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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2452401.Teatro_Grottesco?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Teatro Grottesco" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1209961143m/2452401.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2452401.Teatro_Grottesco?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Teatro Grottesco</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/128466.Thomas_Ligotti">Thomas Ligotti</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/32552627?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars Thomas Ligotti's work has been hard to find in the UK. When I picked up this edition (published by Virgin in 2008 from the 2006 US hardback), I feared that it would be another general anthology largely duplicating the only other available text - The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World. 
 
 Of course, there are very many overlaps (most notably Purity, The Red Tower, The Bungalow House, Severini and Teatro Grottesco itself) but the two books are complementary and not competitive. Why? The 'Shadow' (to be reviewed separately) presents a series of small masterpieces that give a taste of this heir to Poe in the round but 'Teatro' presents Ligotti as a coherent philosophy of life - or is it non-life since the mood is decidely nihilistic.
 
 Three sections presents different viewpoints on an essentially single dark vision of existence - a form of anti-existentialist nihilism in which the life force at the heart of the universe is presented as something very dark indeed, a deadening puppetry in which blind forces make us act or become as they wish and not as we, illusorily, believe we will ourselves to do or to be.
 
 All this is encapsulated in the final story - 'The Shadow, The Darkness' - which requires what has gone before in the book and leaves one with a taste of a nihilism that must surely cause us to worry about Mr. Ligotti's mental state. I have never read a more credible account of that blackest state of existence, existential depression - one without Satanic or demonic dark forces, a pure expression of (perhaps) Lovecraft's Nyarlothep's malign and meaningless rule over all being.
 
 This alone is not a story to be read lightly - certainly not by someone mentally vulnerable. Personally, I found it powerful, a necessary read and one that triggered a sense of commitment to life in me precisely because, in literary form, it exhibited the darkest mental state imaginable, Styron's and Milton's 'darkness visible'. To see this darkness, feel it inside oneself as a possibility and then turn away from it is a liberation - but some may not be able to do that. Approach with care if you are unsure of your own hold on life.
 
 But we run ahead of ourselves ... The book is divided into three sections - Derangements, Deformations, and The Damaged and the Diseased. 
 
 The first [Derangements:] comprises five stories of alienation and, since I am not into spoilers, let us just say that he presents a world of individuals and communities where the protagonists are victims or observers of various mysterious, unfathomable, apparently random, external forces whose general tendency is towards madness, dissolution, degradation and death. 
 
 This is Lovecraft shorn of even the hope that there might be a heroic conclusion or an ultimate triumph of the ordinary against dark forces. The Old Ones are no longer 'personalities' out there to be feared and fought but have become diffuse mindless malignities inside us and our communities. Dark forces are embedded very deep indeed within the ordinary and seem to be loki-like in their conduct, engaged in a snide and sardonic sideshow at our expense. Malicious almost out of boredom, accident and blind nature. Indeed, the hint is that nature, our nature, is 'nihil' or, at best, a blind willing of itself at our expense.
 
 The second [Deformations:] set of three stories are centred on a very particular environment - a mysterious and foggy border town where a faceless corporation is in league with manipulative forces, the medical profession it would seem, to pull in unsuspecting and mentally vulnerable people and force them into lives of inescapable drudgery 'lightened' only by random acts of cruelty which seem to be without personal malice. An air of cosmic malice depersonalises the horror.
 
 Existence is seen as almost accidental, a situation where all we can see are the workings of systems that cannot be understood, operating according to unknown rules and rivalries, that entrap us as readers to the degree that we identify with the neurasthenic, paranoid personalities who act as narrators. Hidden within the text are hints of the sort of practices that Lovecraft and Howard would have assigned to 'unspeakable cults'.
 
 If the first section is about the horror of being at the mercy of specific events and processes and the second is seemingly an allegory of the meaningless of modern life, working as drudges towards death, the real darkness, centred on art and philosophy, comes in the third section, 'The Damaged and the Diseased'. This culminates in the vile, dark tale with which this review began.
 
