by S. T. Joshi
Ligotti, Thomas. My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate
Horror. Illus. Harry O. Morris. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2002.
200 p.
I admit with shame and embarrassment that I have not kept up with the work
of Thomas Ligotti since the appearance of his last full-scale collection of
tales, Noctuary (1994), in spite of the fact that I have repeatedly
declared him, along with Ramsey Campbell and T. E. D. Klein, one of the few
shining lights in contemporary weird fiction. Campbell, with unmatched productivity,
keeps rolling along with a novel nearly every year and a story collection
every few years, so that his output now ranks only with Algernon Blackwood’s
in its fusion of high quality and copiousness. Klein, on the contrary, has
issued only a few short stories since the appearance of the landmark collection
Dark Gods (1985), and one begins to doubt that his long-awaited second
novel, Nighttown, will ever see the light of day.
Ligotti has been somewhere between these extremes, having published several
modest small-press collections of stories but not, to my knowledge, a collection
of the size of Noctuary or its two predecessors, Songs of a Dead
Dreamer (1986; rev. 1989) and Grimscribe (1991). One of these items,
I believe, even featured a CD of music. There were rumors some years ago
that Ligotti was written out, or that he was unsure what direction to take
in his work, but I am unable to vouch for the truth of these reports. At
any rate, any notion that Ligotti has already finished saying what he has
to say has been put triumphantly to rest in his latest volume, My Work
Is Not Yet Done.
The subtitle is of some significance, and I make no apology for drawing
upon the facts of biography to provide some background. Ligotti has long
worked for Gale Research Company in Detroit (the volume is dedicated to a
coworker, Marie Lazzari), and he has drawn upon his corporate experiences
with great panache in these three tales. One would not wish to read any excessive
autobiographical significance in the crazed murderer who is the protagonist
of the long title story, but Ligotti’s familiarity with the petty office
politics that renders work at many companies a living hell is evident on
every page.
And yet, the first thing that strikes us when we contemplate the story “My
Work Is Not Yet Done” is its very existence. Here is a nearly 150-page novella—perhaps
50,000 words in length—that fills three-quarters of the book. This length
would not be intrinsically anomalous in the work of someone like Blackwood,
Lovecraft, LeFanu, or Campbell (remember Needing Ghosts?), who have
discovered that the novelette or novella is particularly suitable for the
creation of cumulative horror; but for Ligotti it calls for some explanation.
This is because, in an interview published in the magazine Dagon in
1988, he stated bluntly: “Critics of supernatural horror fiction have repeatedly
observed that the novel is a difficult form for telling a tale of terror.
After brooding for years over this matter from the viewpoint of a potential
novelist, not to mention the many aborted attempts at actually writing the
things, I find this form too difficult for me.” To be sure, “My Work Is Not
Yet Done” cannot be considered a full-scale novel, but it is certainly about
as long as Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness or The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward, or (to switch genres) any of the short novels of
Dashiell Hammett.
I certainly welcome Ligotti’s expansion of his fictional palette in the
direction of the novel, although I share with him a grave doubt as to the
aesthetic feasibility of the “horror novel” as conventionally written. Ligotti
rightly maintains that such a work, except in the hands of a master, tends
to lapse into merely a mystery or suspense narrative with horrific interludes—an
indictment that could, regrettably, apply to nearly all the “horror novels”
written over the past thirty years. In “My Work Is Not Yet Done” Ligotti
has ingeniously found several ways to avoid this dilemma—specifically by
the use of first-person narration (which thereby allows the tale to achieve
that “unity of effect” that Poe recognised as the sine qua non of the short
story), and by writing what appears at the start to be merely a mundane (if
elegantly narrated) tale of a serial killer, but which slowly metamorphoses
into something very different and much more alarming.
