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observation 1:
review:
ligotti (we’ll get to esquinca) is a horror writer that blends fiction and theory in a contemporary fashion, most populary having written the conspiracy against the human race, that ignores philosophical underlinings for the purpose of drawing moods and excavating poetic pathways forward that are divorced from the walls of propositional attitudes, but arent stuck in an arbitrary feeling of fictional cliche or hyperbole. theres a song by current 93 called "i have a special plan for this world" that runs at 22minutes, a written speech track that emphasizes his attitudes quite refereshingly. he's vastly influenced this space, drawing from cioran, zappffe and others to take a shot at contemporary pessimism. although many authors, eugene thacker, mark samuels, peter watts, esquinca, jon padgett, as much as they try, fail short of this goal due to the generally obnoxious character of their genre, and their own shortcomings to extract the interesting from within the dull in a way that allows for dynamic attitudes.
and his protege/peer, esquinca, is quite interesting, it doesn't appear to be in the list but i found it elsewhere, and there are numerous mentions of ligotti all over it, certain characters, corporations, books by his, and even a story named after him, that is according to the critics the best one, that i'm about to check out. (i'm halfway through reading this book)
secret life of insects' short horror stories occur with an unexpected (and, rarely, very expected, when it came to one guy getting cucked by an octopus in a style similar to the metamorphosis where the poor condition of the protagonist is towards the end, put in retrospect with the innocent, easy-working and shining erotic body of his sister (or in this case the guys wife), and the half caring attitude towards the protagonists condition) twist, but the actual contents of the writings are very ambiguous and constantly shrouded in a kafka-esque mystery or conspiracy unfolding slowly.
there are a lot of different lines intersecting simultaneously, slow developments that worsen the condition of the situation someone appears to be stuck in, micro and macro realities unfolding and then a sudden jump of "opportunity" (certain demise) that appears at some point but isn't noticed at the beginning, usually that the protagonist is chasing after, all being based on a sense of incoming hopelessness or doom, but one of the new world where the fear doesn't come from stereotypical sources but of genuinely terrifying realities that are always faced away from us but we are subtly exposed to, if we choose to actually engage them, they come to life.
however, even better, the author blurs the lines between being able to choose them, because all of them begin to appear as pre-determined and unavoidable, but in a way that if the person really wanted to, they could avoid, they would just have to live in a reality that is constantly aggressive, foreign and disillusioned towards them, and one that leaves them barely any place at all, so either they learn of their fate or are suffocated by it as it closes in on them, and their only chance of escape is just a brief exposure right towards the end where they learn how bad things are, but are then immediately after shut down and denied that same possibility, almost every story i've read so far follows this exact same pattern and i'm about halfway through.
similar to nick lands writings in outsideness, the actual twists are very stereotypical and pointless (although with land, in a way, the twists arent twists but exposures, theyre a type of pure experience that i much prefer over the actual narrative pace of esquinca, that has substantive outcomes rather than moods, although, interestingly a few of these stories do end as moods rather than outcomes), but everything surrounding them and the way they're set up is profound. esquinca doesn't have as much of an the active writing charm and accompanied wit and unfolding progressivity that someone like clive barker has in books of blood, or the self-awareness, subtlety and level of reader involvement someone like jon padgett has in secret of velintroquism, but that is more than offset with the level of pressure and turmoil present in the scenarios, the way the environments are set up, and how fun and rewarding the actual reading experience itself is. the enjoyment doesn't just arise from how the cliches and tropes are offset with difficult questions and disregard the point of the story in order to draw images and dissect lines, or how the ending is always open ended and gets progressively more complex rather than easing up, but in how the horror of the actual narrative announces itself at the most unexpected times.
for example, in the wizards hour, the actual horror doesn't come from the suffocating reality of having an all present entity fucking with your dreams and showing you you're not in control of your own actions, memories, feelings or past experiences, and that a majority of your life has been toyed with by its hands, or that its form is actually different than you would want to even know, fearing that others could sense you've seen it and provoking a great fear in them too, but exactly the burden of provoking that fear, the protagonist feels towards his family to conceal this dark reality, and the inner fear that comes from the idea they'll leave him if he does. this failure to expose the dark matters one is dealing with comes from a fear of being rejected by the world, which points towards your own shortcomings to reconcile with what you have been given, to transcend the scenario, that failure is the failure of your own actions and self-worth, more precisely, the idea you have been showing a face towards the things that matter the most, that then come to destroy you for it.
