Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie

[The Silent One]

What's your opinion on this story? Mine: Ligotti's only heroic fantasy. Inescapable doom. Aristocrats disappointed by the lack of scandal and debauchery. Rants from a deranged god. Enchanted spectacles and Silent Psalms. Red and black mediaeval attire. What's not to love?

 

[Aetherwing]

This was actually the very first TL story I read, and it remains one of my favorites to this day. All th epoints you raised, Silent, I agree with.

I also liked the term Tom used to describe the condotierre Faliol : Sword-Whore. How blatantly and delightfully honest!

-Aether

 

[waffles]

This is also one of my favorites. I reread it several times a year.
I think "Enemies of Silence" would be a great band name.

 

[The Silent One]

Band/Album names:
Anima Mundi
The New Burnstow Park Orchestra (A nod to "Ghost Stories for the Dead")
Paradise and its Slums
Simon Smirk
Bungalow Bill
Nethescurial
The Arthur Emerson Society
The Cloacinae of Spoleto (Both from "The Prodigy of Dreams")
Cynothoglys
Song titles:
"Somnambule" (A reference to "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes")
"Thoss as Thoth" (See "Last Feast of the Harlequin")
"Locrian's Mode"
"An Invocation (No More Blood)"
"The Dream"
-"At the Theatre"
-"Carniero's Return"
"My Education" (See "Miss Plarr")
"In the Abandoned Factory" (From "The Bungalow House")
"Night Bloomers" (See "Les Fleurs")
"Bloom!" (A nod to the final line in "The Chymist")

 

[matt cardin]

Good calls, Silent One. I agree that those would all make for great band and song names.

As for the story in question here in this thread, I personally view it as one of the core Ligottian texts, owing to its direct explication of the horrific metaphysical worldview that lies at the heart of Tom's entire fictional enterprise.

Aside from that, the story has long reminded me, owing to certain incidents in it and, more importantly, to its overarching decadent tone, of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."

 

[The Silent One]

Good calls, Silent One. I agree that those would all make for great band and song names.

As for the story in question here in this thread, I personally view it as one of the core Ligottian texts, owing to its direct explication of the horrific metaphysical worldview that lies at the heart of Tom's entire fictional enterprise.

Aside from that, the story has long reminded me, owing to certain incidents in it and, more importantly, to its overarching decadent tone, of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."

Actually, in an odd parallel, whenever I read "Masquerade of a Dead Sword", I mentally envision it it as a decadent late '60s horror film, perhaps an exceptional but long-lost Hammer film, especially the scenes toward the end. As the Anima Mundi speaks its soliloquy to Faliol, removing its mask, I can see a slow "over the shoulder" shot, moving from the left boot to the back of the head, along the way Faliol's agonised squirming rendered half clearly in the back/foreground, obscured and revealed with the slow descent of a mask-bearing hand, wihich in conclusion drops its load ceremoniously to the stone floor....

As the Duke of Soldori, it would have been wonderful to see some fine dramatic actor as Vincent Price play someone unspeakably boring.

 

[waffles]

Oh my, can you imagine what a Roger Corman production of Masquerade of a Dead Sword would look like?

Of course Vincent Price would have to be in it, but would we really want a pre-famous Jack Nicholson as Faliol?

Could Boris Karloff play the one-eyed wise man?

Actually, the movie would have nothing to do with the story - it would probably take place in the antebellum south and someone would get buried alive.

 

[The Silent One]

Of course Vincent Price would have to be in it, but would we really want a pre-famous Jack Nicholson as Faliol?
....
Actually, the movie would have nothing to do with the story - it would probably take place in the antebellum south and someone would get buried alive.

On the first point, I would think of him more as, say, the brute at the inn... Unutterable horror destroying a (small) mind in moments. He'd be excellent–for the two or three minutes that he'd be there.

As for the second, you are, sadly, all too right.

 

[Nemonymous]

MASQUERADE OF A DEAD SWORD: A TRAGEDIE

A review with possible spoilers, but I contend it is impossible to spoil this story.

"There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them."

This story is an "ugsome hilarity" in a swords and sorcery setting? Or a completely mad or confused exercise in masks and false jesters? If the latter, I guess, it is only madmen who can fathom it, so I make myself mad, for the nonce, to see if I can fathom it. To fathom its ulterior motives and to fashion a path, a subliminal exercise with gaps left for spying the true intent, a path towards this story's "fabulous hoax" or the serious philosophical area where its author is today? Probably both, I guess. A grooming of the world for real and for fun.