“My Work Is Not Yet Done” introduces us to Frank Dominio, a longtime worker
at a company that is wisely never named, and whose actual business is also
never specified. Like many employees, Frank deliberately seeks to maintain
his level of mediocrity in order to remain in a stable job that does not require
from him any excessive degree of mental energy. Through a series of accidents,
Frank finds himself forced to resign; blaming a brace of coworkers for what
appears to be deliberate malice on their part in causing his departure, he
undertakes to murder them one after the other in systematic fashion. At this
point we seem involved in nothing more than a tedious and predictable suspense
tale in which each victim will suffer worse torments than his or her predecessor;
but in some (wisely unexplained) fashion Frank lapses into a bizarre half-dead,
half-alive state, with the power of leaving his body and also, apparently,
with the power to transform the very atoms of his victims into something
very much worse than their already grotesque human forms. It is at this point
that the particularly twisted imagination that we know from the rest of Ligotti’s
work comes into play.
This novella in particular, and the volume as a whole, displays an augmentation
of that pungent, misanthropic wit that Ligotti has gradually made his own,
and which signals him as an authentic heir of Ambrose Bierce. “My Work Is
Not Yet Done” is, for all its grisly horror, really quite funny, albeit in
a bitter, sardonic manner. Consider a pen-portrait of one coworker, Sherry:
"If she closed her eyes and didn’t speak Sherry could indeed pass for an
attractive human female. But the moment she spoke or the moment her thing-like
eyes came into view, she became a Gorgon (no mythic significance intended
or necessary). This duality that Sherry embodied could often be a source
of tremendous conflict to those around her, who one moment would experience
the tide-pull of her figure and the next moment, when she happened to speak
or the image of her eyes loomed up, would be inwardly retching with disgust
at the very existence of this Sherry-thing, as well as heaving away inside
with self-revulsion for having felt an attraction to this creature."
Lest one fancy that Ligotti has lapsed into misogyny, he makes clear that
his disgust as what Evelyn Waugh called “those vile bodies” is gender-neutral:
". . . Richard’s stature was more than that of someone who purchased his
suits at clothes stores catering to large-bodied men. His physical conformation,
straight and solid from head to toe, was imposingly athletic, the anatomy
of an erstwhile ball-player of some kind who had kept his shape into middle
age. In all probability Richard had garnered his share of shining trophies
for the glory of Self and School. He wouldn’t be the first member of middle-
to upper-level management with a background in the world of sport, with all
the playing-field metaphors they borrowed from that milieu, chief among them
being all that puke-inducing nonsense about teams (the characterization of
someone as a “team player” was at the top of my line-up of emetic expressions
of this sort)."
As will be evident from these extracts, Ligotti has tempered what in the
past might have been regarded as his excessively tortured prose, and has instead
evolved a smoothly flowing narrative style that, if perhaps a bit more spartan
in its exotic metaphors than before, is nonetheless capable of powerful emotive
effects.
After the Golconda of horror we find in this richly textured novella, the
two tales that round out the volume—“I Have a Special Plan for This World”
and “The Nightmare Network”—seem almost like afterthoughts; but they offer
aesthetic rewards of their own, plunging us into a far more surreal world
than that presented in “My Work Is Not Yet Done,” and thereby reassuring those
devotees of Ligotti who might have been alarmed that he was abandoning his
uniquely bizarre vision for the mundanities of the mystery-suspense tale,
however artfully managed.
My Work Is Not Yet Done displays a Thomas Ligotti at the height
of his form—in imaginative range, in verve of style and precision of language,
and in cumulative power and intensity. And it reveals several new sides to
Ligotti’s work—an ability to draw upon workaday experience, a tart, biting
wit that spares no person or object within the range of its jaundiced vision,
and, most of all, an expansiveness of plotting and character development that
may one day allow us to witness that most anomalous and unexpected of eventualities,
a Thomas Ligotti novel.
A special word of commendation must be given
to David Wynn’s Mythos Books. This is far and away the most attractive volume
he has published to date, and his choice of Harry O. Morris to execute his
typically fantastic collage illustrations was an inspired one. It has long
been a truism that much of the best work in our field comes from the small
press, and with more volumes like this one Mythos Books may well come to stand
at the forefront of independent publishers of horror and fantasy literature.