Flowers of the Abyss


Thomas Ligotti, "Flowers of the Abyss" in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (Carroll and Graf: 1991). 

It is the madness of things all the way down; it seems foundational. The threads of this story fold in on themselves in fascinating ways. The solution to the madness is just more madness—the town gathers its torches. 

There is more going on in "Flowers of the Abyss" than I can figure out, but one theme that is worth more thought is the relationship between fear and the impossible/the contradictory/the paradoxical/the mad. That tie between the two is something prevalent in many early works of weird fiction: Arthur Machen, in particular, comes to mind.   

Comments

Post a Comment

What did you think about this story?

Popular posts from this blog

Noise

Image
Jack Vance, "Noise" in Startling Stories , August 1952. Read the story here at Internet Archive The planet on which the narrator is stranded is quite strange to him: celestial bodies with unfamiliar orbits, long days and nights, dead suns, and alien species that barely register at the edges of perception due to their almost unfathomable otherness. The story blurs the line between the contribution of the perceiver and what is perceived, suggesting that there may not be any fact of the matter about where that line is drawn. The world offers up something raw to the marooned narrator’s senses, and his mind imposes a pattern onto it, counting some things as mere noise and some things as meaningful. This doesn’t make the world any less real; rather, it elucidates what the objective world consists of. Given the different colors of the heavenly bodies that provide illumination to the world, Vance draws our attention to the idea that color isn’t something that inheres in the objects t
Read more

The Night Ocean

Image
R.H. Barlow with H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean" in The Californian vol. 4, no. 3 (Winter 1936). Read the story here at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive This is a spectacular study of the weirdness evoked by the ocean, particularly the ocean at night. Barlow describes the effects of the sea on our conceptions of self as he recounts an extended stay at a lonely beach house just outside the town of Ellston. The language, the themes, and the way this story's elements work together make it one of the best Lovecraft collaborations ever published.   Human beings have a primal and deep psychological connection to the ocean. As a source of fear, awe, and beauty, the sea represents the unknown, the vast, and the source from which all life evolved. In this story, Barlow handles a well-worn theme of cosmic horror—that is, our insignificance—in a thought-provoking way that manages not to just repeat the same genre theme we've come to expect from cosmicism. Sure the night ocean has th
Read more

The Dancing Partner

Image
  Jerome K. Jerome, "The Dancing Partner" in  The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories , ed. Robert Aickman (Fontana Paperbacks: 1969). One important pillar of cosmic horror is the existence of entities that are indifferent to our goals, projects, values, and lives. Even if they take notice of us, which is unlikely, whether we continue to exist or not is none of their concern. This absolute lack of interest in us makes them something to fear. It isn’t that these alien gods show malice toward us or wish us ill; we don’t even register as the least bit interesting or significant. We see something like that indifference at work in the Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1893. Here, the detachment isn’t found in anything cosmic but rather in something mechanical. The dancing partner’s total dispassion and indifference intensify the horror much more than if the partner showed outright disdain toward Annette. Such coldness adds insult to injury, but, in addition, the fact that
Read more