At first it seems as if it presents, to use the coinage from The Lost Art of Twilight, an "opera of iniquity", one composed by Rossini or Mozart, where Faliol is that opera's Figaro. But soon we stumble on clues to something else. The spectacles, an objective correlative like Nathan's trousers, allowing Faliol both to blur matters into madness and to focus them into truth. (By the way, did you notice above in my review of Eye of the Lynx, the image of the jester that I used to illustrate it had spectacles?) We watch people spying on Faliol, as the Figaro-type plot thickens with a mage and a sorcerer that he trusts one minute and is betrayed by the next, as they betray each other. As the author with his reader - and now vice versa?

All of this is thrust around - in Ligotti's beautiful gothic/experimental style - with the confusion of carnival night, but it is an inopportune time for Faliol to try untangling his puppet strings or undo his oneiric "envelope of sleep". The mage with sagging eyelid, who I take to be the freehold author himself, who holds the madman in a Torture Citadel threatening him, merely by means of explanation, with the Anima Mundi, something that needs destroying, but it won't let itself be destroyed by actually BEING the madman. Then the masked carnival where identities become even more confused, more confused indeed than this arguably mad review.

The jester eventually becomes "composed and methodical." The mage destroys himself, as "a heroic act". Faliol destroys himself, too, at the end, in a "crimson glory". The Anima Mundi is both the jester and the mage, as one, I propose, as I pick myself out of this fantastical morass and become myself "composed and methodical", like them or, rather, like him. The synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, as I have long called them, in an audit trail from here to CATHR.

Or it is just a mad swords and sorcery story, after all - one with a brilliant scene for which alone it is worth reading this controversial work: a scene that the text states goes "beyond the most gruesome".

"From the highest to the lowest, they are all my children and through their eyes I see my own glory."

(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)

 

[ToALonelyPeace]

It's rare to see a good (?) protagonist of Ligotti triumphant, even if he ends up dead. The story reminds me of Masque of the Red Death, where Red is the primal background. I imagine this story has onyx as its color.

 

[Nemonymous]

MASQUERADE OF A DEAD SWORD: A TRAGEDIE

A review with possible spoilers, but I contend it is impossible to spoil this story.

"There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them."

This story is an "ugsome hilarity" in a swords and sorcery setting? Or a completely mad or confused exercise in masks and false jesters? If the latter, I guess, it is only madmen who can fathom it, so I make myself mad, for the nonce, to see if I can fathom it. To fathom its ulterior motives and to fashion a path, a subliminal exercise with gaps left for spying the true intent, a path towards this story's "fabulous hoax" or the serious philosophical area where its author is today? Probably both, I guess. A grooming of the world for real and for fun.

At first it seems as if it presents, to use the coinage from The Lost Art of Twilight, an "opera of iniquity", one composed by Rossini or Mozart, where Faliol is that opera's Figaro. But soon we stumble on clues to something else. The spectacles, an objective correlative like Nathan's trousers, allowing Faliol both to blur matters into madness and to focus them into truth. (By the way, did you notice above in my review of Eye of the Lynx, the image of the jester that I used to illustrate it had spectacles?) We watch people spying on Faliol, as the Figaro-type plot thickens with a mage and a sorcerer that he trusts one minute and is betrayed by the next, as they betray each other. As the author with his reader - and now vice versa?

All of this is thrust around - in Ligotti's beautiful gothic/experimental style - with the confusion of carnival night, but it is an inopportune time for Faliol to try untangling his puppet strings or undo his oneiric "envelope of sleep". The mage with sagging eyelid, who I take to be the freehold author himself, who holds the madman in a Torture Citadel threatening him, merely by means of explanation, with the Anima Mundi, something that needs destroying, but it won't let itself be destroyed by actually BEING the madman. Then the masked carnival where identities become even more confused, more confused indeed than this arguably mad review.

The jester eventually becomes "composed and methodical." The mage destroys himself, as "a heroic act". Faliol destroys himself, too, at the end, in a "crimson glory". The Anima Mundi is both the jester and the mage, as one, I propose, as I pick myself out of this fantastical morass and become myself "composed and methodical", like them or, rather, like him. The synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, as I have long called them, in an audit trail from here to CATHR.

Or it is just a mad swords and sorcery story, after all - one with a brilliant scene for which alone it is worth reading this controversial work: a scene that the text states goes "beyond the most gruesome".

"From the highest to the lowest, they are all my children and through their eyes I see my own glory."

(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK