Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 7: Bird, Thomas, Langan, and Files

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the final four stories in this anthology.

“Gailestis” by Allyson Bird

Gerda and Kay are unhappy, dysfunctional orphan twins living in a world that seems to be slowly being taken over by a red weed of unknown origins. (It strikes me as a verrrrry slow sort of environmental apocalypse, perhaps.) Kay works as a gardener for an eccentric, wealthy doctor; Gerda agrees to work as a semi-nude artist’s model for the doctor so her brother can keep his job. Kay dies though, perhaps killed by some sort of parasite that is crawling beneath his skin. There are some interesting and evocative bits here, I just wish it all made more sense.

“The Prosthesis” by Jeffrey Thomas

Thomas works at a plant that manufactures all manner of medical prostheses, everything from a hand or eye to complete limbs, torsos, and even replacement infants. He is stealing these prostheses, one at a time. We eventually learn that Thomas had a stillborn twin brother, Mason. One day Thomas shows up at work with an injury on his wrist identical to what it looks like when a prosthetic hand is joined to a wrist. By the end of the story, we have Mason, seemingly alive and well, reading a newspaper story about Thomas having been killed by a security guard while attempting to steal a foot. Mason looks down and realizes that his own foot is missing. The tone and setting of a decayed urban wasteland are wonderfully Liggotian. This was perhaps the strongest story by Jeffrey Thomas that I’ve read—a really strong entry in the collection.

“Into the Darkness, Fearlessly” by John Langan

A fascinating character study. We open with the death of a relatively obscure horror author, Linus Price, in a tale told by Price’s friend and editor, Wrighton Smythe. Price was a mean-spirited alcoholic with a bitter ex-wife—a green card-seeking Polish beauty named Dominika—who had become unhealthily obsessed with a new writer, Suzanne Kowalczyk, who became the darling of the horror community before she went mad and murdered Price, who had been stalking her, before disappearing. Whew. That sounds like a bit of a soap opera, but I’m quickly summarizing the main characters. Smythe receives Price’s final book manuscript hand-delivered to his home by an unknown party (my money’s on Kowalczyk), which provides some interesting new tales interspersed with a very personal accounting of Price’s descent in madness, obsession, and hatred for Kowalczyk, who seems to have rapidly achieved the notoriety he always craved. There’s also a hallucinatory funeral, seemingly attended only by Smythe and Dominka, in which that pair have sex while pressed up against Price’s coffin after drinking copious amounts of wine that may have been laced with a narcotic. The final section of the novelette describes what happens after Smythe wakes up from a drunken stupor, but I suspect that section is intended as fiction, rather than as straight narrative, since it uses the same font as Price’s manuscript passages, leading to the question of who wrote this last piece? Did any of this actually happen? I am uncertain, but it’s all wonderfully done.

“Oubliette” by Gemma Files

What an amazing story. Perhaps my favorite in the collection, and that’s saying something because this was an unusually strong and imaginative collection of stories. Thordis Hendricks is a wealthy young woman who is placed in a live-in care program after two failed suicide attempts. She lives in an apartment under a doctor’s care (Dr. Corbray), plus she has a care worker (Yelena Rostov) who checks in on her daily; Thordis also records her dreams and other thoughts in a journal, which Yelena regularly reviews. A couple wrinkles quickly present themselves: Thordis is in Shumate House, a therapy center/program developed in the late 1970s to help rehabilitate some of the Jonestown survivors. Over the years, Shumate House also housed the sole survivor of another (fictional) cult, a kind of Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, a young woman who eventually killed herself in the apartment because of her regrets about not joining her comrades on their cosmic voyage. I think you can begin to see where this is going. Thordis is now living in the same apartment that the cult survivor did; everyone who has lived in this apartment  since then has ended up killing him/herself. Things aren’t looking so great for Thordis. This is almost a kind of ghost story, though I suspect it’s closer to a kind of spectral colonization of consciousness tale, if you catch my drift. I don’t want to spoil any more of this because it’s an amazingly effective tale—truly chilling, once you begin to see what’s going on here—that is mostly told through journal entries, emails, transcripts of therapy sessions, and the like. Really well done.

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Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 6: Nicolay, Strantzas, and Tremblay

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the next three stories in this anthology.

