Weird Murmur

  Thomas Ligotti, “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” in Songs of a Dead Dreamer (Subterranean Press, 2010). Thomas Ligotti and other writers of speculative and weird fiction often use puppets to evoke horror or associated fear responses. The puppet, an inanimate object that mimics life, is particularly effective at inducing a feeling of eeriness often characterized as the uncanny. In this murmur, I will argue that Ligotti’s short story “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” suggests an alternative way of understanding the source of the uncanny, distinct from standard explanations. It also shows how discovering that human beings are mere puppets would disturb us beyond well-worn fears about free will. A quick note about this story: Ligotti is known for re-editing or even writing slightly different versions of a story upon republication. At least two versions of “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” exist. The differences are mostly minor stylistic edits with one exception. In the 1989 version, one character is refer...

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 ...

Thomas Ligotti, "The Bungalow House" from Teatro Grottesco (Durtro: 2006). For those with pessimistic or nihilistic worldviews, Ligotti’s work is sometimes cited as a kind of cold solace. His fiction can validate one’s own feelings by offering temporary comfort in knowing one is not alone in thoughts that lead to what the narrator of our story calls a “killing sadness.” Ligotti gives voice to thoughts that can be isolating and terrifying. As such, his work can be empowering for pessimists given its masterful articulation of the dark and meaningless cosmos. The unnamed narrator in “The Bungalow House” comes across a piece of performance art in the form of a recorded audio tape.   Already steeped in what he calls his philosophy of icy bleakness, the narrator finds something validating by engaging with the audio tape. “I wanted to believe that this artist had escaped the dreams and demons of all sentiment in order to explore the foul and crummy delights of a universe where ...

Jon Padgett, "Organ Void" in The Secret of Ventriloquism  (Dunhams Manor Press: 2016). "Organ Void" brings together philosophical pessimism, gross body horror, Padgett's notion of borrowed realities, and a symbol that triggers gnosis reminiscent of Robert W. Chambers' Yellow Sign. Padgett’s story packs a heavy punch and is ripe for giving a reader’s subconscious free rein.   The story starts with Rose, driving her VW Bug on an interstate exit while listening to a recording of a self-help guru. She stops to help a presumably homeless person who is carrying a cardboard sign that reads " ORGAN  -VOID ." But the narrative facts are constantly shifting, and what is really going on is far from being that straightforward. Throughout, Rose's reality morphs seamlessly between her being a kind and compassionate commuter, to being a homeless person herself living under a freeway, to being a confused patient in a hospital treated by a Dr. Gord Onavi (an an...

Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done , (Mythos Books: 2002) Interpretations of Ligotti’s so-called “corporate horror” that treat it primarily as a critique of consumerism or the corporate workplace can feel much too narrow in scope. Ligotti’s vision is larger than that, and My Work is Not Yet Done is a prime example of a novella that exceeds the label of “corporate horror.” I recommend readers turn to Moreau Vazh’s excellent analysis of the novella on the blog Taskerland (link below). The Taskerland insights reveal a profound depth to the story that goes unnoticed. Vazh is always a great source for penetrating elucidations of Ligotti's work, and I strongly encourage anyone interested to explore Taskerland. I won't be offering anything like the depth and breadth of criticism that you will find there. Instead, this murmur focuses on one specific idea: there is a tight analogy between "being a corporation" and "being corporeal," and that a category mistak...

  Álvares de Azevedo, Noite na Taverna [ A Night in the Tavern ] (1855). Translated by Maurício Búrigo for Universitas Press (2025). Published posthumously in 1855, Álvares de Azevedo's novella drips with soul-crushing perdition, moral depravity, and the kind of deep-seated pessimism that Ligotti will systematize some 150 years later in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . The novella is a series of tales swapped among five men in a tavern. The stories they share are filled with vile debauchery and romantic excess; it is a wild little book. I will focus on Bertram's story, an adventure tale of sorts that stands as an illustration of key Ligottian themes including the absurdity of our survival drive, the detestable nature of Hope, and consciousness as a cruel trap that brings with it the awareness of the horror of existence while at the same time compelling our continued participation in it. The raft scene of Bertram's tale finds the storyteller, the captain, and the c...

  Nebachadnezzar, William Blake (1795) Marcel Schwob, "The Death of Odjigh" in The King in the Golden Mask  translated by Kit Schluter   (Wakefield Press, 2017). Schwob's story can be read through the lens of Thomas Ligotti or Peter Wessel Zapffe, that is, as a work of philosophical pessimism. As the dying world comes to its end, the wolf slayer Odjigh faces his own personal crises of an emerging conscience. Odjigh, by gaining a kind of self-awareness, regrets his role as a hunter and positions himself as an observer and critic standing outside of nature. As he sees the violence around him and pities the suffering of living creatures, he laments existence itself: "Odjigh, deep in his heart, regretted the jigging of the nacreous fish in the meshing of the nets, the serpentine swimming of the conger eels, the heavy gait of the tortoises, the sidelong trot of the gigantic wall-eyed crabs, and the lively yawns of the earthly beasts, hairy beasts decked in scales, beasts...

H. G. Wells,  The Island of Dr. Moreau  (1896). "Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had  not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau — and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. The Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. " It may come as a surprise but the above was not written by Thomas Ligotti! It is H.G. Wells from The Island of ...

Thomas Ligotti, "Vastarien" in  Songs of a Dead Dreamer  (Silver Scarab Press: 1986).   As far as cursed books go, neither the Necronomicon , nor the play  The King in Yellow has anything on the pale gray bound Vastarien . There are features unique to this tome that I particularly like. First, the book itself picks its own readers. It does this by simply appearing blank to most would-be readers. Second, it is a book “that is not about something but actually is that something.” At a first stab, the mad Victor Keirion describes the book as a dream chronicle, but it becomes clear that it isn’t just a recollection of weird dreams; instead, the book is the dream一it composes the world and is not just a description of the world. Ligotti turns many a notion on its head in this one: dream versus veridical experience, representation versus represented, and the dreamer versus the dreamed. But the big one in the story is the inversion of the real/unreal dichotomy in such a ...

SEEING THINGS "I closed my eyes and saw the King in Yellow moving through the forest."                                                     -  from the diary of Dora Lange In fact, there is much to see in this second episode, and plenty of yellow references to keep your juices flowing. Aside from the imagery that we’ll come to below, we get our first direct references to Carcosa and the King in Yellow, most notable in the discovery of Dora Lange’s diary. In the glimpse of the diary shown on screen, we see that Dora has handwritten excerpts of Cassilda’s Song. Readers of Chambers will recognize the verse that opens the book The King in Yellow :                Along the shore the cloud waves break,                The twin suns sink behind the l...

INTRODUCTION It has been several years for me since first watching season one of HBO’s True Detective , and it's time to revisit the series with an eye toward bringing out some of the themes and issues prevalent in much of the weird fiction considered here on Weird Murmur. I’ll take each of the episodes in turn, drawing out ties to the series’ inspirational roots found in Thomas Ligotti, Karl Edward Wagner, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and others. These murmurs will assume familiarity with the episode under discussion and so I won’t provide much in the way of summary. Diving right in, the name of the series, “ True Detective ,” sounds like a title fit for a newsstand pulp sitting alongside magazines like Amazing Stories, Dime Detective, Doc Savage , and Weird Tales . As it turns out, there was just such a true crime pulp using that title, and it had quite a long run. It will be interesting to see whether the story shares much in common with the style popular in the heyday ...

 Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz, "Crampton" a script of an unproduced episode of "The X Files," 1998.  This feels exactly like the script you’d expect if you asked Thomas Ligotti to write an X-Files episode! It includes a strange town, stage magic, clowns, mannikins, a psychic hotline, ventriloquist dummies, and plenty of philosophical pessimism. The script is terrifying, but, at the same time, the humorous banter between Scully and Mulder is spot on. Specific scenes masterfully inform the abstract themes of the episode. Illusion becomes reality when the FBI concocts a fake cover story that spins out of control. The themes of solipsistic idealism—that nothing exists except what is currently conscious—are reiterated when a restaurant eerily shuts its lights off and closes once Scully and Mulder leave the parking lot. At one point a costume is stripped away, revealing no one underneath. There is a telling dialogue where a retired FBI agent, who used to work fraud ca...

Thomas Ligotti, "Flowers of the Abyss" in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (Carroll and Graf: 1991).  It is the madness of things all the way down; it seems foundational. The threads of this story fold in on themselves in fascinating ways. The solution to the madness is just more madness—the town gathers its torches.  There is more going on in "Flowers of the Abyss" than I can figure out, but one theme that is worth more thought is the relationship between fear and the impossible/the contradictory/the paradoxical/the mad. That tie between the two is something prevalent in many early works of weird fiction: Arthur Machen, in particular, comes to mind.