The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

[Insentient Traveler]

All the best of luck in your fight.

Also an additional thanks to you Nemonymous for your intelligent reviews that are unashamedly infused with personal interpretations (which is a factor in any review whether it is admitted or not). The unique, deeply honest approach raises a scholarly assessment to a truly enjoyable and thoroughly educating companion to the already rich original text.

Again thank you and my thoughts will also be with you.
Take care.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

THE VOICE OF OUR NAME The final section of this book containing just one story. And the Nemonymous Voice finishes his review.... "...with some feverish intent." - as the story below reminds me. THE SHADOW AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD It now seems appropriate that I started this review with the picture of two apples, not exactly true to this final story's epithet of "apple red" as such, but fresh enough to eat. But now those two apples have begun to decay in real life. So what about them apples? This story I shall take personally. But first, it is of course a celebrated masterpiece of the Horror fiction genre. Take that as read. The concept of the scarecrow standing in ground that won't turn cold, after it has been cleared. The obnoxious growth that sprouts from the ground like a hand into it as if into a puppet. The decay of Mother Nature, with mankind as part of it, like that decay already beginning with those two apples, is described in the most effective way, and I cannot possibly do justice to it here with my own words describing such utterly mind-blowing Ligottian descriptions. Too many ripe-to-mulch quotes to quote, so I won't quote any. The "self-murder" of Mr. Marble who seems to become the scarecrow itself or its spawn and whom I see as a darkly tutelary and premonitory extension of the author and his authorial intent, even if nobody, including this book's author-conduit himself, can possibly fathom such intent... Well, I could go on. Suffice to say that it is the perfect climax of the book. During the last few months, I have felt like I myself have the "texture of spoiled fruit", and that that hand, like cancer, has come into my own scarecrow's puppet-body. Tomorrow, suitably, I complete my course in having that 'hand' cauterised, at least delaying my death for a nonce - so that I can perhaps write more book reviews than I would otherwise have done! But this story reminds me that there is also much comfort in immersing myself in the decay that besets us all sooner and later, gaining an understanding of this story's description of "a perverse reluctance, as in the instance of someone who is hesitant to have a diseased part of his own body cut away to keep the disease from spreading." This book is 'a dead monument to once ancient hope', but one that has now perhaps earned its alien imperishability, a form of marble impervious to the heat death that otherwise awaits our planet. My book review is now complete. A dreamcatching review as my personal journey through this new Penguin Classics collection. I hope it can be seen - in addition to the listed factors in my now fulfilled 'trial conclusion' earlier in this review - as "disclosing prophecies that no one would credit at the time." (The latter quoted words are from the book's last story just reviewed. They appear in both the 1991 Robinson version and this Penguin one.)

Rationale: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.ph...007#post123007

I realise that I forgot to mention its pareidolia, making faces and shapes from all those elements of Nature, that I have been doing with my photos over the last few years. That seems to fit perfectly with everything else I mentioned.
Also, as an aside, I wonder if Father Sevich in ‘The Library of Byzantium’ is another form of naive parental invitation toward a ‘frolicking’ similar to that of John Doe.
Finally, I shall now read for the first time Jeff VanderMeer’s Foreword to the book, expecting it to give me more food for thought…
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• nullimmortalis
  November 3, 2015 at 4:56 pm Edit
  Someone new to Ligotti literature – as most of the potential purchasers of a Penguin Classics book will be – should, I feel, encounter its strength of disturbing originality face on with the text, a revelation, an experience of reading.
  That whole process of revelation is pre-empted by putting the Mars picture on the front cover (even if – or especially if – it is indeed skilfully representative of the contents).
  That point disregards my personal antipathy towards the picture itself as a depiction of the gestalt of Ligotti, an antipathy which remains. But that is not an argument one can have, as it is based on sensibility and instinct.
  Someone just put HERE this perfect cover on TLO:
  
  
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