“Eyes Exchange Bank” by Scott Nicolay

Ray is a comparative literature grad student who is visiting his loser friend Danny after a breakup with his girlfriend Lisa. Ray travels into the decaying urban landscape of eastern Pennsylvania, periodically witnessing things that are just slightly off-kilter, as in, something weird just happened or Danny just made a brief but horrifying confession, but what was that all about? This is exactly the kind of physical geography that I have come to associate with Ligotti’s work, so a very well-done homage capturing that here. It’s almost a relief when Ray is put out of his misery when he is carried off inside a dying mall by eyeless grey things. Good stuff: really great characterization and setting—I can see these characters and places in my mind’s eye very clearly.

“By Invisible Hands” by Simon Strantzas

Wonderfully creepy. An aged puppetmaker is hired by the enigmatic and bedridden “Dr. Toth” to construct a marionette made from a human corpse. He is brought to and from Toth’s decaying mansion by an ominous chauffer. The puppetmaker agrees to build the marionette while also suffering from missing blocks of time/memory. He eventually discovers that this new marionette, Toth himself, the chauffer, and others he has built—but has no memory of doing so—are inhabited by outside, alien intelligences (clearly malign), and that he has built many of these puppets for them. He will also be building more of them in the future as he is returned to his home and the whole situation set up again at the end of the story. Great stuff.

“Where We Will All Be” by Paul Tremblay

Zane is a college student staying with his parents during Christmas break. He has ADHD and is currently off his meds (Ritalin) and self-medicating with caffeine. We learn how he came to be diagnosed as a child, and it’s an important plot point that Zane’s brain has always “worked differently” from other people’s brains. One day, Zane’s parents, and seemingly everyone else in their town—it’s unclear how far the problem extends—begin to travel lemming-like toward the source of a mysterious high-pitched electronic whine. Zane goes with his father, though unlike everyone else, Zane is unaffected. Eventually everyone just keeps walking into the sea, presumably to their deaths, trampling on those who fall, and possibly being devoured by the underwater shadows the size of submarines that Zane sees. Zane might just be the only person who survives. Really good stuff.

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Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 5: Price, Griffin, and Gavin

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the next three stories in this anthology.

“The Holiness of Desolation” by Robert M. Price

A man finds himself trapped in the dreamworld, as manifested in the city of Vastarien. He tries desperately to free himself and return to our world, eventually finding a bookstore inhabited by a talking raven. There, he stumbles upon a copy of Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race and reads it, internalizing the ideas and arguments it contains. After reading it, he reawakens in our world, but some terrible apocalypse has occurred and he wanders through a destroyed landscape devoid of all life. Eventually he happens upon a small band of human survivors and murders them all. A little too on-the-nose with the direct Ligotti reference, I think, but interesting.

“Diamond Dust” by Michael Griffin

Max works at an ordinary office job and lives with his girlfriend Cassandra, who makes industrial art installations. He discovers that his company, his girlfriend, and his enigmatic neighbor are all secretly involved in a massive engineering project. He thinks it’s some kind of mysterious skyscraper but it turns out to be a vast subterranean project that descends deep into the earth and seemingly springs up over night. It also becomes apparent that some sort of bodily transformations are also involved. Very interesting and Kafka-esque.

“After the Final” by Richard Gavin

J.P. (the narrator) and his companions seem to travel a postapocalyptic wasteland that has been ravaged by a plague; they seek J.P.’s mentor, the enigmatic Professor Nobody, but are unable to summon Nobody despite their best efforts. One of J.P.’s companions is Maximilian, who, as it turns out, is J.P.’s former therapist, and the rest of the companions are Maximilian’s family, held hostage by J.P. The world has not been destroyed by plague, but J.P. did manage to kill his parents with homemade anthrax. Professor Nobody is, of course, literally nobody, as he is just part of J.P.’s disturbed psyche. An interesting one that I liked the more I thought about it. Some elements in this one that reminded me of the film Mandy.

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Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 4: Kelly, Angerhuber, and Padgett

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the next three stories in this anthology.

“Pieces of Blackness” by Michael Kelly

Peter and Katy are a childless couple who adopt a young boy named Timothy. Timothy is, of course, a budding young psychopath who kills animals, sleepwalks, and is generally creepy. Katy becomes so attached to the young scamp that she begins to lactate and starts breastfeeding the boy (who is way beyond the age that a child should still be breastfeeding). Peter comes to feel that there is a kind of darkness inside himself—not the metaphorical kind, as it turns out—and begins vomiting up literal pieces of the darkness. There’s no real sense of coherency here, other than three very disturbed or delusional people living together as a quasi-family. I just wish that there was more to unify the stories of these three people.

