Saturday 27 November 2004

quotes from An Interview with Thomas Ligotti

People will accept a short horror story that ends badly. They won’t accept this in a horror novel… not after they’ve read so many hundreds of pages. Horror stories in the short form are like campfire tales or urban legends that are just a way of saying “Boo.” They have nothing to do with the real world in the minds of most readers.


Fiction can’t be subversive. If the reader feels threatened, then he’ll stop reading. The reader will only continue reading if he is being entertained. Subversion in any art form is impossible. Even nonfiction can’t be subversive. It may be used to serve some person or group’s preconceived purposes, usually to gain power, but its ideas will be recast and deliberately skewed.


ligotti is right fiction isn't subversive nothing is subversive that requires submersion of conscious thought into it's matrix because you're conscious of what you're choosing to experience. the only things that can be subversive are those things of which you remain unaware. music, film, and perhaps a novel along the lines of that the author in stephen king's bag of bones wrote, in which the author codes messages into the text subconsciously through word choice and placement (except I've tried that myself & it usually turns the flow into mud.)
Mental illness will remain taboo until it becomes universal. Not that it isn’t already universal from a certain perspective. But the very existence of the mentally and emotionally perturbed is a genuine threat to the socioeconomic system in which we are imprisoned.
see this article: Fake Saudi princess-model countersues American Express
I don’t think I could make it through an interview for an office job—or a job of any kind—without breaking out in mad laughter. I’m simply no longer fit to be part of the American working world.
also: Three Things They Will Never Tell You:
a series of poems by Thomas Ligotti

illustrated by GrimScribe

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