‘Ghost Stories for the Dead’: An overlooked Thomas Ligotti classic

One of Thomas Ligotti’s best stories doesn’t appear in any of his books. “Ghost Stories for the Dead” was first published in 1982 in the second issue of author/editor Thomas Wiloch’s small press horror magazine Grimoire. It was republished a few years later in Crypt of Cthulhu and then at Thomas Ligotti Online in the late 1990s. After that, it basically disappeared.

I find this mystifying, because if I were to assemble a list of my eight or ten favorite Ligotti stories, this would be among them. “Ghost Stories for the Dead” is a dark and reflective piece, partly mournful and partly horrific, about the bliss of nonexistence as contrasted with the nightmarish agony of existence. Ligotti contrasts the torments and absurdities of embodied existence with a strange, almost beatific condition of post-existence, where identity, memory, and suffering fall away into a state of absolute negation. But in the end, the story suggests that even this annihilating escape may not be secure.

In January, Chiroptera Press, which has published several gorgeous editions of Ligotti’s work, announced that they’re planning to publish a new collection later this year to be titled Thomas Ligotti, Menagerie: Uncollected Early Stuff. One hopes that as details emerge about this welcome development, “Ghost Stories for the Dead” will be listed among the book’s contents.

For a fuller reflection on this story, see “The Best Thomas Ligotti Story You’ve Probably Never Read,” in my Living Dark newsletter. It includes a link to read the story itself, along with an accompanying reflection on Ligotti’s rise to mainstream literary notoriety after years as a cherished cult author, as well as a brief account of how my own authorial beginnings were bound up with Thomas Ligotti Online and my deep response to his work.

When the self is only a puppet

Those who have long inhabited, in their imaginations and fascinations, the crossover territory between religion and unitive spirituality on the one hand and supernatural horror on the other—in other words, people like me—will find much to fascinate in the following passage from Terence Gray, writing famously as Wei Wu Wei. The Ligottian vibes are especially strong in this articulation of the way the self is only a puppet:

[A] sentient being objectively is only a phantom, a dream-figure, nor is anything done via a psycho-somatic apparatus, as such, other than the production of illusory images and interpretations, for that also has only an apparent, imagined or dreamed, existence. All phenomenal “existence” is hypothetical…

“Our dreamed “selves,” autonomous in appearance, as in life, can be seen in awakened retrospect to be puppets totally devoid of volitional possibilities on their own. Nor is the dream in any degree dependent on them except as elements therein. They, who seem to think that they are living and acting autonomously, are being dreamed in their totality, they are being activated as completely and absolutely as puppets are activated by their puppeteer. Such is our apparent life, on this apparent earth, in this apparent universe.

—Wei Wu Wei, Open Secret (1965)

For comparison, here are two sections from Ligotti’s poem cycle I Have a Special Plan for This World that articulate perhaps the darkest possible angle from which an organism can intuit the nondual reality of things, including its own identity. It’s no accident that these appear next to each other, in succession, among the cycle’s thirteen numbered sections. I consider them to represent high points, veritable mountain peaks, both thematically and artistically, among Tom’s total body of work.

Horror from the inside out

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read
A cosmic skyscape filled with stars, with a single glowing eye in the middle

Yesterday an online acquaintance asked me if I had any advice about horror for someone who’s just getting started. “Do you have any hard-earned nuggets of wisdom that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?”

I started typing, and here’s what came out:

Advice on horror depends on which angle you’re asking from. Writing craft? Approaches to publishing? Philosophical perspective? Or recommendations for reading, viewing, etc.? From the craft and philosophical perspectives, I’ll simply offer my own riff on what Thomas Ligotti told Jon Padgett as Jon was undergoing his personal authorial mentorship under Tom’s guidance:

Zero in deeply, deeply, on what really frightens and horrifies you. Become absolutely clear on that. Use any writing or other creative activities that you do in this field to help you accomplish that act of inner knowledge. Seek the supremely perfect articulation of your personal horror, the summit of your private, individualized Mount Doom, the apotheosis in language of whatever naturally offers itself to you—and only to you, in your for-all-time uniqueness—as the absolute nightmare. Explore and perfect ways to describe this nightmare to yourself.

If you approach the writing of horror in this way, as the most deeply personal discipline of self-interrogation and dark epiphany that you can achieve, what you write will automatically, and paradoxically, prove magnetic to other people.

Additionally, and speaking solely as myself on a spiritual or philosophical note: Always remember that your horror is only as real as you are. This is both the way in and the way out.