Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER and GRIMSCRIBE

THOMAS LIGOTTI
was born in Detroit in 1953. Considered one of the foremost authors of supernatural horror stories, he began publishing in the early 1980s. Following a tradition established by Edgar Allan Poe and perpetuated by H. P. Lovecraft, Ligotti is noted for his portrayals of characters who are outsiders to ordinary life, depictions of otherworldly dimensions, and uniquely dark vision of human life. His works are often praised by critics for their richly inventive imagination and evocative prose. Ligotti's first collection of tales,
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
, was published in 1985, and its follow-up,
Grimscribe
, in 1991. Among his other publications are the collections
Noctuary
and
Teatro Grottesco
as well as an influential philosophical work,
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror.
Ligotti has received several awards, including the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for his omnibus collection
The Nightmare Factory
and his short novel
My Work Is Not Yet Done
. He lives in Florida.

JEFF VANDERMEER
'
S
most recent fiction is the
New York Times
–bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (
Annihilation
,
Authority
, and
Acceptance
). His nonfiction has appeared in
The
New York Times
,
The
Guardian
,
The
Washington Post
, TheAtlantic.com, and the
Los Angeles Times
. VanderMeer has edited or coedited many iconic fiction anthologies, taught at the Yale Writers' Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, lectured at MIT and the Library of Congress, and serves as the codirector of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp located at Wofford College. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

Copyright © 1986, 1989, 1991, 1996, 2010, 2011 by Thomas Ligotti

Foreword copyright © 2015 by Jeff VanderMeer

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer
was first published in the United States of America by Silver Scarab Press in 1986. A revised edition with a different selection of stories was published in Great Britain by Robinson Publishing in 1989 and in the United States by Carroll & Graf in 1990. A second revised version with different content was published in Thomas Ligotti's
The Nightmare Factory
by Carroll & Graf in 1996. A third revised version was published in the United States by Subterranean Press in 2010.

Grimscribe
was first published in Great Britain by Robinson Publishing in 1991 and in the United States by Carroll & Graf in 1991. A revised version was published in
The Nightmare Factory
by Carroll & Graf in 1996. A second revised version was published by Subterranean Press in 2011.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ligotti, Thomas.

[Short stories. Selections]

Songs of a dead dreamer: and, Grimscribe / Thomas Ligotti ; foreword by Jeff Vandermeer.

pages ; cm.—(Penguin classics)

ISBN 978-0-698-40928-6

I. Ligotti, Thomas. Grimscribe. II. Title. III. Title: Grimscribe.

PS3562.I4546A6 2015

813'.54—dc23

2015018805

These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover illustration: © Chris Mars/Chris Mars Publishing, Inc.

Foreword

Over the past thirty years, Thomas Ligotti has produced an extraordinary body of work in the short story form—evidenced herein by his first two collections,
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
(
1985
) and
Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
(
1991
).
Songs
was first published by Harry O. Morris's Silver Scarab Press in a three-hundred-copy edition with cover art and illustrations by Morris and an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. The book received its due acclaim after a wider release in
1989
, but the first edition remains a jewel within our book collection. I remember leafing through it and feeling as if I were looking at an artifact that had slipped through from another universe.
Grimscribe
was, at the time of publication, seen by some as a typical second book, as if Ligotti had taken a step back in quality. Over time, however, readers and critics have recognized that the collection is, if anything, richer, more focused, and more mature than
Songs
.

Where within the fictional cosmos do Ligotti's stories exist? The same fixed, timeless position as those of Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka.
*
Like that of Poe and Kafka, his fiction is transformative by virtue of the author's unique way of seeing the world and because it is innovative in ways both visible (formal experimentation) and invisible (stealth experiments that reveal their presence only by how they affect the reader). Unlike with Poe's fiction, this quality in Ligotti's work cannot be emulated in any meaningful way and ferociously resists commodification by the marketplace. Unlike in Kafka's stories, Ligotti's prose is too uncomfortably visceral and (although deeply absurdist at times) too hostile to a certain kind of playfulness to enter into the traditional canon. But in all three cases, a unique voice at the right distance from its subject matter prevents the work from becoming dated. A deliberate lack of specificity follows from the author's natural preoccupations. Unnamed narrators and nameless towns, for example, allow for a corresponding vagueness of either character or setting that, perversely, creates the necessary anchor for even a reader a century from now, traveling beneath strange stars, to be held in thrall.