“The Blue Star” by Eddie M. Angerhuber

A man revisits his seaside hometown, a place that he once visited with his girlfriend and another couple. They traveled by boat to the town and ended up hanging out (and making out) in what seemed to be an abandoned building that had a glowing neon blue star hanging outside. The narrator ventures back into that abandoned building, where he visits the desiccated corpse of his former girlfriend, still right where he left her long ago. As it turns out, while the pair were making out, the power cables from the blue star sign attached themselves to the woman and drained the life force right out of her. He revisits every year. A tragic story that was oddly very poignant.

“20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” by Jon Padgett

This is the short version of the story—Padgett has published a much longer version of this one elsewhere—and I think it’s kind of a masterpiece. This is just a wonderfully creepy and disturbing piece that begins as the text from a manual on how to teach yourself ventriloquism but becomes much more than that. It starts off innocuously, but with a few subtle clues that this is no ordinary (or mere) guidebook. The diligent reader progresses from ventriloquism to telekinesis, and then gains a horrible kind of control over other people and things. The idea is that they (and eventually you yourself) are all just dummies with no true thoughts, feelings, autonomy, or agency. While you progress from being just a regular ventriloquist to a Greater Ventriloquist, eventually you learn that in fact you are a thrall to the Ultimate Ventriloquist. Surprisingly effective.

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Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 3: Spriggs, Cushing, and Goodfellow

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the next three stories in this anthology.

“The Xenambulist: A Fable in Four Acts” by Robin Spriggs

Curious; not quite sure what to make of this one. A man notices a missing step on the stairs as he exits his apartment. He leaves the building and enters a strange church. He is transported to an otherworldly place—another planet, perhaps—before discovering that the whole place is artificial, like a stage set in a theater. The man eventually manages to leave this place, but is beset by shadow monsters, then, it seems, is forced to become one of them. Some interesting things going on here, I just couldn’t figure out what exactly.

“The Company Town” by Nicole Cushing

A man and his daughter pack up and leave town after their wife/mother dies. They take a road trip to a new town where, it soon becomes clear, the man planned a murder-suicide using the services of a company that apparently provides such services for a fee. As it turns out, the company charges a rather large fee—why do you need a company’s help to kill yourself?—which means that they will have to work the fee off while working at the company before they can kill themselves. In fact, everyone working at the company is working their fee off, including the woman at the information desk, who has been working at the company for the past twenty-seven years.

“The Man Who Escaped This Story” by Cody Goodfellow

In my view, this one is just too experimental of a story and a story structure to be wholly successful. At the heart of this one is an insane asylum patient whose identity has unraveled. He conceives of himself in several different ways: as a man who has made a deal with the devil, an author who can write things into existence, and a fictional character in a story. There are some interesting ideas here, but it’s just not all that coherent a story. Wish I liked this one better, I am typically a big fan of Goodfellow’s work.

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Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 2: Warren, Lane, and Schweitzer

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the next three stories in this anthology.

“The Human Moth” by Kaaron Warren

I enjoyed this story because of its sheer insanity. A woman is raised by her strange, abusive parents who take in a large number of cruel, bullying foster children who also abuse her. From childhood she fancies herself a kind of moth in human form. She does things like avoiding eating anything other than lilac, and covers herself in powder. She eventually smothers her parents to death (this seems mostly justified), and then does the same to a drunk she encounters in a park. This one was just plain weird, but fascinating all the same.

“Basement Angels” by Joel Lane

Interesting. Max is a troubled soul, alienated and experiencing blackouts and missing time. He meets a man named Colin, whom he befriends, but who also sells him strange objects: a blue glass pane that seems to look out onto strange vistas, CDs that play strange mixtures of discordant music and noise, a beverage that may be narcotic, etc. Max eventually gets tired of his life and tells Colin he wants to work for him. Max goes to Colin’s studio, gets drugged there, and then has his shadow excised from him and cut into wailing strips that are then dried. Max is then dragged down into the basement and thrown in a chamber with a dozen other lost souls in similar shape. Very evocative.

“No Signal” by Darrell Schweitzer

Interesting. A college professor with a wife and daughter realizes that it is time for him to leave his entire life behind. In a dreamlike state, he travels via subway to another place and meets a crowd of people rushing away. One of them begs him to help and stop someone from leaving. He enters a building and finds a mirror there; he enters the mirror and encounters an unspeakably ancient entity that has been imprisoned in the mirror. He feebly tries to stop it from leaving the mirror, but is easily brushed aside. He winds up being trapped in the mirror. No idea what any of this was about, though I did enjoy it.

