In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND: His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House – This is a story of labels. Many words become catch phrases (eg Twilight Talk, Uncreated Grave, Ascrobius Escapade etc) and reputations earned by people as well as things, ‘the charlatan Dr Klatt’, ‘the Uncreated Grave’ etc, many wrapped within “ “ (as I said before, to exact purity for words outside the impingement of any deceptive ‘tabula rasa’?). The “annulment of existence” (as the story tells), a parthenogenetic late-labelling...
Twilight Talk’s Mrs Glimm (another Purity Ghost?) has a lodging-house or a brothel? Reputations proceed as well as follow. The use of a disfigured body as another body’s headstone...most disturbing image. Genius!
With such weak glimmering twilight, can there be a shadow at all let alone a higher house (or astrological mansion)?
I found myself “thinking” about this story even before I first read it (this was a second reading of it). It was as if I had known about this story (which I didn’t) before inventing the word ‘Nemonymous’ because uncreation has to come before creation or because one needs a ‘tabula rasa’ to create anything at all.
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IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND: The Bells Will Sound Forever – Well, a story connected to the previous one mainly by Mrs Glimm’s rivalry with the new Purity Ghost in this story: i.e. Mrs Pyk (once exotic dancer and fortune-teller). In fact the whole story becomes a " " or purity ‘label’ by virtue of being told ‘retrospectively’ (?) to the Narrator by this story’s main protagonist on a park bench.
Another lodging house/brothel with (today) an apt Christmassy doorbell (Sleigh Bells) extended to the bells on the stick-jester that the ‘main protagonist’ becomes. That image (in the descriptive ‘context’ and ‘ambiance’) is truly the stuff of nightmares. An overused word, but it is ‘genius’ the way this happens in TL’s work: not so much a ‘genius loci’ as ‘genius loco’.
Mrs Pyk’s wooden arm (Cf the stick-jester (a ‘fool’s motley’) and ‘candy cane’) gave her extra powers - or, rather, her missing arm ('tabula rasa'?) was what gave her extra powers ... as echoed by Stephen King in Duma Key (also cf: Matt Cardin’s Divinations of the Deep) ... but I’m now descending into Twilight Talk myself: i.e. my over-keen extrapolation or ‘critique loco’ that almost becomes an apocryphal Nonsense....
“a great sense of excitation relating to things which he could not name...”
"Perhaps this dream ultimately belongs to no one..."
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IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND: A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing - A very bleak story, one of assisted suicide, recommended amnesia, metaphysical namelessness...
I’m in the still growing, GLIMMering context of ‘Teatro Grottesco’ as a collection and of ‘In a Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land’ as a narrower group within a wider group entitled ‘Deformations’ within a single reader’s even wider personal reading history outside of Ligotti (and of other stories labelled Ligotti not in this book), and subject to the dislocation of duration that I have already implicitly noted with my critiques -- and I’m now led by a pasty-faced clown (amid “shiny sickles of fever”) back to the first sentence of this story: “Long before I suspected the existence of the town, near the northern border, I believe I was in some way already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place”.
Dr Zirk (Circus Curse?) calls the sickly Narrator (to his face) “little puppet” at the story’s beginning but calls me “stupid little puppet” at its end – with his soft voice whispering.
This story is a genuine dark masterpiece (of hope and horror?), a story that pulls all my strings -- as Dr Zirk’s own strings are eventually pulled (jerked out like veins?).
This is a seasonal story for Christmas with “frosted panes” and a genius “locus of winter spirit”.
Meanwhile, “How could we find a pretext to react to anything if we understood ... everything?”
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IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND: When You Hear The Singing, You Will Know It Is Time –
I’m not the same Narrator as before.
“I had lived in the town near the northern border long enough so that, with the occult passing of time, I had begun to assume I would never leave there...”
The leathery trap-door (a vocal flap?) and other “architectural moans” remind me of “The House of Leaves”(Cf. also ‘Purity’). The unlabelled “threshold-signs”, too, are as if Ligotti has left such teasing trapdoors in his ‘Wall of Words’ to provide some potential means of fathoming the very stories (Cf. the vicious circle of spider venom) – but how to choose the correct textual entry or exit thresholds? Via “old town” “demon town” or “other town”?
I cannot even manage to die here!
No easy euthanasia except to lose oneself along the delightful rich Ligottian passageways of clause and sub-clause that expresses the ultimate existential conundrum.
“There was simply no peace to be had no matter where you hid yourself away.”
More characters, Dr Pell and Reverend Cork (to add to the fat, jewellery-rattling lady who is connector of the four stories within the truly classic IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND as a whole) gather around a barely visible slow-burning fuse as the glimmer travels up the candy cane towards the tambourine-man’s jingle-jangle head.
“...the town near the northern border, which, whatever else it may have been or seemed to be, was always a genius of the most insidious illusions.”
It's not over till the fat lady sings.

