A while ago, I finished Thomas Ligotti’s short story collection “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World“, and I’ve now read one and a half of the three “Tales of corporate horror” in the collection of novellas “My Work is not Yet Done“, and I’m starting to feel like I’m ready to say something on the subject.

Ligotti’s been called “philosophical horror”, and although the most obvious comparison is to Lovecraft, although there are apparently also comparisons to Borges, William S. Burroughs, and Kafka. That’s impressive praise, and since I deeply love both Lovecraft and Burroughs, and very much respect and enjoy both Borges and Kafka, I figured I would at least like Ligotti’s writing.

But I don’t. Not much, anyway. He has the occasional flash of an interesting idea, but this is basically a whole literary career built on social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder as the ultimate horror, and that’s honestly a bit laughable, and not at all scary. Most of the “horror” derives either from problems with relating to other people, or from badly defined feeling that there’s something wrong with the world.

The prose is not particularly good either, it’s exceptionally repetitive in a way that for some reason makes my entire body itch with impatience, the language in general is uninteresting, and it feels like it really wants to be good, without knowing how, like it’s written by a precocious 16-year-old with bad social skills and a badly-thought-through nihilistic worldview. If these stories were written by a 16-year-old, I’d be quite impressed, and expect the author to do something really good some day, but Ligotti’s born in 1953, so it’s probably hopeless to expect improvement now (although “My Work is not Yet Done” is newer, and noticably better, than most of the stories collected in “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World“).

There seems to be an elitism inherent in many reviews of Ligotti’s work. Lovecraft scholar T.S. Joshi seems to love him and consider him superior to most modern horror, for instance, and tends to blame the readers for preferring stuff like Stephen King and Anne Rice. Now, Stephen King is not a great author, he’s a craftsman with good horror ideas, and Anne Rice is fun when you’re 16, but I can’t see how Ligotti’s any better, he’s just more pretentious, and his writing is bad in a different (and, I suppose, artier) way. There’s a tendency to pedantry, with an accompanying overuse of pretentious vocabulary, for instance, in My Work is not Yet Done, the narrator berates another character for not pronouncing “lackadaisical” correctly, and the word is used at least six or seven times afterwards in the relatively short story.

Also, there’s the major problem of Ligotti’s writing not being particularly scary at all. There’s a moment or two when you think “well, that’s kind of a creepy idea, let’s see where it goes”, but the answer is invaribly nowhere. What horror there is is understated to the point of fading into the wallpaper, and, as I mentioned before, is generally based on things people with severe social anxieties feel are terrifying, such as being an outsider to etiquette and opaque codes of behaviour, be it in corporations (My Work is not Yet Done), queer little villages (The Last Feast of Harlequin), or in an art gallery (The Bungalow House). According to Wikipedia, Ligotti suffers from anxiety, so to him, this might be terrifying, I’m sure, but to the rest of us, it’s mostly tedious. The second major motif is a vaguely gnostic idea of the fundamental evilness of all of creation, which is hidden to most, but glimpsed by some, who invariably go slowly and boringly insane or indifferent to the world because of their knowledge. The characters so afflicted often end up joining Ligotti’s idea of horror in fading into the wallpaper as if they were never there.

As you can tell, I’m not liking this much. I think I’ll stop here, since I think it’s clear how profoundly unsatisfying I find Thomas Ligotti’s writings, both as horror fiction/weird tales, and as literature in general. I’ll just mention as a footnote that both Ligotti books are horribly, horribly ugly editions, no doubt at least partially a result of them being published by smaller publishers. The Shadow at the Bottom of the World in particular is horrid, seeminly set in Times New Roman and laid out in and old version of MS Word, the kerning all screwed up (or non-existent), tracking varying wildly, the margins tiny. In addition, there seems to be an annoying lack of proofreading, since typos abound. That, compared with my misgivings about the text itself, is enough to drive me up the wall.

In short, Thomas Ligotti makes me itch.

Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film is an academic work, but a very light one, in a good way. Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror remains the definitive work in explaining and analyzing horror and its appeal, but Darryl Jones’ book is an excellent, more descriptive companion.

Breaking down themes in horror into chapters with names like “Hating others: Religion, nationhood and identity” and “Forbidden knowledge: Textuality, metafiction, and books”, Jones runs through an enormous corpus of works in a relatively compact volume. Each chapter starts out with the earliest literary examples of the themes, and usually ends up with modern horror movies that exemplify them, all the while running through possible symbolism and societal, political, and moral context for the themes. I don’t necessarily agree with every interpretation, but it’s still an excellent overview for people who are relatively new to the genre, and might think that horror is superficial and without deeper meaning.

