Thomas Ligotti “Teatro Grottesco”

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti became what one would call a “cult book”f or me. I stumbled upon it, as I am sure many did, after watching “True Detective” and happened to enjoy it way more than the TV show (which was far from mediocre, but yet somehow fell below the expectations. Dunno why. Just did). Through this book I discovered the whole new genre of “weird fiction” to me; that is how I later discovered Laird Barron and Eugene Thacker.

So why is this book worth it?

Do you remember how you felt when you first saw a Goya, or, say, a Francis Bacon painting? The imagery seems familiar, and yet bizarre, weird – the more you look at it, the stranger it gets. You cannot stop looking at it and you keep searching for what is right amongst everything is terribly wrong until it ultimately dazzles you.

This is the stuff the nightmares are made of, mine at least. Not the scary monsters, not the gore and not the clowns, but just these weird, morbid things. Things you try to catch with your eye but you never do, it’s an illusion, a fleeting image, a bad dream. Illogical things. Things that could not ever exist under the current laws of logic, physics and common sense. Things you, ultimately, don’t want to coexist with you.

Yet Ligotti does a tremendous job at showing that they still do. At putting away the thin veil under which the cosmic, the gut-wrenching, the profoundly existential horror hides.

Teatro Grotesco is a collection of short stories, and if you want to give it a go and see what I just described, read the Red Factory. After I read it, I looked at my arms and they seemed like mass of crudely arranged flesh, yet arranged just right enough to believe it was some sort of entity who did this.

If that’ not horror, I don’t know what horror is.