this type of experience narratively happens gradually in all the stories, the line of segmentation presents itself immediately, yet the small breaks and cracks that happen in between, the noticing of certain elements that creep in and take place are kind of like a game of territories, the baby cart with the tunes in the wizards hour show a slow turn of events that opens the door for the line of flight, until, when the actual expose emerges, nothing even exists, those cracks were all mimicries of a real unfolding segmentary in the background that went noticed and upon realizing it you are essentially drowning. things like this are ever present, such as the octopus painting that is indirectly correlated with the squid cucking that emerges from underneath. the protagonist wonders who the creator is, why she is turned away from him, where is she looking? in the paradoxical man, the question of what the void represents is the inner rush, once that is already revealed, in a way the protagonist is apathetic towards it, because it becomes obvious from the moment of exposure that the type of lovecraftian power behind that experience (the creature with the claw that doesnt have a form) is way stronger than he could ever be.
in where im going its always night, the two characters are experiencing the night like a type of monster that comes to life, akin to movies like the stalker, where its presence grows and they become smaller in the story, even though they should by all accounts (the more they reveal about the lies they used to keep the segmentary together break apart) become larger, that isnt the case. this all happens simultaneously as the narrative reveals itself, as the torture that one of the characters just committed also closes the world around them. the peaceful drive, the divorced and annihilated social positions that are revealed to the characters slowly take them away from the world of intensity into the world of apathy, as they experience that same type of closing-in that is being described, almost in a way reflected back to them. the trope is simple and stupid, because it serves not as a heightening of events but as a question of the past, the classic deleuzian "what happened"? but simultaniously a what happened that doesnt matter, and a what will happen that doesnt matter. what does matter is the present interaction that reveals inconsistencies in everything, but not because it takes joy in that, but just as an exercise of highlighting elements, a type of gradual setting in of the invisible monsters of paranoia that are unfolding in from all sides and taking control, and drawing new limits, and delimiting space. they are heading towards a mark. the baby carriage in the second story is the mark that limits the territory of movement, so is the painting in the octopus story, and the childhood home in the leprosy of the walls
sort of, as these marks set in, and as the segmentary gets taken away, and the opportunities crushed, and the personalities of the characters revealed to be empty archetypes in a style akin to kafka or beckett, and as the atmosphere becomes its own fate-inducing threat, the cliches become disinterested in their own revealing or outcomes, but rather reveal themselves as both real world problems (that raises the horror element) but also as fascinating ventures outside of metaphor, artifacts that can be adjusted and played with
the moss on the walls of the house of leprosy, the baby carriage and other marks become functional pieces that are far more complex than the actual narrative, and as such they become these type of dynamic, post-world functional subjects, they become characters and essentially influence the story more than any human character, in a baudrillardian fashion they take up space, reveal themselves, they bring a genuine drama
even when an evil villian is behind the problems the stories bring, the evil villian is a cliche and not the real thing. i mentioned this previously in my expose, but again, this time serving a different purpose: (to highlight the dramatic overtaking of the invisible object slowly cracking out of its shell)
dragan stopped but didn’t turn around. he was sure that if he did, this time he would see the real form behind that indistinct voice. and what he saw would be engraved on his pupils so that even little lena would be able to see it.
other examples are the creature in the paradoxical man that doesn't have a form and is made of magma except for a claw (symbolic of the act of being grabbed), and the creature in the wizards hour that he can't describe whether it's the voice of a child or a man, both on the phoneline or in person, there is no way for him to approach the monsters, and not just because of their lovecraftian nature but because they're representations of the actual environment the characters are stuck in, because they happen to be objects, they are not subjects at all to begin with, they're the inner horrors of the worlds of the characters literally attacking them from the outside, all whilst minimizing their existence and worth (the sexless and de-socialized everyday life of the man getting cucked, the horrors of living with people you can't choose to burden nor reveal your struggles to, the childhood house that represents your incapability to escape from living in the world of others pleasures in the third person, the horror of not caring about a murder knowing you work as a murder journalist but are truly apathetic towards your own experience, the horror of literally being written by a writing rather than you as the author writing it, the work literally erases the author because it wrote him, the object pervades the subject directly and explicitly)