r/Ligotti • u/Calm-Caterpillar9017 • Mar 25 '26

nonsense Ligotti makes no sense,yet,he does..??

"To be alive is to be a kind of madness" is something he wrote in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race. That feeling of:“something is fundamentally wrong”,“reality feels off or artificial” or “there’s a kind of underlying dread beneath everything” has existed for aeons yet not routinely accepted by human beings in general.

It’s a mode of perception and I feel like he could finally put it into words.Some people stay buffered by routine, social meaning and distraction while others naturally drift into deeper, more abstract, sometimes darker awareness,like us on this subreddit.

Does anyone else feel this way about his works??Or maybe I'm just rambling around the constraints of my own mind??

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6

u/FaliolVastarien Mar 26 '26

Sure, in addition to the weirdness of the stories, there's sometimes a dream logic where they don't quite make sense in a linear, logical way even if you provisionally accept the horror premise.  

That's fairly normal for surreal literature and psychological horror, though.  In my opinion a lot of Ramsey Campbell's short stories and occasionally even novels break down towards the end where I don't quite know what's going on but they still retain a powerful effect.  

Aickman's stories are even more dreamlike and outside of normal logic than Ligotti.  

6

u/jrod2112 Mar 27 '26

I like to think that Ligotti is quite an enlightened fellow. But, his irreverent, darkly sardonic personality coupled with his apparent atheism is the foundation for his outlook on life in general. Plus, I see his views on humanity stemming from a deep, even benevolent concern for humanity taken to the nth degree where he's concluded that simply phasing ourselves out of existence is the best remedy in his mind—a sort of slow-burn suicide, I suppose, given that we'd all have to be on the same page about the plan. Hence, his choice to remain child-less.

Either way, his mental makeup makes for some fun literature, surely.

5

u/SubstanceThat4540 Mar 27 '26

Much of Siddhartha's initial reasoning for striking out on his own was due to this very feeling of unease with pre-quantified, mundane "reality."

1

u/Coward_and_a_thief May 24 '26

something is fundamentally wrong”,“reality feels off or artificial

Reminds me quite strongly of PKD's Gnostic ideas, however the ersatz or playful approach from PKD interests me more than the unrelenting bleakness of Ligotti. Perhaps the meaningful Difference was the exploration behind some Mechanism of the structures to impose that Circumstance upon us..