Perhaps these qualities also reflect that although Ligotti came out of the weird and uncanny genres, he was always
passing through
those regions. Recalling the horror scene in the mid-
1980
s through the mid-
1990
s, I remember that it was marked by a certain conservativism and a general devotion to naturalism. In its most extreme manifestations, this worship of pragmatic causality became the hyperrealism of subgenres devoted to depicting explicit violence and sex. Set against such trends were a handful of unique voices, including writers like Kathe Koja, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, and Clive Barker, who at times added elements of the surreal, Decadent, New Gothic, or genuinely transgressive body horror.

Did Ligotti come out of this community? Not really. His work, sui generis, just happened to be published in those environs during that time period. To suggest otherwise would be like saying there is huge significance to the neighborhood in which a physicist lives when he has a eureka moment due to research at his laboratory. In this sense Ligotti is allied with iconoclasts like Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami, the aforementioned Kafka, Alfred Kubin, and, to some extent, the great Bruno Schulz. Indeed, brilliant one-off texts like Sakutaro¯ Hagiwara's dreamlike “The Town of Cats” (
1935
) and Eric Basso's preternaturally Proustian “The Beak Doctor” (
1977
) seem oddly Ligotti-esque even if they are not direct influences—precisely because, like Ligotti's work, they exist in a unique space between horror and the surreal, between the visceral and the philosophical. It is a special place, found on no map, where the supernatural resists being labeled and every attempt at naming leaves the formal inquest flummoxed as to whether a particular shadow or reflection was part of the natural or unnatural worlds.

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. He is exploring the underbelly of modernity—personal and societal. His interest is in the blight beneath, whether it occurs solely in the mind or is expressed through actions. For this reason, the films of David Lynch and the fiction of Thomas Ligotti sometimes speak to each other in interesting ways.

Ligotti launches into this exploration, this kind of
Blue Velvet
approach, from the very first story collected in
Songs
, “The Frolic.” The banal start of this story set in the suburbs could be the beginning of the average
New Yorker
tale—and if Ligotti had wanted to he could have reinforced the truth of the surface of modern life; he could have written a story of a husband and wife at odds, with the husband's work serving merely to add fuel to their arguments. Instead, Ligotti serves notice that he's interested in subversion: the window of the rational is smashed to bits by the irrational. One might even make the case that the window is smashed by the fears of the husband, which in a strange way become a kind of perverted wish.

One of Ligotti's first forays into formal experimentation, “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” seems like the metafictional version of a smashed window at first, but accretes viscosity and layers of realism as the tale progresses. As in Vladimir Nabokov's “The Leonardo,” Ligotti tells the reader that he is assembling certain fictional elements to convey his story . . . and then, like Nabokov, proceeds to make the reader forget a story is being read, the “fictive dream” closing around with a cocoonlike sense of claustrophobia. At the same time, “Notes on the Writing of Horror” mercilessly sends up certain approaches to supernatural fiction—it is caustically funny; funny with a sneer and a giggle. It gets under the skin in part because, miraculously, it earns the sneering. As a kind of veiled statement of intent from Ligotti, the story is a fierce, uncompromising work, and a proverbial high-wire act on the page. I can only imagine it as a cuckoo's egg laid in the nest of the horror field as it existed at the time.

