"Alice's Last Adventure": Commentary
from www.ligotti.net/tlo/ss-ala.html
A long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half world between childhood and adolescence.
This tale is written as a short journal in first person. The protagonist, whom the reader knows only as Alice, is an aging writer of bizarre children's stories concerning a fictional character based on her real-life childhood friend, Preston. She is induced to write the text of "Alice's Last Adventure" by the "...pain of episodes that have caused me to become a little insecure about my psychic balance and to attempt to confirm my lucidity by writing it all out."
Alice begins her story by giving the reader some background information: her intellectual father who had the "blood of a child," was obsessed with Lewis Carroll's work (hence, the protagonists' name), and died of a stroke before Alice reached puberty; Alice has made a name for herself in past years by writing such weird books such as Preston and the Ghost of the Gourd or Preston and the Starving Shadows. Her popular series of stories all concerned one Preston Penn, "a disciple of the bizarre," who leads adventures in an "upside-down, inside out, sinistral, always faintly askew (if not entirely reversed) universe," a concept which was inspired in Alice by her father pointing out that the room on the other side of a mirror in Carroll's Through the Looking Glass was "not tidy."
The troubles begin when the older, widowed Alice learns that the real-life Preston, whom she has not seen since her father's death when she was twelve, has passed away. She travels to her hometown, which seems exactly the same, making the changes in the body of her soul-mate Preston and her own life seem all the more grotesque and wrong.
After a one night dalliance with the much younger Hank DeVere at a local hotel, Alice has the first in a long series of experiences which seem to often involve a disturbing element in reflections, whether seeing an oddly moving shape in the mirror of her hotel room; something seen by her cat in the toilet that causes the feline to retreat for the first time in her life (Alice sees only a small, shriveled reflection of her own face, which she promptly flushes); the hideously reversed double of the lecherous neighbor, Mr. Thompson, in Alice's rearview mirror; or Alice's own reflection, covered in shadows in the black mirror of her home's window just minutes before midnight on Halloween. It is in this last locale that Alice, drinking heavily (she is alcoholic), writes her manuscript, trying to collect her thoughts, her sanity falling apart. Hours before, she had performed her Halloween reading at the local library, only to be humiliated by a voice in the audience who compares Alice's old face to a mask, disturbed by the mirror image of two howling jack-o-lanterns hovering in the darkness as she reads her story, and startled by a little girl dressed up in a "kitty-cat" outfit who passes out during Alice's reading because the child thought she "saw something horrible in her mask" (which also serves to remind Alice of her own cat's fright earlier that day by something mysterious and unknown). Finally, as she drives back to her house, Alice is completely unnerved by the Halloween sights of costumed figures flitting about in the night.
In "Alice's Last Adventure," Ligotti plays with a theme common to much of his work: the shattering and manipulation of identity. The protagonist realizes at some point that he (or in this singular case, she) is helpless, being pulled on puppet strings by a persona more dominant than hers and a reality stranger than anything she has known (but which she has imagined throughout her life). As a writer of strange tales, the irony here is keen as Alice slowly and inexorably is drawn into the strange world of the imaginary Preston. The protagonist herself fully realizes the literary nature of her story, stating at one point that it really does not matter whether what she writes is nonfiction or fiction. Her tale does relate awful horrors of a true (or untrue) nature, "But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality--which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair."
Alice reflects on herself, her face, her past, her life, and finds an increasingly bizarre presence, shadows that seem hungry to feed on what she thought was hers and what has been slowly stripped away all of the long, sad years of her life.
Ligotti Comments
JP: I presume Lewis Carroll's work was at least partially an inspiration for writing "Alice's Last Adventure." Besides the background setup (the protagonist as a writer of bizarre children's stories; her father's obsession with Carroll's work), there is a Carroll quote about "untidiness" on the other side of a mirror. Did this line inspire you to write your story?
TL: It wasn't this idea alone.
JP: What was the impetus?
TL: At the time I wrote "Alice's Last Adventure" I was reading a lot of Vladimir Nabokov's works, all of which mess around with reality in the manner of Carroll, sometimes with direct reference to the Alice's Looking-Glass world. The Annotated Lolita points out several of Nabokov's allusions to Carroll.
from www.ligotti.net/tlo/ss-ala.html
A long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half world between childhood and adolescence.
