Name: Treating an office job like it is a cosmic horror
Item: My Work Is Not Yet Done
Author: steerpike

My Work Is Not Yet Done →

by Thomas Ligotti

Treating an office job like it is a cosmic horror

steerpike

Jul 06, 2024

If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all of our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product - Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price - Everything. This would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be - will be - only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.

I think the anti-capitalist satire has a lot to do with how the horror and humor can coexist. In The Red Tower, Ligotti already explored the ideal Factory as a site of horror, but the outsider perspective (and shorter form) made it only as political as any other story in which we are disturbed by a decaying factory. In MWiNYD, our main character actually works for the Company, letting us feel the weight of that meaningless labor, paving a perfect in-road to both fear and comedy.

I am curious about the dearth of products in this one... for a writer obsessed with tchotchkes, detritus, hollowed-out collections of trash (Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech, The Town Manager, etc.), we don't get to much of what the company actually makes. It enhances the feeling of pointlessness and alienation, I guess.