Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe” and “The Lost Art of Twilight”

I’m continuing my review of Thomas Ligotti’s fiction with the next pair of stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer, which includes one of my favorite literary depictions of vampires, ever.

“The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe”

This story resonated with me because I have found myself in a similar situation (minus the horror and existential terror elements….) A young man named Jack is a young man at a large family gathering on Christmas Eve at a party hosted by his wealthy, widowed Aunt Elise. Jack has an odd feeling about Aunt Elise, and there are hints that she’s probably not exactly a nice person, and may be just a bit more than meets the eye; Jack’s feelings are conflicted because he seems a bit of a misanthrope and obviously has mixed feelings about both his family and the holiday itself. She ends up telling a group of children a creepy story about a man who used to live in her neighborhood but now his house has been razed to the ground because after the man died his will stipulated that the house be torn down. We then flash forward and Jack is old and dozing off at a Christmas Eve party much later in life. He encounters his long-dead aunt and experiences a parallel situation to the creepy story she told long ago. I liked the story’s general creepiness a lot juxtaposed with the holiday atmosphere; definitely a memorable Christmas story as only Ligotti would tell it.

“The Lost Art of Twilight”

An amazing story. The narrator was born to a father who was dead before his birth and a mother who was literally staked and killed because the locals (led by a priest) believed she was a vampire. He is now an adult at the story’s outset, having been brought from France to the United States by his mother’s friend, who has raised him since infancy. They now live in a mansion, isolated from society. Initially, I thought that the mother had been killed because superstitious and ignorant peasants murdered a perfectly innocent woman. Not so, apparently. The narrator is a kind of half-human vampire—with a mostly nocturnal existence—who has wonderfully skewed perceptions of the sunsets he paints. The household then receives word that five members of the family are coming for a visit from France. These family members are full-blown vampires who transform the narrator into one of their kind after slaughtering his surrogate mother and the servants. Simply wonderful depiction of vampires as truly monstrous beings, with inhuman means of communication and movement. These are vampires as true monsters depicted in ways that few authors have captured. I liked this one very, very much.

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Week 259 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Ewers, Chabon, Graham, and Smith

Welcome to Week 259 of my horror short fiction review project! There was one clear favorite this week, a truly amazing story that I’m only sorry it took this long for me to discover: “The God of Dark Laughter” by Michael Chabon. Now this is how you do Lovecraftian horror! If only he would return to this story to write a follow up.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“Vampire’s Prey” (excerpt) by Hanns Heinz Ewers

I believe this story is not actually a self-contained story but rather an excerpt from Vampir, one of Ewers’ novels about his protagonist Frank Braun. This excerpt concerns Frank and his odd (and unexplained) illness, his travels in the South Seas, his encounters with cannibals, vampire bats, and tropical diseases. It’s all very evocative, but it very much feels incomplete, since I know nothing about Frank Braun or his background. I just didn’t think this excerpt was able to stand on its own as a coherent story.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“The God of Dark Laughter” by Michael Chabon

Wonderful. The narrator is a small town’s district attorney who is leading an investigation (do district attorneys actually do that?) into the horrific murder of a hobo clown. He delves into the ancient history of two rival cults that have sparred with each other through the centuries and the gods they worship. This tow, its inhabitants, and this newly discovered history are skillfully sketched out and I found myself craving much, much more about these people, this setting, and the larger cosmology. I’ll have to be contented with this single story, though, since no sequel was ever penned as far as I can determine. Expertly Lovecraftian. I can’t recommend this story highly enough.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Super-Doc and the Ten-Day Cure for the Zombie Apocalypse” by Heather Graham

No supers in this story, just a physician who calls himself “Super-Doc.” Like so many of the stories in the collection, it just doesn’t fit the theme. In any case, we’ve got a small walled enclave of survivors after a zombie apocalypse, including this doctor and his wife. The doctor’s wife is bitten and he conceals this fact and tries to cure her. She’s cheating on him with another survivor who has also been secretly zombified. An okay story, I just wish it had something to do with the collection’s theme.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“The Scallion Stone” by Basil A. Smith

A long, boring affair I didn’t care for. This one wasn’t especially coherent and certainly wasn’t interesting enough to capture my interest. There’s some folklore about a (naturally-occurring) stone formation and something that lives in the sea. Bad.