Additionally, Jones has an entertaining writing style, full of dry wit, mixed with an obvious love of the horror genre. He repeatedly references the video nasties flap in his native UK, and lets no opportunity to dismiss this sort of hysteria pass him by. He’s no lover of just the “refined” in horror either, calling Abel Ferrara’s Basket Case “wonderfully grotty” in the chapter on body horror, as well as referring to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre his favourite horror film of all time. And then there are the repeated slams of Keanu Reeves…

All in all, highly recommended, both for the more academically minded, and for casual readers looking for an introduction to the themes and symbolism of horror. Personally, I’m passing this one on to my girlfriend, who’s had a somewhat negative opinion of horror, but was more interested once I started telling her about symbolism and horror as a representation of society’s fears.

Bret Easton Ellis writing a horror novel is weird in itself. That it’s at the same time a postmodern rumination on his own life, featuring a first-person narrator with the same name and at least partially the same life as the author makes it stranger, but surprisingly, Lunar Park works quite well, both as postmodern novel and as horror.

The book’s Bret Easton Ellis has enjoyed a career as a celebrated novelist, but has also royally fucked up his life with drugs and meaningless relationships. One such relationship resulted in a child, and years later, he’s married the child’s mother to try to have a more normal life. Since, in the book’s world, the large cities are unlivable due to incessant terrorist attacks, Ellis and his new family relocate to the suburbs of New York City, where he tries to stay off drugs, and to connect with his sullen teenage son and his wife’s younger daughter by another man. Everyone’s on a cocktail of mood-altering drugs, even the six-year-old, and life in the suburbs is not really what Ellis is used to.

It starts getting strange and horrible, in a fashion very typical of Ellis, when things from his past seem to invade his present. Someone keeps showing up driving a car identical to that of his late father, the paint of his house, which is new and has never been painted another color, peels off to reveal the color of his father’s house, and so on. Add to this a classic demonic children’s toy, a serial killer reenacting murders from “American Psycho“, and boys his son’s age disappearing randomly from the neighbourhood, and some sort of vague form stalking the forest behind his house, and you have a very personal and postmodern horror novel. Essentially, Ellis is haunted by his past and the relationship with his father, but along the way, the book echoes both Stephen King and John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.

The ending is typical Ellis too, where things sort of resolve, but not in any neat and tidy way, and many parts of the story are left open to interpretation. I’m a longtime fan of Ellis, and this book is up there with his best, especially if you’re a horror fan too.

Mexploitation Cinema (with the long subtitle) isn’t associated with this blog in any way except for similarities in subject matter. While I call the sort of movies I’ve participated in here “Mexploitation”, Doyle Greene uses the term more strictly, applying it to horror/monster/wrestler movies produced in Mexico from 1957 to 1977. I think that limit is somewhat arbitrary and unnecessary, but it’s chosen to correspond to Greene’s central thesis, that these movies reflect values and preoccupations common in Mexican society during this period.

And what do you know, that thesis works pretty well. Although Greene uses quite a bit of scholarly critical jargon, he makes a clear and quite convincing case for linking the themes and monsters in the movies to issues of Mexican national identity, xenophobia, politics, and oppression. The main arc of the narrative is that from forging a modern, urban Mexican national identity in the 1950-60s, to the political oppression and violence of the late 60s and 70s.

The tone is dry and academic, but that can be quite entertaining, when applied to movies that are as blatantly ridiculous as many of Santo’s efforts. Greene dissects and analyzes the action and symbolism of several such movies in detail, but can’t seem to avoid bemusement at the puerile plots and stilted dialogue.

All in all, this book isn’t for everyone, but given that it’s pretty much the only serious analysis of a locally important subgenre, it’s definitely worth reading for those interested in Mexican low budget movies.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind is promoted as a sort of literary thriller, along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose, and people also seem to compare it with Borges a lot. Those comparisons aren’t exactly wrong, but I think they sort of miss the point.

More than anything else, The Shadow of the Wind is about synchronicity. The young protagonist, Daniel Sempere, goes to the “Cemetary of Forgotten Books”, is entrusted with a novel by mysterious author Julián Carax, and soon, events in his own life start to echo those of the Carax’ life. The novel in the novel is also titled “The Shadow of the Wind“, which should give you some idea of the direction in which this is headed. A mysterious man has been burning all copies of Carax’ novels, and is after the one Daniel has, which might be the last. The mysterious man uses the name Laín Coubert, which is the name of the devil in one of Carax’ novels, and so on and so forth. There’s also a large helping of references to 18th century gothic horror, romance, and adventure novels, especially later in the book, which of course are exactly the genres Carax wrote in.