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Edited because some of the text didn't show up in certain TLO formats.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

I seem to have been wading my way through "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land" forever. On the whole, I haven't enjoyed it. I'll probably finish it because there are now only a few pages left -- but on the train this morning, I found myself wondering why I was persevering with it.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

I think the quartet of stories in "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land" relies mainly on mood, atmosphere, and thought for its effects. The plots aren't as engaging (at least to me) as the plots of some of the better-known stories in Teatro Grottesco. When I first read these four stories, I liked them, but they left only vague impressions on me -- vague but somehow compelling, I should say. And I loved the titles!

I found them much more arresting on a second reading. It's probably just a matter of taste, but I like stories that are more atmospheric and less plotty, if they're well done, as these certainly are. At this time, I'm more interested in these stories than in any others in the collection, and am probably going to read them a third time. It's been a while since my last reading of them, and I can tell just by glancing through them that I will really enjoy reading them again.

I suspect that public transportation isn't the ideal place in which to read Ligotti's fiction. I read a few of his stories in a laundromat and found myself too distracted to fully appreciate them.

These four stories remind me more of "literary" writers such as Sebald, Walser, Kafka, and Schulz, than they do of other horror writers. These stories give a hint, I think, of what Ligotti's fiction might look like if he edged out of the horror genre and started writing darkly contemplative literary fiction. (I don't know if he has any intention of doing this; I'm just speculating here.)

In addition to all the above, I have personal reasons for appreciating these stories. It sounds bizarre to say, but I feel that I'd like to live in that strange northern town. The remoteness, the sense that everything is old and odd. The passive characters who seem to have plenty of time on their hands to do nothing but wonder about mysterious phenomena while they wait for the inevitable end. As in a Ballard story, the characters seem to have accepted and even embraced the weird, the disturbing, the fatal, even as they remain listless and detached. Can I move there? That northern town seems like a good place to "retire."

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

I agree with gveranon about many things there. They are mood pieces and the 'laundromat' point is relevant to one's own mood when reading some fiction. I think the 3rd 'story' in the quartet (Namelesston Quartet as opposed to Alexandria Quartet!) is probably the bleakest of all Ligotti I've read (and I think I've read all his fiction). And I actually have 'retired' to these and similar environments in Ligotti by Magic Fiction if not bodily!

“Long before I suspected the existence of the town, near the northern border, I believe I was in some way already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place”.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

I think that this is probably true. For me, though, public transport is almost certainly the only place that I would ever read In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land. At home, there are too many other options for me ever to concentrate on something that relies mainly on mood, atmosphere, and thought for its effects (as you so aptly put it). There are the possibilities of working on my own fiction, reading any of the books I own, listening to my CDs, watching my DVDs, doing the housework, going on the TLO and afflicting others with my thoughts (if my mental processes may be dignified with that word)... By contrast, on a tube train, there is little to distract me from In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land -- the alternatives are of the order of reading the adverts, or looking at the all too often ugly faces of my fellow passengers -- there isn't even a view out of the windows. And, even if I have CDs and a Walkman with me, I can't listen to music -- tube trains are noisier than any portable audio device I've ever owned. So, I am trapped with the Ligotti book, and the options other than reading on are unattractive. It may be impossible to enjoy In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land in such conditions. But in other conditions I wouldn't read it at all. What all of this presumably means is that I am tempramentally unable to enjoy In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land. It is devoid of what I enjoy in fiction -- such as the development of characters and (for goodness sake!) some kind of a storyline. Perhaps I am missing the entire point of Ligotti's fiction.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

That sounds like a Ligotti story in itself!

Some of the other stories in the TG book, as you've already possibly found out, are more in line with your above template for fiction.
However, I find HPL fiction more in line with the Ligotti template.
According to my mood, I can enjoy both templates separately or overlapping.

I wonder if any writers regularly combine both types of enjoyment equally in a single fiction?
des

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

Indeed! It struck me as such shortly after writing that. :D

It struck me, too, that Lovecraft's fiction is also devoid of character development. That said, Lovecraft does employ storylines. His fiction is more about phenomena than about people. As such, the Lovecraftian template differs markedly from both my fiction and Ligotti's. If you intended to imply that there are only two fiction templates -- or that fiction templates can be conveniently divided into two -- then I think you are mistaken.

But, yes, I enjoyed the earlier Teatro Grottesco stories (with the exception of Sideshow, and Other Stories) and consider such as Purity and The Town Manager very fine pieces of fiction. Had the book started with In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land, I imagine that Teatro Grottesco would have been swiftly removed from my bag to languish with most of its contents unread. :drunk:

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

I think we are agreed that Ligotti's fiction is not all "mood, atmosphere, and thought", and even IAFTIAFL does have its plot in a way with Mrs Glimm, the Ascrobius Escapade, the stick-jester etc.
But I'm sure you will enjoy more, for example, 'Gas Station Carnivals' and 'The Bungalow House' (which I guess you haven't read yet).
In other words, I think Ligotti has just as much plot as HPL, generally speaking, and both reside within a similar template of fiction.

No I don't think that but I do believe there is a smooth spectrum that moves between two extremes of "mood, atmosphere, and thought" and "plot/character predominance". But that does not exclude the possibility of blending both extremes in one work which I think Ligotti sometimes does.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

In fact, in a different Jefferyan way, you do this successfully in 'Odalisque'.

Re: In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
 

A quote from TL. I'll be off for a while.
Be good. :)

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