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Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “Eye of the Lynx” and “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”

I’m continuing my review of Thomas Ligotti’s work with the next couple stories from Songs of Dead Dreamer, which includes the concluding story of the Nyctalops Trilogy and a very interesting work of metafiction.

“Eye of the Lynx”

The narrator visits a kind of house of domination that also hosts a sort of freakshow that customers can walk through and watch. He is taken on a tour of the establishment by the hostess and witnesses several tableaux but is clearly too jaded to enjoy what he’s seeing; he’s simply bored and not getting the transgressive entertainment he desires. So he absorbs the hostess into his own body—she tries valiantly to escape, to no avail—and carries her off. I just wanted a bit more of a sense of what the narrator was, he’s some sort of supernatural entity clearly. For me this was the least successful of the three thematically-linked stories of Ligotti’s “The Nyctalops Trilogy,” though I still found it interesting, just a bit too baffling.

“Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”

I think that Ligotti is having a lot of fun with the reader on this one. This is an extremely “meta” story on multiple levels that breaks the fourth wall in several ways. It begins as a notional work of non-fiction by a horror author (someone explicitly not Ligotti himself) on how to write horror fiction. He gives us the outline of a story he was never able to quite make work—a man named Nathan is heading out on a first date and dons a pair of pants that seem to kill their wearer—and then walks us through how we might go about presenting that story in different modes of storytelling: realistic, gothic, and experimental. He then adds an additional mode—the confessional—and that’s when the story lurches into another gear and takes a series of very dark, twisted turns. Fascinating story, though certainly the most “experimental” of Ligotti’s works thus far in the collection.

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Week 258 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Leroux, Kiernan, Gaiman, Kaveney, Lunde, and Sallis

Welcome to Week 258 of my horror short fiction review project! Some okay stories that didn’t quite pan out for me this week, but the clear outlier was “In Letters of Fire” by Gaston Leroux. An eccentric living in a remote area has made an interesting deal with the Devil.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“In Letters of Fire” by Gaston Leroux

Four men are trapped in the wilderness one night while out hunting and forced to seek shelter in a decrepit mansion that is said to be inhabited by a madman. He turns out to be an elderly man who believes himself cursed by the Devil to invariably win games of chance. The hunters don’t believe the man, of course, and decide to test the crazy old coot. A very fun story.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“A Redress for Andromeda” by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Kiernan’s work rarely does it for me, and this one certainly doesn’t. I have always found Kiernan to be an author with a wildly overrated reputation, but Kiernan seems to have a very persistent and vocal fan base. In any case, here we have Tara, who has arrived at a house that seems to be used by a group of occultists/esotericists that might be better termed a cult. This group placates some kind of monstrous female figure associated with the sea. Some decent atmosphere but there’s almost no payoff for the setup. Could have been so much more. I view this one as a big missed opportunity.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“The Lady and/or the Tiger” by Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney

Lamb is a conspiracy theorist/journalist who is nominally hunting werewolves by using the Library of the Conspiracy, a publicly available repository of secret information from all over the world that reaches across all of human history. What a nice resource! There seems to be much more backstory about this library and the ancient race of shapeshifters that Lamb is seeking information on. Either this story is part of a larger narrative or not enough of this backstory comes out here. I was intrigued by what I read but found myself wanting much more. The story feels incomplete, as is, though what it hints at is intriguing.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“A Weather Report from the Top of the Stairs” by David Lunde and James Sallis

A kind of dark version of the film Toy Story. The toys are mustering their courage and energy to take revenge on the boy who has neglected them and either damaged them through play or allowed them to fall into disrepair and neglect. We are presented with two alternate endings: the authors’ preferred version in which they never quite have the energy to attack, and another where it is implied that they do indeed take their revenge, Only okay. The writing style did not grab me.

