"The Impasse" and "My Case for Retributive Action"
Mark Samuels, "The Impasse" from The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press: 2003). Thomas Ligotti, "My Case for Retributive Action" in Weird Tales , January 2001. Mark Samuels cites Ligotti as a literary influence, and he often takes a Ligottian theme and twists it into something nightmarishly different. Samuels is particularly good at showing, through his fiction, the emptiness of our epistemic foundations and the ephemeral or vacuous center of things, whether that be reality, the self, the corporation, or any number of other concepts. I argue “The Impasse” is not merely Ligottian corporate horror. “The Impasse” is the narrative form of a kind of nihilistic theory that claims originality, memory, and the self have no center. The story presents as a metafictional copyright case involving Ligotti’s short story “My Case for Retributive Action.” Ligotti’s story was published in Weird Tales in the Summer of 2001, while Samuels’s story was published in ...