What You Have Left

[G. S. Carnivals]

Quote ( View Quotes )
Even if it turns out that I'm making everything up, at least what you have left can be enjoyed as a story--no small value to my mind.       Thomas Ligotti - “Alice's Last Adventure” Added by: G. S. Carnivals on 06-09-2007 #67

[Harksen]

Hehe... Great quote! From a great story. To be perfectly honest, this is probably the favorite Ligotti story of mine (well, the Top 3, at any rate). Perhaps a strange choice for a favorite, but this Alice-meets-horror/grotesqueness struck a chord in me. And I find it perfectly executed... Heh, and I also like that it is a little odd, for a Ligotti story :-P

Regards,
Henrik

[The Silent One]

The totally subjective becomes objective at some point. Look at the Comte de Lautréamont, Michael Gira, Thomas Ligotti, D.F. Lewis. Waking dreams and hallucinations written down in the most objective way possible, Gira in particular. His fantasies are written with suffocating vividness, incredibly personal but detatched. On the opposite end, Ligotti or Lewis. When they are describing the mundane things that become objects of horror, it is through a dreamer's lense. Lewis takes on a quirkier tone, almost a normal human looking at the absurd calmly, while Ligotti has a voice that has dark, dry intonations, mixed with black humour and a jaded, repressed revulsion.

Gira walks in broad daylight in L.A. while various sickly faces of reality and its associates glare at him. He stares and reveals some inhuman quality in himself to the scene that frightens it into masking itself. By night, Ligotti wanders Detroit and is followed by shades. He watches them slither towards him, only a man with a long knife, disappointed that his doom won't be more spectacular. And the next morning in some non-descript town in Britain, Lewis remembers something about the latter which never happened. He resumes writing, as the garden begins to sing fitfully.