Metaphysica Morum

I loved the dream dealer and the twisted doctor. The appeal to heredity and horror at caricatures of Southern hicks was bizarre and out of character for Ligotti, who usually writes of marginalized people with such deep empathy and camaraderie (see Purity); perhaps there was some subversion that I missed.

This story is one of his most suicide-batey by far (at least of his fiction) which made it feel less like the oft-quoted James Baldwin line (You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks she is alone.) that I often feel in Ligotti's humor-tinged existential horror and more like... I don't know, just despair for its own sake.

In some interview Ligotti said he had written things too dark and depressing for publishing, acknowledging that stories must have some trace of entertainment to be worthwhile. I didn't take that very seriously and thought it was a little bit of cringey even, but reading this I can feel the shadows cast by those works and affirm that yes, our boy Tom was being deadly serious.

Overall, too uncomfortable to enjoy, and weirdly racist against the Scots-Irish.

The Small People

Okay, here is the study of prejudice and being a "hateful little bigot" that does everything I think Metaphysica Morum failed at. Several staples of horror done so transcendentally:

• The frame story of a narrator explaining himself to a (probably sinister) psychiatrist is written subtly enough that we start to forget it by the time he addresses the doctor at the end, telling us the details of his incarceration and re-contextualizing how the narration might be operating

  • Is he trying to convince the doctor of something beyond the explicit ideas of the text? Does he believe the doctor is one of them, and if so, what do we make of his unapologetic polemic?

• The atmosphere of paranoia from the small people, or course, but much more from the way society reacts to them, and our knowledge of the narrator's already sealed fate

• Not-so-Lovecraftian fear of the Other where the Other in question seems less like a metaphor for immigrants or whatever and more representative of a cultivated mindlessness or artificiality: So what’s inside of the small people, Doctor? My guess is that they’re composed of some doughy substance inside and out—a flabby clay that can be molded into any form, having no identity of its own. Is this really our world, the real world, or is it theirs?

  • The small people are like set-dressing in a play, or perhaps the actors and we the audience... or they're the mindless masses victimized by capitalism and ideology (if we want to get really pretentious intellectual with it)

  • Are they simply the classic Ligottian obsession with artifice? With fake and left-behind gadgets, cheaply made detritus that humans built for reasons obscure or terrible, or worse, for no reason at all, and abandoned to rot? Or, if the real world is theirs, maybe we've never build anything that doesn't fit that description...

• A single soul being one's light in the darkness iasip style where the narrator's friend is the only other person who can see the matrix, giving an emotional resonance beneath any philosophy or horror

• I love when characters don't have names

My father was smiling slightly and staring with concentration as he always did. But I never noticed that he was really staring at nothing in particular—that he was more or less gawking with bottomless eyes. And though the sun was shining on my mother’s smooth face, her big eyes weren’t squinting.

Don’t you care about time, whatever you are? How about space, existence, all the commotion of reality? I’ve known it was all just a preposterous mess for ages now. I also learned that I should be on the outside, and the rest of this ludicrous world, or most of it, should be in here for study and rehabilitation, adjustment and readjustment, if that’s the point.