The Spectral Link | review by Rafe McGregor
The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
SubterraneanPress, 94pp, £11.80, June 2014, ISBN 9781596066502
Thisreview was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49,following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (athree-year hiatus).
IfThomas Ligotti is not the only contemporarypractitioner of weird fiction, the genre that emerged as an epiphenomenon ofliterary modernism, then he is certainly the most accomplished. This slimvolume comprises a two-page preface and a pair of short stories which, like hisentire oeuvre to date, resist interpretation and exemplify the recondite. Ligotti’sacquaintance with the perennial problems of the disciplines constituting theWestern tradition of philosophy – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics– is striking and his work exploits the failure of repeated attempts to answer crucialquestions about existence, knowledge, and morality. The suicidal narrator of “MetaphysicaMorum” might be speaking for the author when he registers his ‘scorn for thesaved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe’because Ligotti appears convinced that all is not right in the universe and continually revisits the fearful consequencesof this conviction in his strange, singular, uncanny stories. There is a strongimpression, for example, that “Metaphysica Morum” is nothing more than a slow,sustained unravelling of the meaning of the word ‘demoralization’, which is exposedas having implications beyond personal concerns with the terminal.
Despiteits innocuous title “The Small People” is perhaps the more philosophical of thetwo tales, exploring one of the most pervasive questions in metaphysics, thedifference – if any – between things as they really are and things as we perceivethem; or, alternately, the extent to which human concepts reflect the realityof the natural world. Here, the narrator finds disturbing evidence of amismatch and realises that he is one of the few possessed of ‘a type ofinstinct that actually forced me tosee things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I couldget by in life.’ He experiences asystematic disintegration of reality when the ‘small country’ he perceives iscontrasted first with the ‘normal country’ and then the ‘big country’ until theborder between small and big is breached by ‘halfers’. If neither “small” nor“big” map on to the world, do “self” and “other”? As the narrator penetrates deeper into the mysteryof small and half-small people, he is less and less able to “get by” and runsthe risk of that ultimate undoing…demoralization. Ligotti is a writer of weird tales and these two will not be toeveryone’s taste: their weirdness overflows and unsettles.
TheSpectral Link sold out almost immediately on publication and is unfortunatelynow only available at exorbitant prices on the used books market ($99 and £189respectively on Amazon US and UK at the time of writing).
