Thomas Ligotti, continued...

HG: What other literary projects do you have in the works?

Thomas Ligotti: I’ve been working forever on a nonfiction book called The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short Life of Horror. In Conspiracy I attempt to bind together themes from the works of pessimistic philosophers and horror writers into an exposition on the uncanny nature and ontological fraudulence of the human species.

HG: Here’s the question I'm sure you get asked all the time: when are we going to see a Ligotti novel?

Thomas Ligotti: I think it’s safe to say that I will never write a novel. The reason is this: I really don’t like fiction, and novels are what fiction is all about. The only fictional works that I’ve ever admired are those which have their formal basis in essays (Borges), poetry (Bruno Schulz), monologues (Thomas Bernhard), or all three (Poe and Lovecraft). I want to hear a writer speaking, not see a movie in my mind that takes days or weeks to get through rather than 100 minutes or the time it takes to watch a multi-part mini-series. Why would anyone want to read The Silence of the Lambs when they could see the movie? A fair response would be, "There are more good works of fiction -- if you like fiction -- than there are good movies." That’s massively true. Good movies are a happy accident.

HG: You're a rather daunting personage, you know! What frightens you? What makes you smile?

Thomas Ligotti: I never knew that I was a daunting person until people with whom I worked at a publishing company told me I was daunting. Of course, they didn’t say that until they got to know me and understood that I was more afraid of them than they were of me. What frightens me? All the ghastly ways in which one can suffer in this world. I think about them all the time and say to myself, "I’ve got to kill myself before something like happens to me." Unfortunately, I’m afraid of dying. Unless I’m in a depressive phase, in which case I’m not afraid of anything. What makes me smile? That brings to might a sentence from E.M. Cioran: "Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes." I think that if I could walk from one end of the world to the other and see nothing but annihilated landscapes, that would make me smile. I’ve always thought that I would make a good last man on earth.

HG: You rose up through the ranks of the printed small-press. How has the internet changed the way writers earn their stripes?

Thomas Ligotti: I have no idea. I don’t frequent fiction sites on the internet. Twenty years ago I would have been all over the horror sites on the internet. One thing I’ve noticed from the books and anthologies that people kindly send to me is that horror writers are better today than they were when I started writing. I may not care for their work, but I know that it’s good -- more polished, more imaginative, more everything. Perhaps the internet has had something to do with that because you have a chance to read so many writers and develop a sense of standards that was higher than it was in the past, at least for short stories. The burgeoning of small-press horror publishers no doubt also has something to do with how good horror writers are today.

HG: How has the internet changed the way you do business as a writer?

Thomas Ligotti: I’ve never really done business as a writer, unless you mean as a freelance writer and editor. There were a number of jobs I couldn’t have done without the internet.

HG: Where on the internet can people find out more about your work? How involved are you with these online venues?

Thomas Ligotti: There’s a site called Thomas Ligotti Online, but it’s not a personal site in which I have much involvement. It was developed by a gentleman named Brian Edward Poe. Seriously. There’s not only stuff about me on the site but tons of music, art, and writing by TLO members. I can actually find out more about myself as a horror writer on that site than I can on my own. If I want to find out what I’ve published, when, and how many times, I refer to Doug Anderson’s up-to-date bibliography on TLO.

HG: Society and technology are evolving at a frantic pace -- how is horror, as a genre, evolving to match those changes?

Thomas Ligotti: I don’t think that horror is a genre that evolves or has ever evolved. I think it "develops" in a way that parallels the "Great Man" theory of history. Every so often a writer comes along who changes the way other writers in the horror genre write. Examples: Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King.

HG: Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with the readers of Horror Garage. I’ll make your final question an easy one! What are you having for dinner tonight?

Thomas Ligotti: Leftovers. I like leftovers better than first-times. I think that there should be restaurants than serve food made the day before. Like roast beef. Who wants to eat roast beef and potatoes and all that when you can have roast beef hash with everything all mixed together? And how about day-old pizza?

END

*****

THE FROLIC

A Short Film That Packs a Punch
Reviewed by Mark McLaughlin

I've always enjoyed the black-velvet gruesomeness of Thomas Ligotti's fiction, so when I found out that one of his best stories, "The Frolic," had been made into a short film, you can bet I wasted no time in landing a copy. The DVD came with a beautiful little perfectbound book -- the whole package was darkly elegant and wickedly inviting. But just before I loaded the DVD into the player, I experienced a moment of unease....

I wasn't familiar with the director, Jacob Cooney, or the production company, Wonder Entertainment. What if they didn't "get" Ligotti and had decided to Hollywoodize the whole production? What if they'd added Carrot-Top as a wacky neighbor and Meg Tilly as a ditzy, busty love-interest? Hey, I've seen stranger things in movies -- like Keanu Reeves in Coppola's Dracula.

I popped the DVD into the machine and watched ... and happily, it turns out my last-minute worries had been groundless. Cooney and Wonder Entertainment had stayed faithful to Ligotti's vision -- and they did a fantastic job. The short film, The Frolic, is only 24 minutes long, but I found it much more entertaining than the 134-minute Stephen King opus, Dreamcatcher. The Frolic is a taut, stylish production that tells its nightmarish tale with chilling precision.

Because the movie is short, I hesitate to reveal too much, since I don't want to spoil any of its surprises. Basically, it concerns a prison psychiatrist, trying to figure out an especially disturbing John Doe, and -- that's all I'm going to tell you! But rest assured, you won't be disappointed.

Visit www.WonderEntertainment.com to find out more.

END