer of horror fiction and his statements about Lovecraft, see the final section of this essay.)
If it is ironic that Ligotti has answered, after a fashion, some of Joshi’s criticisms in one of the very stories that Joshi has singled out for praise, then it is doubly ironic that Lovecraft’s own words indicate that by the end of his life, he probably would have agreed more with Ligotti than Joshi on this issue. Although Lovecraft did begin employing a documentary-realist approach to fiction writing beginning in 1926, his self-stated ultimate goal in the writing of even these realistic stories was the evocation of mood, not the “complete reconciliation of [their] various supernatural features,” which formulation may be taken as one of the hallmarks of supernatural realism. “[Weird fiction] must,” he wrote in 1935,
if it is to be authentic art, form primarily the crystallisation or symbolisation of a definite human mood—not the attempted delineation of events, since the ‘events’ involved are of course largely fictitious or impossible. . . . A really serious weird story does not depend on plot or incident at all, but puts all its emphasis on mood or atmosphere. What it sets out to be is simply a picture of a mood, and if it weaves the elements of suggestion with sufficient skill, it matters relatively little what fictitious events the mood is based on. (SL 5.158, 198)
In the case of Lovecraft’s own writing, the point is illustrated by his 1931 short novel, At the Mountains of Madness. He wrote this one in an ultra-realistic tone, complete with a generous overlay of scientific jargon, but as he said in a 1936 letter to his friend E. Hoffmann Price, at root his goal was simply “to pin down the vague feelings regarding the lethal, desolate white south which have haunted me ever since I was ten years old.” In other words, he simply wanted to write a story that would express for him, and that would convey to others, an undefined feeling. This emotional closeness that he felt to the setting and subject matter of the story may account in part for the fact that when it received a hostile reception and was subjected to severe editorial mishandling, he was so discouraged that, in his own words, the episode “probably did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career” (SL 5.223, 224).
The point is reinforced later in the same letter to Price, where Lovecraft used similar mood-based terms to explain his motivations for writing “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935): “The sole purpose of this attempt was to crystallise (a) the feeling of strangeness in a distant view, and (b) the feeling of latent horror in an old, deserted edifice” (SL 5.224). Again, this ideal of mood, and not the achievement of a successful supernatural-realist effect, was so important to Lovecraft that his self-perceived failure deeply discouraged him. These words about “The Haunter in the Dark” are followed directly by his already-quoted claim that he was farther from “doing what I want to do” than he had been twenty years earlier.
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In a more formal vein, in his 1933 essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft had made the same point when he wrote, “My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature” (MW 113). And if we look to the introduction to his classic essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (written 1925–27), we see him flatly asserting that the “one test of the really weird”—that is, the litmus test for whether a supernatural horror story succeeds or fails—is simply whether it generates the right mood. More specifically, and to quote Lovecraft’s famous words in full, “The one test of the really weird is this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim” (D 368–69).
At this point, the attentive reader may have begun to think that I am confusing categories in my argument. Supernatural realism, the reader might say, is a stylistic approach, whereas Lovecraft’s weird-fictional ideal of evoking mood is a fundamental authorial motivation, prior to and separate from the selection of a literary style. In other words, supernatural realism was merely one of several stylistic vehicles that he employed in pursuit of his emotional goal, and therefore to oppose the two is to commit a category error. In my defense, I do not think I have committed this error, because what I have been attempting to show is precisely that primacy of his emotional motivation for writing stories at all. My point is not that his stories can be discretely divided into “mood-based” ones and supernatural realist ones, but simply that he was more emotionally invested in the idea of writing stories to convey ethereal moods than he was intellectually invested in the idea of writing stories to create a convincing air of realism or to offer a coherent explanation or reconciliation of supernatural motifs. When he reached middle age and began to take stock of his writing, he felt that the work he had produced prior to adopting the realist approach had more successfully achieved and fulfilled his emotional goals. And in this opinion, he is at one with Ligotti.
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