Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

"The Bells Will Sound Forever" has one of Ligotti's best opening lines: "I was sitting in a small park on a drab morning in early spring when a gentleman who looked as if he should be in a hospital sat down on the bench beside me." Sadly, I am unable to fully explain why I like it so much. It has something to do with how its cadences are nice and even (to me, anyway, but my scansion is awful, particularly in English) and yet you can just about sense a kind of mania straining at the leash somewhere within it, as though the narrator might at any moment lose control and turn into one of those ranting lunatics you find on park benches everywhere.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

The Teatro Grottesco collection was my first introduction to Thomas Ligotti’s work and I had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I picked the book up. It was in our local Library and happened to be on a separate little stand, singled out as the recommended read of the month. Deservedly so of course. :)

As I’m sure others have experienced, once I had started reading Ligotti’s work it became clear that this was unlike any of the other horror literature I had previously read. Certainly it left me with a hunger to devour any of his works I could lay my hands on!

To return to the subject of the thread - I remember that "The Bells Will Sound Forever" was one story in particular that gripped me from the start and lingered with me long after I had finished it. I think the stories within “In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land” slowly build up the atmosphere and characters with each story, so that when you have read them all, you feel the town is a little less foreign, but no less disturbing.

JD

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

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

IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND

A quaptych of tales. (My expression, not the story's.)

His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House

Indeed with that new momentous book last month, Ligotti’s own shadow, too.

“…Klatt was there holding forth on the subject of his relationship to Ascrobius, whom he now called his ‘patient.'”

Like the previous two stories, we are across the border or near a border, as this town, full of ‘extraordinary gossip’ or ‘twilight talk’, literally takes shape within the artfully rarefied texture of the words on Durtro’s black-edged pages. These border stories, especially this one, remind me of an inversion of today’s Schengen Zone, an inversion of Jungianism, with its ‘uncreations’ summoning up, in a premonitory fashion when this story was first published, today’s false states and borderless wars. Just read it and see. The description on page 121 itself reminds me of a rarefied version of Brussels in the news today (if anyone will be able to remember when they read this what was happening to Brussels today!)…

The characters of the ‘Ascrobius’ and the ‘charlatan Dr. Klatt’ also summon up for me a recognisable mutation (a mutation physically like the ‘terrors of Ascrobius’) of the developed relationship, since this story was published, of, today, a new Ascrobius and YellowJester (for those of us in the know), also striated through with the ‘extraordinary gossip’, ‘meddling’, ‘annulment’ and the concepts of missing graves, anonymous graves (cf The Red Tower), uncreated graves…

(I shall now read my 2008 review of this story above at the top of this thread.)

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

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

IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND

A quaptych of tales. (My expression, not the story's.)


The Bells Will Sound Forever

"deliriously preposterous"

Ligotti's skill is indeed to combine the delirious, in its sense of sickness, with preposterousness, adding the hint that 'deliriously' can be a positive adverb as well as a negative one. The latter negative aspect would entail a fevered delirium, the results of which might be mentally stimulating on the temporary surface while embedded as inimical to body and sanity. This second border-town story in this quaptych (CAN there be a four-sided painting that opens up like a diptych or triptych?) reprises brothel-keeper Mrs Glimm (cf Crumm) from the first one, who is now in polarised rivalry across the town with Mrs Pyk (Pyk echoing ptych?) who runs a boarding-house that, in common with many houses in Ligotti, seems to entail an akimbo building akin to an extended Bungalow House [cf in this country of mine the Chalet Bungalow wherein I have lived since 1995] where bedrooms are so close to the roof they become creepy attics, containing strange artefacts, here the eponymous bells of a type of YellowJester suit. QH Crumm, a commercial agent, in business like the two women, tells the narrator all this in a park and imparts a spooky Roald Dahl type tale where he stays with Mrs Pyk, someone like an earlier Ligotti character, with a mannequin's or wooden hand, that seems to entail Crumm donning the jingly-jangly jester suit and become a sort of extension of that hand, like the inferred bungalow house's roof rooms. I am left wondering whether flesh and wood need not cross borders to become a single entity? Enemies, too, like Glimm and Pyk? (Syria and Iraq blending as a single BEING from IS-IS?) In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land.