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Book Review: Shards of Shattered Darkness by Mark N. Drake

Shards of Shattered Darkness
Mark N. Drake
Aethos Publishing (January 18, 2023)
Reviewed by Andrew Byers

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know Mark N. Drake’s work through his series of novels and short stories set on the fictional Darkisle, a foreboding place inhabited by Lovecraftian horrors and cultists. Those have been a lot of fun, but I was delighted to see Drake branch out a bit and showcase his talents as a writer of some other types of fiction. Shards of Shattered Darkness is Drake’s new, wide-ranging collection that contains everything from flash fiction to novellas, encompassing crime fiction (with supernatural elements), horror, and science fiction. As far as I can tell, this is Drake’s complete short fiction output to date, which includes the novelette “The Grey Berserker” (reviewed here) and the three short stories included in his previous introductory collection Hobb’s Top and Other Horrors (reviewed here). Because I’ve already reviewed those stories, I’ll focus my attention on some of the stories that were new to me.

I would essentially divide the stories in this collection into two types: subtle horrors and overt horrors. Drake is a strong writer who excels at both types of stories, but they are very different types of stories that impact the reader in dissimilar ways, so I think it’s worth grouping them here for the purposes of a brief review.

In terms of some of Drake’s more subtle horrors, I’d note a couple stories that begin like straightforward crime stories but rapidly shift and take on new forms when it becomes inescapably apparent that something supernatural is going on. The best examples of this are “Broom Grove” and “Memento.” In “Broom Grove,” Alicia is a lawyer called in to deal with Johnny, who I’d describe as a hyperviolent gang leader. Johnny speaks in a decidedly strange manner that doesn’t actually indicate that he’s mentally ill, as the authorities surmise, but that something far creepier is going on. In “Memento,” Natasha is a police woman with a troubled, violent past who is called in to respond to a school shooting. It’s a good story, and avoids being a tragic but run-of-the-mill crime drama with the inclusion of a very nice supernatural element. Drake does a very good job with historical fiction, and “Bleaklow” is a great example of this. Here we have a couple pilots in WWII forced to crashland in a remote, foggy, and bleak area. A very nice twist ending on this one. Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention “Go Right to the White Rose,” which was one of the most affecting stories in the collection. This is the story of an elderly widower at the end of his life who has set up a large forested area near his home as a national trust. Very poignant and just a little scary.

In terms of more overt horrors, there are plenty included in the collection. “Vane Harbour” is one such story. Here we have Mia, an oceanographer investigating a company that she believes has been dumping toxic waste at sea, who travels to a remote, mostly depopulated harbor where she unfortunately finds out that this is true. And worse, the toxic waste has mutated the local kelp to become extraordinarily predatory. A fun and unexpected monster story. As a big fan of The Thing, I was delighted to read Drake’s “Meme.”  This is a novel take on another polar expedition that encounters something long-buried in the ice. Not a physical threat but…something else. A very nice twist on a classic concept.

In the overt horror camp, I’d also have to include “Beyond the Night’s Dark Veil,” which is Drake’s only new and previously unpublished Darkisle story included in the collection. In the mid-1920s, four university students interested in expanding their minds and just having a good time have ventured to Darkisle for a relaxing holiday. They inadvertently enter Lovecraft’s Dreamlands and do indeed expand their perceptions and knowledge of the universe and how it really operates. They also bite off way more than they can chew. I liked this one especially because it demonstrates the menace that the Dreamlands pose to the unwary. Really nice one, and glad to see Drake return to his Darkisle setting.

The collection closes with a nice long set of author’s notes about each of the stories and how they came to be, which I always appreciate.

If you’re interested in a nice eclectic set of horror stories, including Drake’s very interesting take on the Cthulhu Mythos, check out this Shards of Shattered Darkness.

This review originally appeared in Hellnotes.

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Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “The Chymist” and “Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes”

I’m continuing my 2023 review of Thomas Ligotti’s work and am continuing with the next couple stories in Songs of Dead Dreamer, which includes the first two stories of the Nyctalops Trilogy, three loosely-connected–at least thematically–stories.

