Ligotti as a form of Neo-Decadent literature

[G. S. Carnivals]

Kevin,

I imagine you're in the throes of your frenzied Flannery O'Connor reading. I won't take much of your time. When I suggested "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" as the story to read, I really meant "Good Country People." Time blurs the details. Anyhow, a passage from the latter has just struck me as "familiar." Check out the cadence of the "nothing" bit:

"One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and, opening it at random, she read, 'Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing--how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of Nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.' These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill."

This quotation is probably not a lot of help as such. The leg business in the story is, though.