07.09.11

Ever played the Silent Hill series? Ever read one of Kafka's novels? I bet you did at least one of those. If you didn't, well, I think you may not fully get what I'm about to tell you. Neither am I going to tell you about some new game – there's plenty of gaming blogs and I'm quite sure that there are also people who would handle that topic much better than me. What unites these two is the certain feeling of oppression and fear that I failed to find anywhere else but in Ligotti's books. Other horror writers and artists are usually very straightforward – bam, here comes the monster and that's it, you're supposed to get scared. This time, however, the type of fear is quite different. Nothing comes running at you, nope. I think the best words that illustrate Silent Hill and Ligotti (I wonder if it's right to put these two together; seems I'm a laic after all) and other horrors are fear and anxiety. Fear is the conventional scenario with the usual shock scene of a monster jumping at you from darkness. Anxiety has no definite shape and this is the thing that can be seen in these two. Every time I submerge myself in Ligotti's novels I feel intangible, ominous anxiety that you can't really put a finger on. A kind of worry some of the residents of the madhouses may tell you about (such phenomena are experienced by people with PTSD or dissociation disorders in a much more sharpened form).

The thing is, there's nothing with these texts and lyrics apart from that they're weird (which is why Ligotti's works have been classified as weird fiction). Most of these are neutral, but still threatening.

I can't really paste here a larger excerpt of some of his text without a major copyright infringement and smaller would only lose all the that this man achieved while writing his novels.

All I can really do is to get some Current 93 (another great band I should write about sometime) songs and one soundscape of which lyrics were written by Ligotti. Hope that explains everything.