THE RED TOWER - Thoughts

[Nemonymous]

THE RED TOWER – I simply love this story. The language texture is complex and savourable (with clause and sub-clause galore), a texture that equally slips down easily into the reading mind like baby food. A rare talent to bring this off.
This texture matches the complexity of the Factory and its prehensile Novelty manufacture.
Fiction ‘fadings’ in and out - like an ill-tuned radio station amid the static grey landscape...
I wonder how many readers symbolise the Red Tower (this factory with its various “stories”) as a phallus, or as the Archetypal Author, or as a Biblical edifice, or a Radio Transmitter, or (on this seasonal day when I write this critique) as Santa Claus’s homebase from where he sends out the Novelties to deliver themselves as presents...
I feel it is a readerly failure thus to ‘symbolise’ fiction, a belief which brings me back again to gveranon’s thoughts on ‘allegory’ and ‘thinky dreaminess’ where such blatant symbols would be out of place.
Instead I make these tantalising quotes:
“my decayed fascination”
“a tempting defectiveness”
“burying graves” “utilitarian” “hyper-organisms”
“desolate purity of the landscape”
The first stories in this TEATRO GROTTESCO collection which I have now treated (‘PURITY’, ‘THE TOWN MANAGER’, ‘SIDESHOW, AND OTHER STORIES’, ‘THE CLOWN PUPPET’ & ‘THE RED TOWER’) are, I notice, grouped (at least in my Durtro edition) under the group title of DERANGEMENTS. That seems to make a nonsense of such ARRANGEMENTS and thus it shall be -- but maybe when I see if there is any rhyme or reason to the remaining ‘group’ titles ere long, I shall return to this point. Suffice it to quote this from THE RED TOWER: “After a time, however, things began to fall into place as they always do, rejecting a harmless and uninteresting disorder – never an enduring state of affairs – and taking on the more usual plans and purposes of a viciously intent creation.”
My boldness. The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction.

 

[Nemonymous]

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:-

THE RED TOWER

An amorphously ruined factory with an autonomous sense of its own growth and decay, possibly with more empirical intent than the author himself who ostensibly created this semi-spiritual Heath Robinson architectural-contraptive interface between its own pale, then red, colour of conscious suffusion and the interminable grey territory that surrounds it, at first like an Amazon unit of outgrowth (selling dire novelty goods, dire but scintillatingly described by the text), an Amazon corporation with delivery points in every corner of the world, then like its own 'birthing graves' (an anti-natalist concept?) developing within the slowly ratcheting lower levels of thriving production in contrast with its visible decaying upper levels. Selling living parts of itself as hyper-organisms from nemonymous gravestones?
This is RUMOUR made tangible for the first time in literature, I guess, paradoxically demonstrating as well as dispersing the 'monumental tedium' of existence. It is a core Ligottian text that is itself organically amorphous. Nothing can do justice to its suppurating self-awareness as a living autonomous text as well as its narrator's disingenuous self-negation in being allowed even to talk about it at all.
Corporate as the promised apotheosis of the Corporeal. Work now done?

(I shall now read my 2008 review of this story that can be found above on this thread.)

 

[R.P.Dwyer]

When I read Ligotti's story "The Red Tower" I was reminded of Kafka's story "The Great Wall of China". (If you haven't read Kafka's story "The Great Wall of China" I suggest that you do so post haste.)

There are important differences between the two stories, but both stories have a narrator that gives a historical/investigatory account of an unusual structure.

 

[Nemonymous]

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:-

THE RED TOWER

An amorphously ruined factory with an autonomous sense of its own growth and decay, possibly with more empirical intent than the author himself who ostensibly created this semi-spiritual Heath Robinson architectural-contraptive interface between its own pale, then red, colour of conscious suffusion and the interminable grey territory that surrounds it, at first like an Amazon unit of outgrowth (selling dire novelty goods, dire but scintillatingly described by the text), an Amazon corporation with delivery points in every corner of the world, then like its own 'birthing graves' (an anti-natalist concept?) developing within the slowly ratcheting lower levels of thriving production in contrast with its visible decaying upper levels. Selling living parts of itself as hyper-organisms from nemonymous gravestones?
This is RUMOUR made tangible for the first time in literature, I guess, paradoxically demonstrating as well as dispersing the 'monumental tedium' of existence. It is a core Ligottian text that is itself organically amorphous. Nothing can do justice to its suppurating self-awareness as a living autonomous text as well as its narrator's disingenuous self-negation in being allowed even to talk about it at all.
Corporate as the promised apotheosis of the Corporeal. Work now done?

(I shall now read my 2008 review of this story that can be found above on this thread.)

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

 

[Nemonymous]

THORSBY’S RED TOWER

BRAINWROTE IMAGE AND CAPTION

More images linked from here: https://howivi.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/brainwrote-art/



“This image deepens the “Brainwright” motif, emphasizing art as fictional intrusion or real-time haunting— while others show women rooted in earth, minds without bodies, empty chairs as portraits. They feel like extensions of weird fiction tropes, perhaps a meta-commentary on forgotten creators. If this is part of a growing series, it’s masterfully cohesive.”