Thomas Wiloch 1953-2008: A Personal Tribute by Thomas Ligotti

On September 4, Thomas Wiloch collapsed at his home and died from a probable heart attack. Among other laudatory things that could be said of Tom is that he was a great artist of the prose poem. He was in fact one of the greatest the literary world has known, even if that world did not know it. Perhaps someday it will.

Tom and I worked in different departments at the same publishing company in Detroit (and later elsewhere). We first met in 1980 at a Xerox machine where I was photocopying a collection of obscure ghost stories. Tom showed up with a book by Lord Dunsany that he wanted to copy. (Both of us prodigiously abused the facilities of the company where we worked.) On the spot we became friends. Not long after, we began exchanging and critiquing each other’s unpublished manuscripts and continued to do so for over twenty years. Anyone who has enjoyed my story “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” can thank Tom for getting me to rewrite the ending.

In addition to being a two-man creative writing group on company time, we engaged in literally thousands of conversations that most often ended in riotous laughter. Tom’s depth of wit is entwined in much of his writing (see Mr. Templeton’s Toyshop.) So is his depth of emotion, his intelligence, and that tincture of chaos that made him Thomas Wiloch and not someone else.

Not too long ago, I was asked to contribute to The Book of Lists: Horror. My list was that of the ten best horror poems or collections of all time. I submitted my choices in inverse order, from number ten to number one. Here is my number one pick.

Paper Mask by Thomas Wiloch. This is but one, almost arbitrarily chosen, collection among the numerous volumes of prose poems by Wiloch. He is the best at what he does, and what he does is seduce his readers into a world of quiet apocalypses, bitter ecstasies, and tiny derangements. While the prose poem form is compact by its nature, Wiloch’s imagination is vast with sinister conceits.

The Book of Lists: Horror is scheduled to be released on September 18 of this year. After I moved out of Michigan, I had not been in touch with Tom for some years. I thought I would send him a copy of the book in which I wrote the words above by way of saying hello again and perhaps getting into an exchange about how the universe has deteriorated since we last spoke. Now that Tom is gone, the universe has deteriorated a little more.

The following prose poem is taken from Tom’s 1989 collection The Mannikin Cypher. It is not so much representative of his work as it is appropriate to the occasion.

                              The Now Is Fragile

There is no childhood, except in our memories, and
there is no super man, except in our dreams.
      All is memory and imagination. We remember a past
now gone; we imagine a future we will never see.
            The now is fragile.
            We sit before a sheet of blank paper. We lift a pencil.
We charge this white pulp with meaning.

To read more about Tom and his work, see his Web site and the Wikipedia

article

Thomas_wiloch

on him.