This tale is written as a short journal in first person. The protagonist, whom the reader knows only as Alice, is an aging writer of bizarre children's stories concerning a fictional character based on her real-life childhood friend, Preston. She is induced to write the text of "Alice's Last Adventure" by the "...pain of episodes that have caused me to become a little insecure about my psychic balance and to attempt to confirm my lucidity by writing it all out."
Alice begins her story by giving the reader some background information: her intellectual father who had the "blood of a child," was obsessed with Lewis Carroll's work (hence, the protagonists' name), and died of a stroke before Alice reached puberty; Alice has made a name for herself in past years by writing such weird books such as Preston and the Ghost of the Gourd or Preston and the Starving Shadows. Her popular series of stories all concerned one Preston Penn, "a disciple of the bizarre," who leads adventures in an "upside-down, inside out, sinistral, always faintly askew (if not entirely reversed) universe," a concept which was inspired in Alice by her father pointing out that the room on the other side of a mirror in Carroll's Through the Looking Glass was "not tidy."
The troubles begin when the older, widowed Alice learns that the real-life Preston, whom she has not seen since her father's death when she was twelve, has passed away. She travels to her hometown, which seems exactly the same, making the changes in the body of her soul-mate Preston and her own life seem all the more grotesque and wrong.
After a one night dalliance with the much younger Hank DeVere at a local hotel, Alice has the first in a long series of experiences which seem to often involve a disturbing element in reflections, whether seeing an oddly moving shape in the mirror of her hotel room; something seen by her cat in the toilet that causes the feline to retreat for the first time in her life (Alice sees only a small, shriveled reflection of her own face, which she promptly flushes); the hideously reversed double of the lecherous neighbor, Mr. Thompson, in Alice's rearview mirror; or Alice's own reflection, covered in shadows in the black mirror of her home's window just minutes before midnight on Halloween. It is in this last locale that Alice, drinking heavily (she is alcoholic), writes her manuscript, trying to collect her thoughts, her sanity falling apart. Hours before, she had performed her Halloween reading at the local library, only to be humiliated by a voice in the audience who compares Alice's old face to a mask, disturbed by the mirror image of two howling jack-o-lanterns hovering in the darkness as she reads her story, and startled by a little girl dressed up in a "kitty-cat" outfit who passes out during Alice's reading because the child thought she "saw something horrible in her mask" (which also serves to remind Alice of her own cat's fright earlier that day by something mysterious and unknown). Finally, as she drives back to her house, Alice is completely unnerved by the Halloween sights of costumed figures flitting about in the night.
In "Alice's Last Adventure," Ligotti plays with a theme common to much of his work: the shattering and manipulation of identity. The protagonist realizes at some point that he (or in this singular case, she) is helpless, being pulled on puppet strings by a persona more dominant than hers and a reality stranger than anything she has known (but which she has imagined throughout her life). As a writer of strange tales, the irony here is keen as Alice slowly and inexorably is drawn into the strange world of the imaginary Preston. The protagonist herself fully realizes the literary nature of her story, stating at one point that it really does not matter whether what she writes is nonfiction or fiction. Her tale does relate awful horrors of a true (or untrue) nature, "But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality--which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair."
Alice reflects on herself, her face, her past, her life, and finds an increasingly bizarre presence, shadows that seem hungry to feed on what she thought was hers and what has been slowly stripped away all of the long, sad years of her life.
--Jonathan Padgett
Ligotti Comments
JP: I presume Lewis Carroll's work was at least partially an inspiration for writing "Alice's Last Adventure." Besides the background setup (the protagonist as a writer of bizarre children's stories; her father's obsession with Carroll's work), there is a Carroll quote about "untidiness" on the other side of a mirror. Did this line inspire you to write your story?
TL: It wasn't this idea alone.
JP: What was the impetus?
TL: At the time I wrote "Alice's Last Adventure" I was reading a lot of Vladimir Nabokov's works, all of which mess around with reality in the manner of Carroll, sometimes with direct reference to the Alice's Looking-Glass world. The Annotated Lolita points out several of Nabokov's allusions to Carroll.