(I will now read my 2008 review of this story at the beginning of this thread.)

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

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

IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND

A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing

The start of this story expands on and confirms, fortuitously, what I was saying about 'delirious' above. And a soft voice as a telling contrast to the jester's bells.
I sense this third portrait of the border town is a core Ligottian work, introducing Dr. Zirk as a more explicit, if softly-voiced, mentor from 'The Night School' and prefiguring later CATHRianism... It has some extremely deep-textured emotions in "that remote and desolate place." As if this town is CATHRIANISM's birthplace like a wintry Bethlehem. TS Eliot's "A cold coming we had of it."
"To make an end of it, little puppet, in your own way". And there are many inferred ligotti or knots, like loops, nooses, tangled strings (as CATHRIANISM's version of crucifixion?) with more accoutrements of this 'unfaith', more skewed houses whose business-heavy end is the roof, plus a solitary lackadaisical egg-shaped clown and a 'thrumming' parade, a wooden cage with top-unfastened bars hanging the 'unchurchly' items (of a new Ecclesiatica?), another metaphysical Swiftian Modest Proposal prefiguring The Spectral Link, and the wonderful wonderful concept of the 'architectural moan'. And, for me, the ultimate nemonymity: "...nothing is more enticing, nothing more vitally idiotic, than our desire to have a name -- even if it is the name of a stupid little puppet -- and to hold on to this name throughout the long ordeal of our lives as if we hold on to it forever."
Ironically, it is a woman as potential mother, the one possibly named Mrs Glimm - ultimately not recognised by that name but by the 'gaudy rings' on a hand - who represents this story's Pilate? A story that is imbued and ends with a darkly and deliriously musical 'dying fall'.

(I shall now read my 2008 review of this story at the top of this thread.)

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

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

IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND

When You Hear The Singing, You Will Know It Is Time

"...a bizarre and jagged conglomerate of massive architectural proportions, with peaked roofs and soaring chimneys or towers visibly swaying and audibly moaning even in the calm of an early summer twilight."

The fourth story, or a coda to this internal fiction set, featuring the border town, here where you will die by its means or by your own hand - or you may never leave even if you never die?
A new Doctor called Pell, but we never really know Who the next Doctor will be in Ligotti, talks of a Reverend Cork, a Preacher either from Truman Capote or retrocausally from King's Revival, together with 'threshold-signs' worthy of the Dark Tower musical todash of jingle bells and soft voices and here, now, a deeper droning garbled preaching speech like the erstwhile architecture moan, thresholds like oubliettes beneath the lowest floor in the house in contrast to the earlier roof attics, this particular basement oubliette (oubliette being my word, not the story's) beneath what the narrator appropriately sees as a leathery trapdoor. And Mrs Glimm, now seen as 'idiot-hag', the common denominator of this internal fiction-set, as a dark catalyst like Mrs Rinaldi.
A coda, yes, a todash coda, echoing endlessly wherever you happen to read this quaptych of a fiction-set.
A CATHRian-Catholic blend of communion wine left in an attic with bits of cork floating in it. An oubliette you can never forget. Thrumming, crummy, glimmy yellowmanker of a parade led by the eggman. And a text mentally overlapping its borders. A work you can say anything about with conviction.
On the day the Turks shot down a Russian jet across an uncertain or duplicitous border.

(I will now read my 2008 review of this story at the top of this thread.)

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

Rationale: Le NŒUD de Ligotti - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

These fragments promise many things but end on a flatter note than I expected. Nonetheless, I enjoy His Shadow Shall Rise to A Higher House because it reminds me of The Spectacles in the Drawer, and also A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing since the idea of a foreboding mentor fascinates me no matter how many times Ligotti used such character. Also, the first portion of this quote is from E.M Cioran. I find it interesting to wonder if it's Ligotti or the narrator who responses in the latter part.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

Not sure if this has been posted but (from Current 93 via facebook):

Thomas Ligottis IN A FOREIGN TOWN - Trailer on Vimeo