Nemonymous
Grimscribe
THE LOST ART OF TWILIGHT
"...for my existence took the form of one seamless moment, without forgettable yesterdays or expectant tomorrows."
This starts with another Aunt, one born as an Aunt years after she was born, who we later find out is named Terese. Remarkably the above quote echoes the last line of my previous review about Aunt Elise, remarkable in the sense that I have just read this substantive Twilight story without remembering it at all from 1989 when I must have read it for the first and only time.
And indeed it is a revelation. A horror story in the tradition of Lovecraft and Poe, the prose supremely gothic and manipulative with perfect turns of phrase and quotabilities (far too many to which to do justice here), and also decidedly making the reader feel almost 'dirty' with a permeating evil or nastiness, coupled with modernistic tones that remind me of many writers I have read in recent years including someone I read for the first time recently, Clarice Lispector, i.e. In this Ligotti we read: "This was simply a family reunion, a sentimental gathering." The prehensility of understatement. Human as animal, here blood-yearning vampires.
The work is enticingly imbued with painterly Aesthetics, abstract as well as representational, and the concept of endless twilight in this context. This carries a touch of Clark Ashton Smith in my eyes. Modern music, too ("a slow, throbbing drone like the lethargic pumping of a premature heart.") Adumbrations of Cezanne, who lived where the protagonist's French roots centred. The Endless Twilight artist protagonist sees himself, both literally and metaphorically, as "the offspring of the dead" (cf Ligotti's later overt espousal of anti-Natalism in CATHR). And the protagonist's family hinterland is seen with the distaste of Lovecraftian xenophobia, the French tongue being seen as "loathsome". An 'aristocracy of blood'.
More "labyrinthine eyes." I feel with these Dreamcatching reviews, I, too, am feasting at Ligotti's "astral banquet of Art." The shocking ending makes me think this is a mass abuse, to echo the earlier individual abusers in this book, a gang bang of abuse to the protagonist and his Aunt as well as to our sensitivities, a gang bang implemented ironically by sensitive literary decadence and aesthetic wordage, amid "A vista of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomical haze..." A chess match where the reader thinks he is winning, till the author calls checkmate, "a discourse in hell on the subject of sin", "an opera of iniquity" - an endless twilight as a staging-post for anti-natalism, as "the prospect of eternal life in eternal death seduces me more and more."
"I said no to life and death. No, Mr. Springbud. No, Mr. Worm."
(An extract of my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
"...for my existence took the form of one seamless moment, without forgettable yesterdays or expectant tomorrows."
This starts with another Aunt, one born as an Aunt years after she was born, who we later find out is named Terese. Remarkably the above quote echoes the last line of my previous review about Aunt Elise, remarkable in the sense that I have just read this substantive Twilight story without remembering it at all from 1989 when I must have read it for the first and only time.
And indeed it is a revelation. A horror story in the tradition of Lovecraft and Poe, the prose supremely gothic and manipulative with perfect turns of phrase and quotabilities (far too many to which to do justice here), and also decidedly making the reader feel almost 'dirty' with a permeating evil or nastiness, coupled with modernistic tones that remind me of many writers I have read in recent years including someone I read for the first time recently, Clarice Lispector, i.e. In this Ligotti we read: "This was simply a family reunion, a sentimental gathering." The prehensility of understatement. Human as animal, here blood-yearning vampires.
The work is enticingly imbued with painterly Aesthetics, abstract as well as representational, and the concept of endless twilight in this context. This carries a touch of Clark Ashton Smith in my eyes. Modern music, too ("a slow, throbbing drone like the lethargic pumping of a premature heart.") Adumbrations of Cezanne, who lived where the protagonist's French roots centred. The Endless Twilight artist protagonist sees himself, both literally and metaphorically, as "the offspring of the dead" (cf Ligotti's later overt espousal of anti-Natalism in CATHR). And the protagonist's family hinterland is seen with the distaste of Lovecraftian xenophobia, the French tongue being seen as "loathsome". An 'aristocracy of blood'.
More "labyrinthine eyes." I feel with these Dreamcatching reviews, I, too, am feasting at Ligotti's "astral banquet of Art." The shocking ending makes me think this is a mass abuse, to echo the earlier individual abusers in this book, a gang bang of abuse to the protagonist and his Aunt as well as to our sensitivities, a gang bang implemented ironically by sensitive literary decadence and aesthetic wordage, amid "A vista of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomical haze..." A chess match where the reader thinks he is winning, till the author calls checkmate, "a discourse in hell on the subject of sin", "an opera of iniquity" - an endless twilight as a staging-post for anti-natalism, as "the prospect of eternal life in eternal death seduces me more and more."
"I said no to life and death. No, Mr. Springbud. No, Mr. Worm."
(An extract of my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)