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Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 1: Llewellyn, Mills, and Cisco

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the first three stories in this anthology.

“Furnace” by Livia Llewellyn

A strange, slow-motion apocalyptic tale with some extremely evocative parts. The narrator is a young teenage girl, living with her mother and grandfather, on the outskirts of a small town. The town starts dying, but not because of a factory closing or an influx of drugs. Instead, something sinister and otherworldly is going on here. People—entire grocery stores worth of people—start disappearing, sometimes with traces of violence left behind, or are left horribly twisted and mutated.. The very nature of reality starts unraveling, with no clear explanation. Eventually the girl flees her town, heading southward, and over time the same thing starts happening in other towns. She eventually ends up in the last town on Earth, and then, of course, the same thing starts happening there. Very melancholic.

“The Lord Came at Twilight” by Daniel Mills

A story that builds on Ligotti’s “The Mystics of Muelenburg,” though I don’t think what is described here matches up well with what Ligotti wrote in his story. Nevertheless, I liked this one a lot though I am at a bit of a loss for what to make of the story’s ending. This is the diary of a medieval monk living at an abbey outside the German town of Muelenburg. Over time, the monastery’s society breaks down, with monks leaving, killing themselves, and falling into despair. The Town itself is in turmoil. The town’s silver-masked reclusive count orders an amphitheater to be built and he withdraws his support for the church. He has increasingly lewd, decadent, violent plays and performances in the new amphitheater. This culminates when a former monk sings an ode to the count, then kills himself on stage in tribute to the count. The narrator enters the count’s box with the intent of killing him, but he discovers that not only is the count not even present, but there’s no way for anyone to even enter the private box. Very reality-bending. I also got kind of a Chambers’ King in Yellow vibe with this one (which is a plus in my book).

“The Secrets of the Universe” by Michael Cisco

A brief story that didn’t work for me because it plays at profundity but I’m not sure that there is much here. The prose itself seems to consist of two tracks, interspersed with each other. The first track is a discussion between two people about their belief (or lack thereof) in ghosts and the supernatural. This contains some dime-store philosophizing that seems very circular to me. The second track—the far more interesting one—contains some brief anecdotes about strange things happening: one dog seemingly ritually sacrificing another at the behest of a supernatural entity; a man who starves cats to death as a hobby; and a fourth-grade teacher who is held captive, raped, and tortured by her students over a period of days. Overall, I can’t say that I took a lot from this story, but I did find some absolutely fascinating and thought-provoking bits of imagery tucked inside the rest.

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Story Review from Vastarien, Volume 1, Issue 1: Goff, Krall, Thoss, and Ropes

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the very first issue of Vastarien magazine, which if you haven’t yet checked out, you should. Here are my thoughts on the last four items in this issue.

“Nervous Wares & Abnormal Stares,” short story by Devin Goff

A really good story that begins very innocuously. This is the diary of a woman who has moved to a small, dying town to open a ceramics shop. She begins to learn that the town has secrets that are left unrevealed to an outsider like herself, including the existence of what seems like a cult whose members wear orange robes and hoods. The group eventually hires her to construct ceramic idols for them, which begins to take a toll on the woman. There are some fascinating things going on here with dates and issues related to mass/size of physical objects. Really intriguing.

“My Time at the Drake Clinic,” short story by Jordan Krall

A curious one; I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. The story begins with an instructor teaching some sort of class to approximately college-age students and two of the students are disruptive. There’s the impression that this may be a mental health facility rather than a university setting. One of the disruptive students ends up coming to visit the instructor in his office and they have several semi-incoherent conversations. By the end of the story, the instructor is having these same sorts of bizarre conversations with his boss. It’s unclear to me if the student’s mental problems were contagious in some sense, or if the instructor had been deranged all along. Not incredibly satisfying.

“Notes on a Horror,” essay by Dr. Raymond Thoss

An utterly compelling essay that was one of the strongest contributions in the journal. I would actually argue that it is an important essay, and I don’t say that lightly. The author is a practicing clinical psychologist who works with children who have experienced extreme forms of trauma, and has himself experienced such trauma. He (I am merely assuming that the pseudonymous Thoss is male) discovered Ligotti’s work and philosophy at the age of seventeen when he was suicidal; Thoss states that Liggotti saved his life by revealing that he was not in fact insane—the world is insane and he was merely awake. Most of the rest of humanity wants people like Thoss to go back to sleep. This is excellent. But the “important” part of the piece is Thoss’ description of how he incorporates some of Ligotti’s ideas into his clinical practice. This may be Ligotti’s most valuable contribution to society, via Thoss, and I am heartened that these ideas have proved useful to some of Thoss’ clients.