 Again no spoilers but the five stories seem to centre on the presumption of art and of the intellect in their claims to come close to meaning in a meaningless existence. The characters are possibly all mad, certainly disturbed and often sick in body as much as mind, introvert and stuck in their dreams or in environments that are claustrophobic. The best known work is Teatro Grottesco, a descriptor of the world of Ligotti, as much as the story 'The Clown Puppet' is a descriptor of the individual in that world. There are clowns, carnivals, costumes, cabarets, theatres, puppetry, art, all supposed to be providers of fun and entertainment but all, following the tradition of Stephen King and Ray Bradbury, twisted into paranoia, deception, madness and tragedy.
 
 Why go on? The world of Ligotti is disturbing. I have mentioned the obvious influence of Poe mediated by Lovecraft. There are small nods to King (an underestimated writer) although Ligotti writes in small amounts to concentrated effect whereas King tells long rollicking tales that somehow always seem to affirm humanity somewhere in the text, even if the general tone is pessimistic. 
 
 In my view, Ligotti is a must-read and a re-read and the fact that the book can contain perhaps half the material of another anthology and yet the two anthologies bear complete separate (possibly repeated) readings (like Poe and Lovecraft) suggests that the artistry lies in the positioning of the stories against one another as much as in the stories themselves. But for a taste, I give you with two extended quotations:-
 
 "Even in a northern border town of such intensely chaotic oddity and corruption there was still some greater chaos, some deeper insanity, than one had counted on, or could ever be taken into account - wherever there was anything, there would be chaos and insanity to such a degree that one could never come to terms with it, and it was only a matter of time before your world, whatever you thought it to be, was undermined, if not completely overrun, by another world."
 ['In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land':]
 
 "Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race ... Words are simply a cover-up for this conspiracy. They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness - its ultimate artistic cover-up. Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of self or soul exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up'
 
 ['The Shadow, The Darkness':]
 
 There is one last thing to note - the style. Ligotti uses repetitions a lot, much like Lovecraft might use a word like 'eldritch' to make the reader feel some intensity of engagement with the story. The style is hard to pin down but it is detached and world-weary, observing, emotionless, sometimes allusive so that some horror or disturbance is seen (as it were) slightly offstage, like a twitch of a curtain or rat running across the aisle of the show. The mood is of being stuck in a grey, misty or sepia stage set or geographical location where, if you walked too far in any direction, you might fall off the ends of the known world and into nothingness. Those borders seem to shrink as the stories progress so that claustrophobia is inevitable.
 
 There is something European about the sensibility. Ligotti is not in the least optimistic like your average American. This is the world of Dr. Caligari and black and white art movies of long ago, of Kafka (one is reminded of 'In the Penal Colony') ... there are a lot of hospitals and medication, a lot of attempts to avoid reality through art, work, society and drugs that are ultimately useless.
 
 So, if you have a strong stomach for existential horror, try it.
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1016626?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Tim's review
rating:

bookshelves: -------five-star-, horror, north-american
recommended for: Anyone Strong

Thomas Ligotti's work has been hard to find in the UK. When I picked up this edition (published by Virgin in 2008 from the 2006 US hardback), I feared that it would be another general anthology largely duplicating the only other available text - The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World.

Of course, there are very many overlaps (most notably Purity, The Red Tower, The Bungalow House, Severini and Teatro Grottesco itself) but the two books are complementary and not competitive. Why? The 'Shadow' (to be reviewed separately) presents a series of small masterpieces that give a taste of this heir to Poe in the round but 'Teatro' presents Ligotti as a coherent philosophy of life - or is it non-life since the mood is decidely nihilistic.

Three sections presents different viewpoints on an essentially single dark vision of existence - a form of anti-existentialist nihilism in which the life force at the heart of the universe is presented as something very dark indeed, a deadening puppetry i...more

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