I don't read very much horror fiction. I enjoy Poe and Lovecraft and
even occasionally King, but the genre doesn't grab me in quite the same
way that SF does. But the biggest exception for me is Thomas Ligotti, a
little-known writer whose short fiction has mostly been confined to
small presses and tiny print runs despite the fact that he's one of the
best writers in any genre, living, dead, or otherwise. His sort of most
recent work, a novella (or just a short novel, depending on your page
count threshold) called
My Work is Not Yet Done, won both the Bram
Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild in 2002, but didn't get
a print run bigger than 1,000 copies until Virgin Books re-released it
earlier this year. Some long-time Ligotti fans have complained that the
story is too mundane, and certainly its setting, a modern
cubicle-ridden office, is more down-to-earth than some of Ligotti's
previous work. But despite-- or perhaps because of-- its accessibility,
the story contains perhaps the most extreme example of Ligotti's bleak
philosophy than anything else he's written to date.
My Work is Not Yet Done is the story of Frank Dominio, a mid-management
drone in a company that does... well, we're never quite sure, and it
doesn't much matter. Dominio becomes convinced that his co-workers, who
he calls the Seven Dwarfs, the Seven Swine, or just the Seven, are
conspiring against him. At first it seems like simple paranoia, but
events soon begin to prove him right, leading him on a bizarre path of
revenge that takes more than a few unexpected turns. More importantly,
though, Dominio's understanding of the conspiracy against him grows. He
begins to understand that it's not simply the Seven who hope to destroy
him, it is the system that they represent-- their company, and, on a
greater level, the entire corporate system. In a particularly powerful
passage, Dominio decries the aims of his company and others like it:
The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare
that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible,
and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to
do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream
about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly
supposed to achieve: the ultimate product-- Nothing. And for this
product, they would command the ultimate price-- Everything.
This market strategy 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...
Ligotti's aim, at this point in the story, seems to be to depict the
dehumanizing horror of capitalism. But, as Dominio descends further to
the bottom of the conspiracy against him, he begins to see it as a
much, much larger problem than simply a poorly-designed economic
system. By the end of the book, he describes the being behind the
conspiracy, a cosmic entity he calls the Great Black Swine: "a
grunting, bestial force that animated, that used our bodies to frolic
in whatever mucky thing came its way." This force "moved and
manipulated all the created life of this world and gave me the power to
move and manipulate things according to my will." The Great Black Swine
is more than simply a plot against a single middle-manager; it is
something more akin to sin itself-- and, for Ligotti, that nameless
evil is ultimate reality.
There are a lot of parallels between Ligotti's worldview and Buddhism.
In an
interview with the
New York Review of Science Fiction, Ligotti
acknowledges the similarity, stating that "Buddhism isn’t my point of
departure, but I’m in a similar place." Dominio gives a description of
the ultimate nature of reality, which he experiences after crushing a
cockroach, that seems to express the
Three Marks of Existence of
Buddhism: that all things are impermanent, that all reality is
suffering, and that there is no self. His statement of this
enlightenment (not a term he uses, but certainly applicable) could come
directly from the
Dhammapada:
We were brought into this world out of nothing... We were kept alive in
some form, any form, as long as we were viciously thrashing about,
acting out our most intensely vital impulses... We would be pulled back
into the flowing blackness only when we had done all the damage we were
allowed to do, only when our work was done. The work of you against
me... and me against you.
But where the Buddhist response to this understanding of existence is to seek to
liberate all beings from the cycle of suffering, Dominio's reaction is
much darker: he concludes that all existence must be destroyed, or,
failing that, he must destroy himself. He must do "all the damage he is
allowed to do"-- and, by the novel's conclusion, he seems to have
gained enough eldritch power to do a great deal of damage indeed. That desire for destruction is the result of the enormous difference between Ligotti's worldview and Buddhism. To
Western eyes, Buddhism can appear pessimistic, or even nihilistic: all that talk about
existence being suffering, and the ultimate goal being "cessation" from
existence as we know it. But in fact Buddhism sees a potential, if not
a necessity, for a positive end to the universe in which all created
beings cease suffering. Dominio does not see that possibility: he sees
only the conspiracy, and not the solution to it.
That pessimism is the
biggest distinguishing characteristic between the philosophy of
Ligotti's stories and Buddhism. His stories are bleak, but that
bleakness is presented in such a singular manner, with such
gorgeously-composed prose, that it's impossible not to be intrigued by
it. The true horror about which Ligotti writes is ontological; the fear
he hopes to awaken in his readers is: what if he's right? By setting this terror of being in so recognizable a setting as a fluorescent-lit office space, My Work is Not Yet Done makes this bleak argument all the more frightening.