“Singing the Song of My Unmaking,” short story by Christopher Ropes

A depressed man who has attempted suicide twice lives in a city with his fiancée and his father, who is dying of cancer. A void opens above the city. At first, life goes on but then people start disappearing one, dissolving into the existential void. Eventually even inanimate objects—the city itself—disappears as well, until only the narrator is left. A very poignant look at what depression feels like and how depressives cope with it. Good stuff.

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Story Review from Vastarien, Volume 1, Issue 1: Mullins, Bates, Penkas, and Rose

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the very first issue of Vastarien magazine, which if you haven’t yet checked out, you should. Here are my thoughts on the next four pieces in this issue.

“Strange Bird,” poem by Ian Mullins

A poem that reflects on the detritus that is accumulated in life and how all will become, in time, alien and mere garbage that is sorted through and puzzled over.

“Solar Flare,” short story by Paul L. Bates

Interesting, perhaps even disconcerting story. A man is driving along a deserted road in absolute pitch blackness, intending to meet some friends, though he is undergoing some psychological turmoil and has come to believe that they are not his friends, and never have been. He does eventually meet up with them; they seem to be waiting for a major solar flare, perhaps even a civilization-destroying one. Bates’ use of darkness and the unfamiliarity of objects in a world without any light produces a really effective and surreal perspective, and demonstrates just how important the sense of sight is to us making sense of the world.

“Night Walks: The Films of Val Lewton,” essay by Michael Penkas

Great analysis of the use of solitary night walks—and how terrifying those can be—in the many horror films of iconic horror producer Val Lewton. I’ve always been curious about Lewton’s work, having heard many wonderful things about it. I was definitely inspired to check these films out. Evocative descriptions to the point where I genuinely want to see all the films described.

“Infinite Light, Infinite Darkness,” short story by Martin Rose

Set during the Vietnam War. Vo is an elderly Vietnamese farmer whose son and wife went missing one day, just leaving some bloodstains behind. He encounters an American soldier, apparently a deserter, who stays with him for a time. Like Vo’s son (pre-disappearance), the American believes that he periodically visits a nearby temple and meditates with a monk who is always there. Just one problem: Vo knows the area thoroughly and there’s no such temple. There are some subtle hints at darkness in this one, and suggestions that the enlightenment the monk seems to offer may not be an unalloyed good. Very evocative.

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Story Review from Vastarien, Volume 1, Issue 1: German, Smith, Worth, and Edwards

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the very first issue of Vastarien magazine, which if you haven’t yet checked out, you should. Here are my thoughts on the next four pieces in this issue.

“Wraiths,” poem by Wade German

A poem about ending the suffering of one’s life, which flows nicely from Ligotti’s comments on euthanasia in the interview that precedes this poem. Not bad, though I am certainly no connoisseur of poetry.

“Eraserhead as Antinatalist Allegory,” essay by Colby Smith

An excellent essay that gives me a framework for understanding David Lynch’s Eraserhead, a complicated film that has always intrigued and confused me. Delves deeply into the film’s themes of anti-natalism, life as suffering, and sickness. Very well done—exactly the kind of non-fiction I enjoy seeing in journals like this.

“The Theatre of Ovid,” short story by Aaron Worth

An epistolary story, set in 1898. A doctor in a lunatic asylum writes to his friend while on a honeymoon in Romania. He has married a former patient, Charlotte, who seems to be compelled to annotate her father’s old books. He finds it to be gibberish, but the reader understands that her annotations may be strange but they are also erudite. She eventually starts behaving strangely while sleepwalking, likely possessed or otherwise controlled by some ancient entity that is seeking a theater from the days that the ancient Romans controlled this coastal town in Romania. There is an intimation at the end that this theater is actually part of some cosmic or otherworldly locale/network of locations, outside traditional constraints of space and time. Interesting, though I’m not entirely certain what was going on here—just a few more hints would have been helpful.

“The Alienation of the Self: Marx, Polanyi, and Ligottian Horror,” essay by S. L. Edwards

An interesting set of reflections and comparisons between how Ligotti uses puppets with how both Marx and Polanyi thought about laborers, as well as the alienation that both laborers and puppets experience. Good.

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