Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

Here is an interesting review of Messiah:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2006/...-has-been.html

And an extract to show it's not without relevancy:

The world has been conquered by a death cult called Cavesword, named after its founder, John Cave (note the initials). The main premise of the cult is that life, consciousness, is an aberration, and that death is the natural state in which we are perfectly at one with the unknowing and uncaring universe. A potion/poison can be administered to adherents called Cavesway, which fills the suicidalist’s dying brain with lively visions and eases the final journey. Governments have succumbed to the cult, and all branches of Christianity have been totally eradicated (if only...). All dissenters are brainwashed and society exists in a kind of ghastly uniformity. Our protagonist, Eugene Luther, it transpires, played a crucial role in the formation of this religion, providing its basic texts and doctrines through his knowledge of philosophy and classical history. When he is recruited to the cause, he has just finished work on the emperor Julian, the last apostate. Writing his memoirs is the final doomed assertion of the truth, which no one will read, except, of course, the reader of the novel...

The essential conflict revolves around Luther’s realization that if Cavesword is right, then life must be celebrated, and the others’ insistence that death must be sought. We have art on the side of life, and publicity, media manipulation and marketing techniques on the side of death, resulting ultimately in the death of Western Civilization, as all history prior to the life of Cave is erased and forgotten, and Western culture succumbs to the banality of the media...

For Vidal, the real horror lies in the banalization of Death and how easily it is packaged and sold to willing consumers in a culture that specializes in merchandising. Not surprisingly, Cave's message falls flat in the Islamic world.
I find Vidal's take on this quite different and interesting. Messiah was published in 1954.

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

An interview with Ligotti has been issued today here: Today's interview
This is fascinating and harrowing, and concerns ‘The Spectral Link’. I am split between these following two viewpoints, my heart and my head, but which is which?
1) This is a rich and illuminating interview that helps my future re-reading of the book.
2) It is something that badly infects the book with considerations outside of its published pure text, and this is why I have always tried to resist reading authorial interviews, including the very many Ligotti interviews.
(1) and (2) benefiting as well as infecting like Olan’s ‘loan’?

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

The Spectral Link is here!

https://scontent-b-mxp.xx.fbcdn.net/...61500209_n.jpg

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

I love this guy :

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

I read THE SPECTRAL LINK simultaneously with BORN TO FEAR. I felt as if my brain had been taken out and put back in back to front. Together with THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, these books would make a rock go through a paradigm shift, if a rock could read. There is also a unique pleasure in re-reading them, as it is with any of Ligotti's work.

"Enough to be in a crowd, in order to feel that you side
with all the dead planets."
E.M. Cioran

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

Can "The Small People" (or the whole book) be downloaded from Amazon? I don't find a link there. I have an Amazon Kindle for PC, and I think it will only accept ebooks purchased directly from Amazon.

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

It is my understanding that the ebooks can only be sold within the United States, so if you live elsewhere it won't show in your search results. Here's the link to the ebook:


If you see the "1-click purchase" button thing, you're good to go.

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

Ramonoski, a message says that The Spectral Link is currently not available for purchase. :( Other Ligotti ebook titles can be bought with the "1-click purchase".

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

My last rationale: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.ph...007#post123007

========================================
22.7.14
I have now read ‘Metaphysica Morum’, but not yet read ‘The Small People’. I don’t think it’s any accident that Olan is an anagram of Loan, a loan being a two way ‘deal’, infecting and benefiting both ways, just as ‘demoralise’ is, in its modern sense, to make someone lose hope but, in its archaic sense, to strip someone of morals. This story is of the infinitesimal and the immeasurable, both ironic and non-ironic, about futility, where fighting in this literary way for futility is a purpose that outlasts and immortalises the fighter but also this fighter is fighting WITH futility thus landing him back in that bus station toilet where he began.
I am indeed “open to ‘delightful possibilities and interpretations'”, like Dr. O, but also believing “nothing really meant anything”. The story has its own “magnificent symphony” as its ‘new-found context’ for a ‘metaphysical mutant’. Borrow or lend, which comes first? A fascinating tantalisation. Am I ‘uniquely defective’ in thus interpreting this work?

22.7.14 (later)
And now I have read ‘The Small People’…significantly on this the day my own bungalow house begins to take final shape through quite major rebuilding this summer; originally a 1930s built abode into which my wife and I first moved in 1995, the same year that Ligotti’s Bungalow House story was first published. I am now sitting in the back garden writing this in the evening sunshine sometimes gazing up at the reconstituted roof and new dormer extension, the new roof made from the old tiles, now a patchwork of worn and not so worn tiles… “ruins upon inauguration”.
Metaphysica Morum was for me, at times, a sort of Swiftian Modest Proposal; The Small People is more a Gulliver’s Travels merged with Sarban, a genuine masterpiece that will incubate slowly within me… telling of our struggle with entropy and the desperate half-life between offspring and we parents. The vision of the Small People is a unique one, I feel, uniquely defective, like eating backwards…chewing and absorbing ourselves towards where we emerge from the womb, then the womb itself?
The two friends meet in a lavatory in an old park, related to that bus station one in Metaphysica Morum? The spectral link? A gestalt real-time review of one book leading to another book, each word itself a small person dying to express itself, but needing others to join in to give full joined-up meaning.
Is a life a loan with a curse of interest?

