"Alice's Last Adventure" Commentary

[dr. locrian]

"Alice's Last Adventure": Commentary
from www.ligotti.net/tlo/ss-ala.html

A long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half world between childhood and adolescence.


This tale is written as a short journal in first person. The protagonist, whom the reader knows only as Alice, is an aging writer of bizarre children's stories concerning a fictional character based on her real-life childhood friend, Preston. She is induced to write the text of "Alice's Last Adventure" by the "...pain of episodes that have caused me to become a little insecure about my psychic balance and to attempt to confirm my lucidity by writing it all out."

Alice begins her story by giving the reader some background information: her intellectual father who had the "blood of a child," was obsessed with Lewis Carroll's work (hence, the protagonists' name), and died of a stroke before Alice reached puberty; Alice has made a name for herself in past years by writing such weird books such as Preston and the Ghost of the Gourd or Preston and the Starving Shadows. Her popular series of stories all concerned one Preston Penn, "a disciple of the bizarre," who leads adventures in an "upside-down, inside out, sinistral, always faintly askew (if not entirely reversed) universe," a concept which was inspired in Alice by her father pointing out that the room on the other side of a mirror in Carroll's Through the Looking Glass was "not tidy."

The troubles begin when the older, widowed Alice learns that the real-life Preston, whom she has not seen since her father's death when she was twelve, has passed away. She travels to her hometown, which seems exactly the same, making the changes in the body of her soul-mate Preston and her own life seem all the more grotesque and wrong.

After a one night dalliance with the much younger Hank DeVere at a local hotel, Alice has the first in a long series of experiences which seem to often involve a disturbing element in reflections, whether seeing an oddly moving shape in the mirror of her hotel room; something seen by her cat in the toilet that causes the feline to retreat for the first time in her life (Alice sees only a small, shriveled reflection of her own face, which she promptly flushes); the hideously reversed double of the lecherous neighbor, Mr. Thompson, in Alice's rearview mirror; or Alice's own reflection, covered in shadows in the black mirror of her home's window just minutes before midnight on Halloween. It is in this last locale that Alice, drinking heavily (she is alcoholic), writes her manuscript, trying to collect her thoughts, her sanity falling apart. Hours before, she had performed her Halloween reading at the local library, only to be humiliated by a voice in the audience who compares Alice's old face to a mask, disturbed by the mirror image of two howling jack-o-lanterns hovering in the darkness as she reads her story, and startled by a little girl dressed up in a "kitty-cat" outfit who passes out during Alice's reading because the child thought she "saw something horrible in her mask" (which also serves to remind Alice of her own cat's fright earlier that day by something mysterious and unknown). Finally, as she drives back to her house, Alice is completely unnerved by the Halloween sights of costumed figures flitting about in the night.

In "Alice's Last Adventure," Ligotti plays with a theme common to much of his work: the shattering and manipulation of identity. The protagonist realizes at some point that he (or in this singular case, she) is helpless, being pulled on puppet strings by a persona more dominant than hers and a reality stranger than anything she has known (but which she has imagined throughout her life). As a writer of strange tales, the irony here is keen as Alice slowly and inexorably is drawn into the strange world of the imaginary Preston. The protagonist herself fully realizes the literary nature of her story, stating at one point that it really does not matter whether what she writes is nonfiction or fiction. Her tale does relate awful horrors of a true (or untrue) nature, "But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality--which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair."

Alice reflects on herself, her face, her past, her life, and finds an increasingly bizarre presence, shadows that seem hungry to feed on what she thought was hers and what has been slowly stripped away all of the long, sad years of her life.

--Jonathan Padgett

Ligotti Comments

JP: I presume Lewis Carroll's work was at least partially an inspiration for writing "Alice's Last Adventure." Besides the background setup (the protagonist as a writer of bizarre children's stories; her father's obsession with Carroll's work), there is a Carroll quote about "untidiness" on the other side of a mirror. Did this line inspire you to write your story?

TL: It wasn't this idea alone.

JP: What was the impetus?

TL: At the time I wrote "Alice's Last Adventure" I was reading a lot of Vladimir Nabokov's works, all of which mess around with reality in the manner of Carroll, sometimes with direct reference to the Alice's Looking-Glass world. The Annotated Lolita points out several of Nabokov's allusions to Carroll.

[Preston]

I enjoyed reading this story but the thing that caught me off guard was the "Harry Potter" like character and the female writer. Did anyone get the same impression?

- Preston

[the_havoc_man]

One bit of insight that I always got from this story was the idea that an author is trapped by a past character by their audience, even though the a writer strives to create something more meaningful to them, Like the author from Stephen King's Misery as well. Thanks for the post Dr. Locrian. I plan on re-reading Songs of a Dead Dreamer very soon, once I finish moving.

[The Silent One]

While the whole of Ligotti's opus probably qualifies as "bleak", "Alice's Last Adventure" is one of that handful of his tales that really qualify as "sad", another notable example being "The Bungalow House", perhaps because, unlike many of Ligotti's other first-person works, the reader is given an actual view into the mind and emotions of the narrator, lending further to the horror of their ultimate physical or metaphysical destruction by letting one, as opposed to forcing one to or not to, sympathise, on a level, with the decedent.

[mishima head]

If sadness is a lesser emotion than metaphysical numbness, then this story may not be Ligotti's best. But it's the Ligotti story I've read the most times, am drawn back to it. Ligotti has an amazing range of psychological states he's able to reconstruct (and consequently destruct) in his stories. In this particular story, he manages to both describe the crumbling madness of old age and a disturbed fanciful adolescence, quite well.

My favorite so far, as Im plugging through my copy of The Nightmare Factory, once again, in no particular order. Im alternating reading one of Ligotti's with an E. A. Poe tale, which is producing rather strange moods.

[Renoroc]

I thought the story provided good insights into alcoholic dementia.

[The Silent One]

Something I just noticed: DeVere is extremely similar to de verre, namely "of glass", or more poetically "of the looking-glass". Not likely a *complete* coincidence, considering Tom's more-than-reasonable knowledge of French.

[Nemonymous]

ALICE’S LAST ADVENTURE

“…that peculiar drunkenness of a child’s brain,…”

Which is ironic as Alice in late life replaces that natural drunkenness with an unnatural sort.
A wonderful character study of a woman whose Dad used to read to her Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass, and now she reads to children at each Hallowe’en her own famous stories of a boy character… Two selves: herself as this story’s projected narrator and the authoress Alice self whom the first self almost mocks, among the Joycean epiphanies that lead to the striking finale and yet another self. A Sunset Boulevard of masks and mirrors. Quite chilling as well as poignant.
When this work was first written it would have been seen as experimental, I guess, despite its Horror story trappings. Now it is an exhibit of great seasoned or traditional literature. The story is broadly the same text as it always was, I assume, but it is now a different story altogether in the light of changing times, emerging mores and new undercurrents.
‘Stories’ is a good word for what we compose as our separate selves, the linear or, even, overlapping exhibits of each one of us. Within or set against these panoplies of perceived identity we hope that our latest adventure in active projection is indeed the last one, fixed and certain and eternal – but it never is.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

ALICE’S LAST ADVENTURE “…that peculiar drunkenness of a child’s brain,…” Which is ironic as Alice in late life replaces that natural drunkenness with an unnatural sort. A wonderful character study of a woman whose Dad used to read to her Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass, and now she reads to children at each Hallowe’en her own famous stories of a boy character… Two selves: herself as this story’s projected narrator and the authoress Alice self whom the first self almost mocks, among the Joycean epiphanies that lead to the striking finale and yet another self. A Sunset Boulevard of masks and mirrors. Quite chilling as well as poignant. When this work was first written it would have been seen as experimental, I guess, despite its Horror story trappings. Now it is an exhibit of great seasoned or traditional literature. The story is broadly the same text as it always was, I assume, but it is now a different story altogether in the light of changing times, emerging mores and new undercurrents. ‘Stories’ is a good word for what we compose as our separate selves, the linear or, even, overlapping exhibits of each one of us. Within or set against these panoplies of perceived identity we hope that our latest adventure in active projection is indeed the last one, fixed and certain and eternal – but it never is.

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

[Banake]

Honestly, Preston Penn made me think about Peter Pan. And I think there is some similarities.

"Preston gained a reputation as a champion of misbehavior and an adventurer who looked beneath the surface of everyday things (...) to discover a stunning sortilege, usually with the purpose of stunning in turn his perenial foe: the dictatorial world of adulthood."