“The Chymist”

A chemist—who is also an occultist and, as it turns out, a serial killer—“romances” and picks up a prostitute in a seedy bar. The story is told from the chemist’s perspective and we see only his words though we can readily infer the woman’s reactions. Throughout all of this we see hints of his Rosicrucian philosophy and interest in alchemy. The pair eventually leaves the bar and end up in the woman’s apartment. The narrator pours a kind of glittery dust in her palm, where it is rapidly absorbed into her body. This alchemical substance provides the chemist with complete control over the woman’s body, allowing him to completely transmute her body into other forms via thought/dream. I have not encountered this premise elsewhere and was highly intrigued by it. Fascinating case of body horror via alchemical control.

“Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes”

A master hypnotist is entertaining an audience at an exclusive private residence with his assistant, a woman the audience finds to be incomparably beautiful and who he has apparently hypnotized into being able to perform a variety of fantastical feats to the amazement of the audience. We begin to realize that something is off-kilter here. The hypnotist seems to have nothing but contempt for his audience, and he interacts with a little boy who didn’t witness the earlier performance (and was therefore not hypnotized like the rest of the people in the house). Unlike everyone else, the little boy finds the assistant “yucky.” We realize that the assistant has been a mesmerized corpse all along, hypnotized into returning from the dead. The hypnotist sneaks out of the house and plans to ring the doorbell as he leaves, which will break the hypnosis of everyone, leaving them in a room surrounding a rotting corpse. A wonderful tale, delightfully told.

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Week 257 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Clawson, Link, Maberry, and Crowley

Welcome to Week 257 of my weekly horror short fiction review project! These were all good to very good stories this week. My favorite though was “The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link. Just two little girls in a big, creepy house being babysat one night. What could go wrong?

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“Double Hex” by Samuel M. Clawson

An adult pair of siblings hates each other but is forced by circumstances to live together. Their hatred is so visceral that they are locked in a battle of hex magic against each other, constantly cursing and warding off curses. Nicely suspenseful piece.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link

Two little girls, twins Samantha and Claire, are neglected by their widowed father. The family lives in a creepy rented mansion formerly owned by an obscure poet that the twins’ father is nominally researching. A babysitter arrives one night to take care of them while the father is otherwise occupied and, yes, you guessed it, tragedy ensues. Wonderfully atmospheric story.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Holding Out for a Hero” by Jonathan Maberry

This is a Joe Ledger story, which I have a love-hate relationship with. He’s kind of a modern-day ex-government agent/special forces kind of guy who gets involved in shooting and beating up all manner of bad guys. This one was fun though. The villain here is an Iraq War vet-turned super soldier who has been transformed against his will by an evil defense contractor. The vet breaks free from captivity and goes on a  rampage that I didn’t quite understand: half of his targets are the office locations of the evil defense contractor company (okay) and half are where he intervenes in petty urban crimes and end up killing the gangbangers, vigilante style, in especially gruesome ways. Good action and kind of fun actually.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

[previously reviewed] “The House of Cthulhu” by Brian Lumley

“Antiquities” by John Crowley

A rural area of England experiences a rash of infidelity, which the locals hypothesize is caused by a succubus, or perhaps a bunch of succubi. As it turns out, it’s caused by 300,000 cat mummies (!) that were unearthed, and, since they were left unsold at auction, are chopped up and used as fertilizer by local farmers (!!). A truly bizarre cause for the supernaturally-induced infidelities. Despite how silly this premise is—it shouldn’t work at all—it’s actually well-written and engagingly told, which makes up for some of the silliness.

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Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “Alice’s Last Adventure” and “Dream of a Manikin”

I’m continuing my 2023 review of Thomas Ligotti’s work and am continuing with the next couple stories in Songs of Dead Dreamer.

“Alice’s Last Adventure”

Alice is a retired (and very successful) author of the long-running “Preston Penn” series of children’s books about a lovable rascal who gets involved in some genuinely creepy adventures. She’s now an alcoholic and fairly reclusive, but ventures out once a year to give a reading of one of her books at the local library to a bunch of squalling brats. Last year, she missed the event because she returned to her hometown for the funeral of the childhood friend on whom the character of Preston Penn was based. But Alice is once again giving the annual reading this Halloween. Things have been getting creepier and creepier in Alice’s life—even her cat seems to notice strange, furtive things happening around her. This story is all about characterization and atmosphere, because everything that happens in it is extremely subtle. Is Alice simply an old drunk with a morbid, over-active imagination, or are there really strange things and entities intruding on our reality? Alice is portrayed perfectly here, a real testament to Ligotti’s ability to create fully realized characters; this is a brilliant and authentic character study. One of my favorites of his, perhaps because of the story’s subtlety.

