The Shadow, the Darkness

[Nemonymous]

THE SHADOW, THE DARKNESS – Not so much a story as a philosophical treatise disguised as a story and makes mention of a “Conspiracy Against The Human Race” – with a photographic 'negative' Maat called Tsalal. It takes place in a Twin Peaks town (Crampton) (plus mention of “psychic coffee house” and the town’s metamorphosis at the end into, inter alia, “strange peaks”), a ‘storefront’ art gallery (Cf The Bungalow House) and a character called Grossvogel who reminds me of Madoff the disgraced hedge-fund operator. A very apt comparison, I found!
“Soul or self” are dubbed “nonsense and dreams”, and Grossvogel is like the “giantlike” Russian ‘man’ in Algernon Blackwood’s THE CENTAUR. In fact this Ligotti ‘story’ (almost novella length) is the precise 'negative' version of THE CENTAUR novel.
It also treats of Art as a “swindle” (akin to hedge funds?) and other Aesthetic matters in 'The Bunglaow House' - and, in this respect, reminds me very strongly (but also, in its way, very differently) of the story ‘The Point of Oswald Masters’ (the authorship of which is currently unknown in the ‘Cone Zero’ anthology (Nemonymous 8)).
The style of 'The Shadow, the Darkness' is hypnotic, almost like Philip Glass music as well as clumsily amorphous, yet paradoxically tight and sinewy, in the textual texture of Elizabeth Bowen fiction.
The gastrointestinal disease (here seen as a religious Road to Damascus!) echoes the story ‘Teatro Grottesco’ and, not surprisingly in view of this ‘disease’, there is the need of another Art installation lavatory to be placed into the ’story’!
This ‘story’ also has labels like “drab abyss”. A 'story' about “absence” and the “useless desire to do something, and to be something.”
In many ways, perhaps against its authorial intent, this ‘story’ uplifts me. I fail to explain why.