These kinds of subversions continue in a more gentle fashion with stories like “Alice's Last Adventure,” in which Ligotti uses a smidgeon of Lewis Carroll to send up the “twee fey” of both Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson. The element of play is found not in the appropriation of childhood grotesqueries, but in the voice of the elderly author juxtaposed with a series of unnerving encounters. Once the window is broken, not only can things come through, but you can
get out
. Except,
what is there to get out to?
A plausible interpretation of the story could be that it is about the irrationality and contradictions of aging. A tweak here or there and this interpretation would be the surface of the story, not just part of the subtext.

In the same vein,
Grimscribe
's major story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” creates its greatest effects as much through the mundane as through the uncanny. An anthropologist visits the town of Mirocaw out of curiosity about a pageantry festival that includes clowns. In a perfect deadpan tone that allows the author a tightrope walk between the absurd and the horrific, the metaphysical and the visceral, the anthropologist comes to realize he has made an irrevocable mistake. Much of the pleasure here comes from the narrator providing the reader with information previously left out and inquiries into clown activities that are often drily humorous. (Indeed, Ligotti has always been a very funny writer, a quality easier to enjoy once you become acclimated to his supernatural elements.)

But the story also expands on Ligotti's interest in a kind of middle-class experience, or ordinary life, that is disrupted by the extraordinary, which puts a lie not only to the narrators' view of their own selves but also to the idea that the ordinary is mundane, that the surface is also the subtext. In part, Ligotti here comments on modernity through the idea of ritual, and how ritual pervades our lives in both ordinary and outré circumstances. Ritual is a kind of mask that holds in check what happens in our most secret lives. Other stories in
Grimscribe
use objects as talismans to explore these same undercurrents, whether the eyeglasses of “The Spectacles in the Drawer,” the “madness of things” in the house in “Flowers of the Abyss,” or the idol/manuscript in “Nethescurial.”

When we encounter ritual enacted in a grotesque fashion (that to some extent ridicules our own repetitions) we may at first try to reconcile it with our own preordained patterns; thus the absurd element of
politeness
or
reasonableness
sometimes expressed in true-life extreme situations. But if instead we recoil, run shrieking, might it be not only because what we see is macabre but because, for a moment, we recognize that this strangeness partakes of the same wellspring as our own regimented lives? That our (unthinking) rituals are only attempts not to succumb to what is going on beneath the surface, within our minds, with regard to the intolerability of life (i.e., eventual death)?

•   •   •

I must confess I am loath to discuss other favorites among these stories. Each has at some point appeared sharp and pale out of the murky darkness, had its moment, and then receded from my sight again, such is the impressionistic flavor of these particular stories. “Ethereal” is a terribly overused and imprecise word to describe weird fiction, but it's still the best description of how Ligotti's fiction exists in the moment of individual sentences on the page. Every time you read these stories, not only do you reimagine them, but they seem to change shape and substance through some power rising from behind the words. These are not uncanny effects—they're merely another manifestation of the universal in Ligotti's fiction.

With
Songs
and
Grimscribe
, Ligotti burst fully formed onto the literary scene. Had just these two collections been published, Ligotti would still be hailed as a writer of the first rank. What occurs later in his career is not so much a maturing and a leaving aside of earlier work as an interesting shift of attention: from the general preoccupations with what lies beneath modernity, often expressed through Everyman and Man of No Qualities characters, to a specific focus on the modern workplace in such long stories as
My Work Is Not Yet Done
. Turning the gaze of weird fiction toward the modern work environment—pushing past the blatant emptiness of the cubicle world to truths ever more horrific, subtle, and darkly hilarious—is just a natural extension of Ligotti's initial explorations in
Songs
and
Grimscribe
.

In writing about these more existential explorations, I don't mean to suggest that the supernatural in Ligotti's fiction is not convincing, terrifying, and cathartic in its own right. It is all of those things, and for another writer that might be the extent of our fascination, and quite enough for most readers. But the reason Ligotti lingers in our imaginations, why his work is so relevant to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is that so much else exists beneath the surface. Whether you are just now encountering Ligotti's fiction or rereading it, I envy you this chance to encounter the work of one of our greatest dark imaginations.

JEFF VANDERMEER