Thomas Ligotti

But what happens if someone strips away all those distractions and just stares the void right in the face?

Well, that brings us to Willis's second archetype, the dramatist, represented by Thomas Ligotti.

The dramatist.

Yeah.

Ligotti takes Zapfer's shortfall and turns it into pure visceral horror.

He portrays human consciousness as a monstrosity.

A monstrosity.

It is.

So this is where Pizzolatto's sources like kind of start to matter big time.

So one of them being Thomas Ligotti, which we already mentioned, he's basically where Pizzolatto got the, almost plagiarized word for word the dialogue in the first episode with russ talking about how consciousness is this accident and it's like this torturous thing that um uh yeah it's just like we're it's just plays into the whole we were better off we would have been better off not having been been born like we should just like all hold hands and walk off the face of the earth together, I guess, mass suicide and, you know, just to make the best of a bad thing, you know, where all of his ideas about feeling guilty about having brought his daughter even into the world.

So that's this anti-natalism stuff.

Now you can kind of see, you know, like the justification almost like, well, he's seen these terrible things.

But I, it never occurred to me to combine pregnancy and to think through the pregnant body, the, uh, about his concept and then finally 16 years, it took me 16 years to come back to my senses and to reflect theoretically on, um, certain, certain terms like Heidegger being towards death and Mitsein being with and through the pregnant body, you combine it in being with towards death.

Like, and that's, and that's where, mm, one of the instances how I think love is tragic because in conventional, uh, pessimism, philosophical pessimism, which is produced by male normally- Mm-hmm ... um, it, it kind of, um, it reminds me sometimes Ligotti.

Uh, he's great in, his, his, his style of writing is great, and I won't ever be able to write on that level.

But it's, um, in a way it's relaxing in terms of in a similar way like you watch horror movies.

Um, part of it is that, you know, I do think that a lot of people who make horror games are Lovecraft fans, have, like, some attachment to that.

Um, definitely there is some limitation of reading, but there's also, like, this question of, you know, okay, like, let's say you wanna make a Thomas Ligotti video game.

Like, how do, how do you even begin with that? Like, how do you even think about doing that? You know what I mean? Um, the...

A lot of the solutions with Lovecraft have n- have already been made, right? Like, the visual solutions of what Lovecraft, what people think Lovecraft is supposed to look like, what people think that those worlds are supposed to read like.

This is not the sword and sorcery genre that was begun by Robert E. Howard.

This corroded sword and sorcery of MacNaughton's belongs on the blackened branch of weird nihilism belonging to Thomas Ligotti.

It tickles that same part of my mind that wonders aloud sometimes if human consciousness is just an evolutionary whoopsie.

It's asking the same question two different ways.

I'll just talk about three books.

I, um, while I was in Hamburg with my wife a month or so ago, I read, uh, Grimscribe and Songs for a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti, a highly recommended horror writer.

God, it was tedious.

There were two stories.

In science fiction and weird horror, like when I teach about Lovecraft or something, like that tradition, into the new weird, it's the same idea.

It's Chekhov all the way where you don't ever – or like Ligotti is a great example.

Thomas Ligotti, we talked a lot about.

Yeah, yeah.

And like, it's the same thing.