The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

Foreword

In the historical development of the artistic horror story, there are three major figures. The first is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the father of the modern psychological horror story. The next, chronologically, is H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), who brought cosmicism—an awareness of the vastness of the universe and of the insignificance of the human race— to the weird tale. And now there is Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953), who has extended Lovecraft’s cosmicism by suggesting that an inescapable malignancy and nightmare inheres in all existence, manifesting itself in both the individual psyche and the physical cosmos. Interestingly, these three writers have found the short story rather than the novel to be their ideal vehicle for expression.

For Ligotti, “the short story allows a purer and more intense expression of horror … than do novels.”

Born in Detroit, Ligotti grew up in a nearby suburb and in 1977 graduated from Wayne State University with a B.A. in English. From 1979 to 2001 he worked in the literary criticism division of the Gale Research Company (now Thomson Gale), a publisher of reference books. Ligotti then moved to Florida, where he makes his living as an editorial freelancer.

He began writing horror fiction around 1976, and published his first short story in 1981. His first book, a small press collection entitled Songs of a Dead Dreamer, came out in an edition of 300 copies in 1985. Today it is a highly-prized rarity. An expanded edition appeared from a trade publisher in 1989, followed by further collections: Grimscribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), and the omnibus volume The Nightmare Factory (1996). Since then Ligotti has worked mostly with small publishers, like Durtro Press, which has issued elegant limited editions like In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land (1997), a collection of four interconnected stories; an unproduced screenplay, Crampton (2002), written in collaboration with Brandon Trenz; and some small books of Ligotti’s verse, I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000), This Degenerate Little Town (2001), and Death Poems (2004).

In 1994, Silver Salamander Press collected Ligotti’s vignettes in The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein & Other Gothic Tales. Another small press, Mythos Books, has published My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), whose eponymous story is Ligotti’s lengthiest tale. Forthcoming from Mythos Books is Ligotti’s long essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: On the Horror of Life and the Art of Horror, a kind of personal credo of Ligotti’s views on life and literature. The two main websites devoted to Ligotti’s work are Thomas Ligotti Online (www.ligotti.net) and The Art of Grimscribe (www.ligotti.de.vu). Both websites have a complete Ligotti bibliography, and much else of interest.

The stories in this volume were selected by Ligotti and myself as an introductory sampler of his works. They are arranged in the order in which they were written. Thus, “The Least Feast of Harlequin”— which Ligotti has referred to as the first story he wrote that he thought was good enough not to throw away—opens the collection, and “Purity,” one of his most recent tales, concludes it. The bulk of these stories, however, date from the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ligotti’s most productive period.

Unlike the bulk of horror fiction past and present, Ligotti’s work” is essentially outside the tradition of strict realism in which a neatly demarcated natural world is threatened by a supernatural menace, an aberration in the normal course of things that more often than not maybe combated and conquered.

In the universe of Ligotti’s fiction, the natural and the supernatural merge into the same nightmare; to distinguish them is meaningless and no salvation is to be found in this world or any other. As Ligotti has noted, many of his stories “focus on those anomalous moments in which a character’s perception of his world is shaken and he is forced to confront a frightening and essentially chaotic universe.” Which is, in its way, a realism of the highest order.

—Douglas A. Anderson