“Dream of a Manikin”

A story in the format of a long letter from one psychiatrist to another; the writer seems to be a male psychiatrist who has been referred an odd patient, a young woman who calls herself Amy Locher, by a female psychiatrist he is infatuated with. It’s not entirely clear what the exact nature of the relationship between the two psychiatrists is; the writer seems kind of weird and perhaps stalker-y, though the pair may be having a series of flings. In any case, Ms. Locher comes to a single session and recounts a recurring dream she has that troubles her deeply. Though she says she is a loan processor, in the dream world, she is a manikin-dresser at an upscale boutique. (Note Ligotti’s spelling: “manikins” are typically hyper-realistic dummies used by anatomists and medical professionals, as opposed to “mannequins,” which are dummies that stores use to display clothing.) Then, in that dream-state, she has another dream as the manikin-dresser, and interacts with some terrifying manikins that cause her to question the nature of her own identity and reality (is she a manikin dreaming she is a woman?) The narrator hypnotizes her, and detects traces of the female psychiatrist, who is also a hypnotist, which makes him wonder if he is having a prank played on him. Locher doesn’t show up for her second session, and he finds out she provided false contact information: that of an upscale boutique with a manikin in the window that is dressed exactly as Locher was. The writer then has a dream in which he also interacts with creepy doll people, and the last paragraph of the story is sufficiently creepy and odd that I wonder if perhaps he has been given some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion, or will be transformed into a (sentient?) manikin by the female psychiatrist. The story’s atmosphere is wonderfully creepy, and offers some commentary on the nature of human identity. Are we all simply manikins? I wonder what Ligotti might have to say about the theory that we inhabit a simulated universe.

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Week 256 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Graves, Lee, Martin, Starlin, Keltner, and Russell

Welcome to Week 256 of my horror short fiction review project! I had a clear favorite story this week: “Yellow and Red” by Tanith Lee. While I grew up reading Tanith Lee’s mind-warping dark fantasy tales, her horror stories are exceptional. She was a terrific wordsmith.

The Black Magic Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining (Taplinger, 1976)

“An Appointment for Candlemas” by Robert Graves

A short but amusing little interview with Mrs. Hipkinson, a thoroughly middle-class British witch with actual magical powers. She’s very blasé about them, but she and her fellow practitioners seem to be extraordinarily powerful. Not much to this one, but fun.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“Yellow and Red” by Tanith Lee

What a wonderful story. It’s perfect in all particulars, I think. There’s just something about this story that really appealed to me. Gordon Martyce is a dour, stodgy, semi-misogynous inheritor of his uncle’s country estate. Gordon visits and is essentially warned to sell the place by all the locals he encounters because everyone in his family who has lived at the house has died prematurely. What a terrific set-up. Gordon spills some whisky on some old family photos and discovers what has been causing the mysterious deaths over the decades. This one was exactly what I was looking for in a weird fiction story.

Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens (IFWG Australia, 2022)

“Doctor Weird: ‘The Sword and the Spider’” by George R.R. Martin, Jim Starlin, and Howard Keltner

A short (8-page) comic from the 1970s or thereabouts that is more notable for the people involved in the project than the actual content of the comic itself. Dr. Weird is an occult-themed superhero who is kind of a low-rent Superman type, though he ends up wielding a captured demonic sword (a la Elric) against a demon riding a gigantic bloated spider that is probably the creepiest element of the whole comic. Not a waste of time, but it’s really just a curiosity of a bygone era.

Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Jove/HBJ, 1979)

“Mirror, Mirror” by Ray Russell

Alan has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for a mirror that can show him the future. The Devil has tricked him: the mirror only depicts exactly what will happen in front of it exactly five seconds in the future. Alan exhibits it at a party to try to gain some notoriety, though after the party the Devil shows up and points out that the mirror was only supposed to be for his private use, so Alan is, of course, dragged off to Hell. This ending is a bit of a cheat because Alan is condemned to Hell for violating a clause of his contract that the reader didn’t even know existed. Not very exciting.

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Story Review from Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer: “The Frolic” and “Les Fleurs”

I have long admired Thomas Ligotti’s work but have rarely if ever reviewed him here. I aim to correct that in 2023. Each week, until the stories run out, I’ll review some of Ligotti’s fiction, beginning with Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, then move on to Grimscribe’s Puppets, a wonderful tribute anthology, then an issue or two of the Ligotti-inspired magazine, Vastarien.

Today I’m discussing the first two stories in Ligotti’s Songs of Dead Dreamer.

“The Frolic”

What a delightful story with which to begin Ligotti’s first collection. I think this was probably the first Ligotti story I recall reading, so I will always have a soft spot for it, but it’s an objectively engaging story that carries an almost maddening sense of menace and dread from the very first sentence. The story takes place entirely within the cozy home of David and Leslie Munck, who have just moved into their new home after David took a job as a prison psychiatrist at the local prison. The couple also has a young daughter, who is asleep upstairs. David is at his wits end: the new job has turned out to be unsettling in ways that he hadn’t anticipated; the latest problem comes from an inmate—a convicted child-murderer—who refuses to tell anyone his name, so he is just referred to as John Doe. Leslie doesn’t like the new town, or David’s job either, so is looking forward to leaving. The couple talks about David’s troubles, and he checks on Norleen, who sleeps upstairs clutching a stuffed animal; he even shuts her bedroom window, which is partly ajar. Leslie shows him a bust of a young boy made by one of the inmates, which she purchased in a local store. This is the final straw for David, who recognizes the boy as one of Doe’s victims. Eventually David grows increasingly alarmed—along with the reader—that maybe, just maybe, Doe has escaped and taken their daughter, despite the improbability of that. As it turns out, Doe has taken Norleen, and left a taunting note stuffed into the split-open stuffed animal. Undoubtedly he had been hidden in the room all along. So we are left with the question of Doe’s nature. Was he simply a madman, or was he some sort of demonic/otherworldly figure, as he alluded to David during their conversations? He certainly hinted that he came from and had access to some sort of otherworldly space that he used for his “frolics,” what he called his torture-murders. This was a very chilling and extremely effective story. A very approachable story for those new to Ligotti.

“Les Fleurs” [The Flowers]

I have always been a sucker for a “diary of a madman” type of story—is that a distinct and recognized sub-genre of horror fiction? If not, it should be—and Ligotti puts his own unique imagination to work here. The unnamed narrator-diarist is interested in pursuing a romance with a young woman named Daisy, appropriately enough, who works at a local florist shop. It very rapidly becomes clear that he has disposed of another young woman, Clare, who he dated for a while but then he came to believe that she was unfaithful to him; besides, Clare could never properly appreciate his avant-garde art, and he oh so badly wants to find a woman who can appreciate his art. He is obsessed with flowers, and intimates that he is part of a flower-obsessed secret society of occultists, the Brotherhood of Paradise. Now to be sure, his art does certainly seem to be strange. We see a sculpture that seems to depict some sort of shoggoth-like plant-animal thing that Daisy clearly doesn’t care for, nor does she seem to like a painting of another world’s strange vista that he eventually shows her. Daisy’s disdain for that painting spells her doom. A very nice little done with excellent style and economy of words. I also found some elements of humor in it—when we see a madman’s line of thinking laid out explicitly, it’s hard not to see the absurdity in it. The only lingering question in my mind is how reliable is the narrator? If he’s reliable, then he’s a sorcerer who has access to some darkly beautiful floral world that he just wants to share with a woman who can appreciate its hypnotic beauty as he can. If he’s unreliable, well, his art is just misshapen lumps and the clear scribblings of a madman, and he’s going to keep obsessing over women and killing them each in turn when they make clear that in fact they don’t share his artistic vision. Either way, it’s a great story.

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