The large story arc is interesting enough, and it’s skillfully executed, although some of the “mysteries” are not too hard to figure out, and the main mysteries to be revealed are more the details of how things happened, instead of the larger revelations it seems Ruiz Zafón wants the reader to experience. In the end, however, this doesn’t matter too much, since a lot of the joy in the book is in the details, especially, perhaps, in the humorous ancillary characters, such as Fermín, the ex-revolutionary turned homeless drifter under the Franco regime who Daniel and his father take in and give a job in their bookstore. I found myself looking forward to any sequence where he would play a prominent role, since his hilarious anecdotes and outrageously brazen solutions to problems are the book’s high points.

The ending is not entirely unexpected, and perhaps a bit pat, but by then, you’ve been so thoroughly charmed by the characters (not to mention Barcelona, which is as much a character in the book as anyone else) that you don’t care too much. Highly recommended, especially if you don’t take it too seriously. It’s not as intellectual as Eco or Borges, but it’s at least as enjoyable, especially if you love books.

The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, by Jason Colavito (Prometheus Books, 2005), is a strange book. From the title and a quick check of the summaries available, I thought it would be more about Lovecraft’s work and its influence on pop culture in general. It’s not, not really.

It’s mostly a debunking of ancient astronaut theories and related fringe “science”, such as the work of Erich von Däniken. That’s fine, although it’s not so interesting, at least not to me. I read von Däniken back in the day, and found it sort of intriguing, but weak, and it’s been a long time since I considered any of it as anything but fantasy. Linking ancient astronaut theory back to a possible origin in Lovecraft’s fiction sounds like an interesting idea, though, and even though that’s a much more narrow analysis of Lovecraft’s influence than I was hoping for, it still seemed interesting. And to an extent, it is.

But the book fails on a number of points. First, and most importantly, the “linking” of ancient astronaut theory and the like to Lovecraft’s works just fails. The author keeps claiming there’s a link, but never shows much for it, and indeed, from his examples of parallels to other works, it seems much more likely that ancient astronaut theory had some of the same influences as Lovecraft, such as the writings of Blavatsky and Charles Fort, or the ancient civilizations craze of the late 19th century. Lovecraft used it as inspiration for fiction, while others have used it as inspiration for writings they pass off as fact, of course, but otherwise it seems obvious. Colavito is committing the same mistake as people who think humans descended from chimpanzees, while in reality humans and chimps have a common ancestor.

Even that would be excusable, though, since the book could be read as an investigation into the links between fiction writing and fringe science anyway. But there are other problems. There’s the never-ending smugness and feeling of intellectual superiority that oozes off every page, like the author is a particularly precocious and nerdy member of a high school debate team. He used to write for Skeptic magazine, which is full of this kind of arrogant attitude (and that’s probably why people in general don’t listen to them). It’s like hearing Penn Jillette’s debunkings on Bullshit, slightly amusing, but you get the feeling it would actually work better if he calmed down a bit and tried to be more objective, instead of frothing at the mouth. And that’s for a half-hour TV show, imagine a whole book of it.

Which brings me to the third and perhaps biggest problem. Colavito has that particularly American right-wing libertarian point of view, where society is seen as in decay, “everything is relative”, we’re overly politically correct, and people can study GAY HISTORY in universities! Imagine that, surely western civilization must fall. He links this to the rise of ancient astronaut theories, since apparently the gays have tricked people into not believing in science. It’s not surprising he’s a Lovecraft fan, since Lovecraft also ranted endlessly about the moral and racial decay of society and whatnot. He conveniently glosses over the racist and xenophobic aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction in an early chapter as well. Colavito sees western society as being in decline, the “rot” having set in “shortly after” the revolutions of the 18th century. All that because some people believe in UFOs? Let’s get some perspective here. How much scientific knowledge did an average person have in the late 18th century, as compared to now? Fundamentalist religion and superstition was almost universal back then, and that’s generally improved a lot now. It’s ironic that Colavito, as an obvious atheist and believer in science, can skirt so dangerously close to arguments we’re most used to coming out of the Religious Right.

All in all, this is an ok book, if you can get by the problems above. When it sticks to the facts, it’s interesting material. Just don’t read it without a healthy dose of skepticism towards the author and his motives. If someone’s claiming to be the only person who’s honest, unbiased, and without an agenda, just telling it as it is, that’s who you should scrutinize the most.