23.7.14
It may be significant that the protagonist in ‘The Small People’ addresses a Doctor in telling his tale as a sort of confession, and I imagine this doctor to be Lemuel Gulliver who was a medical doctor and also was imprisoned for public urinating rather than in a toilet or lavatory (although it was to put out a fire that he did it). I was wondering whether there is anything else possibly significant from Swift’s book in relation to Ligotti’s. (I speculatively compared parts of Metaphysica Morum to the Modest Proposal device, for example.)
Having slept on ‘The Spectral Link’, I co
nsider it to be a major work that will continue to resonate with me…
24.7.14
An interview with Ligotti has been issued today here: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=8726
This is fascinating and harrowing, and concerns ‘The Spectral Link’. I am split between these following two viewpoints, my heart and my head, but which is which?
1) This is a rich and illuminating interview that helps my future re-reading of the book.
2) It is something that badly infects the book with considerations outside of its published pure text, and this is why I have always tried to resist reading authorial interviews, including the very many Ligotti interviews.
(1) and (2) benefiting as well as infecting like Olan’s ‘loan’?

4.8.14
Just learned about Jonathan Swift’s importance in creating interest-free loans for the Irish poor: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/07/jonathan_swift_.html

25.8.14
Today’s Gulliver knots / Ligotti theory: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=8882

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

The Spectral Link is the ultimate Ligottian Knot...?

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

Sometimes, the strangest things seem vital, the most marginal needs press on you, screaming to be attended to, in the midst of other concerns that should take precedence.

Sat on my desk, in a city almost completely shuttered, I glanced at my bookcase, saw no copy of The Spectral Link, and decided to remedy the situation.

Book ordered, time of delivery...well, maybe before mid-June.

Nothing like being optimistic about receiving a book that is not very positive at all, while the sky is falling on humans.

Then again, when was it the last time it wasn't?

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

I have to yet to read this one, and some of the later collections. I've put off reading Ligotti for some time now and discovering other writers. From time to time I go back and read some of the stories from the Penguin Classics edition and "Teatro Grottesco".

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

It never arrived.

The seller filed a lost item claim and will be sending me a replacement copy.

Where do all these books that people order and never arrive end up?

Perhaps a speculative fiction story could be crafted around this question.

Re: The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti
 

Today, I read The Small People in Tibet's anthology. I am baffled and elated at the same time, which feels like the appropriate response, even if if it doesn't feel quite right.

If this was the first Ligotti story I ever read, I would probably consider it an allegory or a type of social commentary - there's a 'bigot', his hatred borne out of fear for the humanoid others/ the small people, and their encroachment of the narrator's world. But of course, I have read almost everything else that Ligotti has ever written so I know he cannot do allegory or social commentary - in the traditional sense - to save his life.

Then there's the sense that it is more Lovecraftian than anything else Ligotti has written post-Grimscribe: a narrator who can barely modulate his hysteria ends up in an asylum or hospital for the criminally insane having committed a crime he thinks is not the kind of crime that everyone else might think it is.

The Small People is also Lovecraftian in the sense that it presents you with a story that has consequences for the readers and not just the protagonists - something I recall Cisco identifying as an HPL signature move of sorts. The narrator accepts he has been on the wrong side of reality and as a reader I empathise: I have woken up on the wrong side of reality a few times. Ligotti, of course, wakes up on the wrong side of reality every morning and that is why in every story he invites you to see things from his side. But that is a broader topic.

There is also a motif of miscegenation permeating the story - even if it is only metaphysical miscegenation: disgust for the small people turns to disgust for the half-small people, for those that look like normal people but are empty the way the small people are. And of course, even though the narrator is not his parents' biological child, he still feels it is very possible that he is misbegotten in a very real sense - hence the tragic questioning of his whole existence in the end.

In terms of where the story is situated in relation to Ligotti's whole corpus, I would say it comes after Purity which comes after The Frolic - stories that also play on the theme of a family unravelling and also provide a broader contemplation of family as a fiction of the same type as race, nation et caetera.

Two more things.

At first, the ending of the story felt like a copout - a way to say, these are the ramblings of a broken mind, misperceptions that led to a horrible parricide. But then it occurred to me that perhaps Ligotti was offering a way to appreciate his story to those that have never woken up on the wrong side of reality. Let's just say that this is not a story meant only for the adept or for the fellow-travelers - that someone with views and sensibilities antithetical to Ligotti's can still enjoy this vile little ( parable? indictment? nightmare?) tale.

The second thing I feel like noting here involves a delightful little Borgesian moment in the tale, when the narrator tries to track down the history - but "they have no history of their own" - of the small people and discovers a reference in a footnote which cites another work. When that work is read, it includes no reference to the small people at all. It confirms for the narrator the suspicion that normal people are incurious about the small people as if by consensus - they have contrived to be incurious in order to shield themselves from uncomfortable realizations regarding "the spectral link" that exists between the normal people and the small people who are "all appearance and no substance".

I think I will have to reread this story a few times to come to terms with it - I cannot decide if this is one of the best things Ligotti has ever written or if it is misbegotten, adopted, bastardized, half-story, normal-story or small-story, or perhaps a construct like the town of the small people, "a ruin upon inauguration" - a manifestation of pointless activity - or if it is a schematic of "how things are in this world at its deepest level."