Nemonymous
Grimscribe
THE SECT OF THE IDIOT
"I was no more than an irrelevant parcel of living tissue caught in a place I should not be, threatened with being snared in some great dredging net of doom, an incidental shred of flesh pulled out of its element of light and into an icy blackness."
A "wasting" tissue called, by Professor Nobody earlier in this book, a "sepulchral pomp". There is a genuine pomp to this story and perhaps to the whole book so far, a knowingness, even a condescension towards mere readers and others who revel in these dark texts with a hopeful sense of comfort that Horror fiction often provides, a sense that the Horror is happening to the protagonists but not happening to the readers. Except here there is no such comfort. A paradox that we read of The Sect of the Idiot, and then we begin to realise that we are a composite of that same Idiot. A recurrent multiple bluff, that we are not going to win.
The text itself glories in its own compositional riches - and it is indeed full of textured language riches - comprising the single roofed precincts of the town, the uncanny angles as a mixture of endlessness and claustrophobia, with our becoming the faces (while manipulating Lovecraftian claws and tentacles from our sleeves), the same faces from the previous Locrian asylum story as we share the protagonist's own views from the high rooms and the top storeys of those strange buildings, hypnotised by those who are themselves hypnotised, and there is no escaping such pomp and circumstance.
Just as, for me, the Idiot God Azathoth sits at the claustrophobic centre of the Earth as well as of the endless Nemonymous Night...
(But which of us is the biggest Idiot? Nobody can be visionary without being trapped by their own vision. Vision battling vision, book battling book, author battling author in our Facebook world, Rush-to-Die in his bejinned convergence of the fantastical and the quotidian, Ligotti entrammelled by his own synonymous knots?)
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
"I was no more than an irrelevant parcel of living tissue caught in a place I should not be, threatened with being snared in some great dredging net of doom, an incidental shred of flesh pulled out of its element of light and into an icy blackness."
A "wasting" tissue called, by Professor Nobody earlier in this book, a "sepulchral pomp". There is a genuine pomp to this story and perhaps to the whole book so far, a knowingness, even a condescension towards mere readers and others who revel in these dark texts with a hopeful sense of comfort that Horror fiction often provides, a sense that the Horror is happening to the protagonists but not happening to the readers. Except here there is no such comfort. A paradox that we read of The Sect of the Idiot, and then we begin to realise that we are a composite of that same Idiot. A recurrent multiple bluff, that we are not going to win.
The text itself glories in its own compositional riches - and it is indeed full of textured language riches - comprising the single roofed precincts of the town, the uncanny angles as a mixture of endlessness and claustrophobia, with our becoming the faces (while manipulating Lovecraftian claws and tentacles from our sleeves), the same faces from the previous Locrian asylum story as we share the protagonist's own views from the high rooms and the top storeys of those strange buildings, hypnotised by those who are themselves hypnotised, and there is no escaping such pomp and circumstance.
Just as, for me, the Idiot God Azathoth sits at the claustrophobic centre of the Earth as well as of the endless Nemonymous Night...
(But which of us is the biggest Idiot? Nobody can be visionary without being trapped by their own vision. Vision battling vision, book battling book, author battling author in our Facebook world, Rush-to-Die in his bejinned convergence of the fantastical and the quotidian, Ligotti entrammelled by his own synonymous knots?)
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