A couple of weeks back, my (roughly) semiannual Amazon.com order arrived, some 30 books this time. I figure I’ll try to review at least some of them here, so here are my impressions of the ones I’ve read so far.

His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman (Dell Laurel-Leaf Books box set)

This is very interesting, a trilogy of dark fantasy for “young adults” which is outspokenly anti-religious (or at least anti-organized religion), and is quite heavy on metaphysics based on or extrapolated from modern particle physics. Philip Pullman has been on record criticizing C.S. Lewis for the moralizing and christian propaganda in the Narnia books, and although I remember the Narnia books fondly, I have to say that Pullman is a much better writer than Lewis, and has much more interesting things to say.

It’s fantasy, of sorts, and steampunk, and some SF, and alternate universe fiction, and several other things, and it works quite well. The criticism of organized religion is right on, although it gets a bit heavy-handed and obvious in the third book. The third book in general has a few problems, especially the second half of it, where the ending seems anticlimactic, and the loss forced upon the protagonists by fate seems unnecessarily cruel. But all in all, it’s quite good, and far better than most things written for young adults, including the Harry Potter series (which I like, but it’s not as interesting or well-written). There are some awesome ideas here, from knives that can cut between universes to armored sentient polar bears, but also very well-written sentimental passages, and meditations on destiny, free will, loss, and death.

Black Hole, Charles Burns (Pantheon)

I bought this mostly because Sean T. Collins has been constantly raving about it, and it’s an interesting book. It’s a graphic novel, but bound in a normal novel-sized hardcover, which makes the art smaller than it would be in the hardcover or trade paperback bindings usually used for longer graphic novels, but it’s fine, the art is crisp and clear black and white, and looks gorgeous on the heavy paper.

The story itself is a sort of body horror concept, teenage alienation in seventies Seattle manifest as “the bug”, a sexually transmitted disease that brings about bodily transformation that varies wildly from person to person. That sort of psychological state manifested in the body story sounds like something Cronenberg would have written, and it appeals to me because of that. The story isn’t really about that, though, the bug is the backdrop against which the characters work out their lives and relationships. There’s also a serial killer picking off infected kids, but that subplot didn’t seem particularly necessary or interesting to me. All in all, it’s interesting and quite good, but I’m not going to be raving about it like Sean has been.

Teach Yourself Film Studies, Warren Buckland (Teach Yourself)

My formal knowledge of film studies is lacking, so I decided to get a few books to try to remedy that. This is the first and most basic, and while it’s a good introduction and high-level overview, it was really too basic for me. It introduces core concepts, the main directions of film studies (mostly the difference between genre theory and auteur theory), has a chapter on documentary film, and one on film reviewing, and that’s about it. If you’re more or less in the dark about the whole thing, and want to see if it’s interesting, this is probably a good book, but it is very basic indeed. For me, it mostly confirmed and refreshed my memory of things I already knew, like the fact that I mostly disagree with auteur theorists, and think their priorities are misguided.

Coming up next, Carlos Ruíz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I just started reading. I got it on the urging of my girlfriend, and so far, I have to say it’s very promising. I see it’s been compared to Focault’s Pendulum, Auster’s New York trilogy, The Club Dumas, Borges and Márquez, so this should be right up my alley.

As I mentioned in my own birth of a horrorblogger post, one of the books I read at an early age was a Norwegian translation of Dean R. Koontz’ Phantoms. I’ve only later figured out that it was this book, since I only remembered fragments of it. But I remember it scaring me when I was around 12 or 13.

So the other day, I picked it up and re-read it. It was definitely the book I had read in my youth, but it was not very good. Not at all, actually. The idea and setup are quite good, and there’s a Lovecraftian atmosphere that works well, especially in the beginning. The problem is more than anything the writing.

Koontz’ prose is often compared to that of Stephen King, since both are considered no-nonsense craftsmen, with effective writing styles that have little pretense of being high art. This comparison is quite flawed, however. Stephen King is like that, Koontz is just… bad. There’s expository and repetitive dialogue, horrible logical mistakes that any decent editor should have caught, clumsy prose, idiotic similes, and cliché upon cliché.

I’d heard that this was turned into a very bad movie, and I thought it was the presence of Ben Affleck that did it, but it turns out it’s likely it was just because it was based on a bad book.

In addition to some good ideas and being a nostalgia trip for me, its only other redeeming feature is that science is actually used in an explanatory and documenting fashion here, much in the way I hoped for in my technology and horror post. Too bad it’s not better written, it could have become a prime example of that. As it is, it’s just bad.