Themes of Social Disconnection / Alienation in TAROVF

[Nicole Cushing]

I was fortunate to buy this one at the Centipede Press table at WHC. Just recently got around to it. I've read some of the commentary in earlier threads, and agree it's thematically quite different from other Ligotti works. The stories don't seem as intense (at least, not as "philosophically intense", if that makes any sense).

These stories seem to saunter, every so delicately, into the world of human relationships (or the feeling of disconnection that occurs when these relationships end). This, in itself, is pretty fascinating, as Tom has often said in interviews that he's not interested in exploring human relationships in his writing.

And yet...(caution: spoilers posted below)

Victor Frankenstein's brain is placed in a reanimated corpse, and he despairs because the only creature who can understand his plight no longer exists...

Dracula rues the day he was "irresistibly drawn" to Mina Harker.

Lawrence Talbot remains conscious after death, and realizes the young woman he fancied doesn't keep her promise that would allow him to remain near her...

Lost love in "The Intolerable Lesson of the Phantom of the Opera"...

Similar themes in "The Scream: From 1800 to the Present" (in which a ghost yearns for an attractive, apparently lonely living woman to hear his scream, only to feel betrayed when she has a man over. In the end he is "not only utterly alone, but also competely imperceptible behind his private wall of eternity."

And so on...and so on...

So, while this book is somewhat easy to marginalize as a minor contribution to Ligotti's body of work, it does seem -- to me at least -- to be a rare chance to see Tom address previously-unexplored subject matter. (And sometimes, as in "The Scream", doing so brilliantly).

[matt cardin]

I think you're dead-on accurate here, Nicole. Tom once told me that the direct emotional impetus that drove him in the writing of this book was the painful ending of a real-life relationship. Given that pretty much the entirety of the rest of his work has arisen out of the cosmic supernatural-horrific symbolic worldview that attends his panic anxiety disorder, I think an etiological reading (as it were) of TAROVF strongly supports your point. These stories touch on and inhabit much of the same general supernatural horrific territory, but their overall inflection is distinctly more human and personal in a conventional sense.

Thank you for raising the point in such an interesting way, too. Now you've inspired me to want to go back and reread the book, which has struck me as something really special -- not a piece of marginalia, not trivial at all -- ever since my first reading of it circa a decade (or more) ago. That may well be due to what you describe here: the tendency of these mini-tales to "ground" supernatural horror in terms of a more mundane and commonly known aspect of human reality than is Tom's usual authorial wont.

[Freyasfire]

Fascinating observations indeed! I am also inspired to re-visit this book, which is one my my least favourite works by Ligotti, and read it in a different light, one that highlights his inherent humanity. The romantic in me is also saddened to hear that part of the impetus for writing this work was a failed relationship.