Get the idea? What difference does it make who is narrating the story if every living thing is just a drastically diseased and deluded tumor? This book is horrible – horrible but also absolutely deadly. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism.” And my mind – another disease, the disease of a disease. “My body – a tumor that was once delivered from the body of another tumor, a lump of disease that is always boiling with its own disease. In one of the tales, a character describes himself thus: Human minds and souls aren’t real they are a symptom of the sickness of reality, and the attempt to distinguish between one person and another is a pathetic exercise in futility.

One of the key ideas throughout this collection is that the self is an illusion. This might seem like a criticism to somebody who hasn’t read the book, but I strongly suspect that it was intentional. The narrator of any one tale in this collection could be the narrator of any of the others. They’re all artists or managers of boarding houses.

They appear more as shadows than as distinguishable individuals. The characters in these tales are very strange. Indeed, the horror of Ligotti’s prose is more directed at its reader than at its characters. It made me feel quite bad when reading it. The final tale in this collection, The Shadow, The Darkness, is one of the most profoundly articulate discussions of the futility of human existence that I have encountered. For me, it was far more effective coming across these ideas in fictional narratives than in a treatise of philosophy. I was able to brush them off as somebody else’s bad attitude. I read and enjoyed that one a few years ago, but my one complaint was that although the arguments therein are convincing, they didn’t hugely influence the way I was feeling when I read them. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read his The Conspiracy against the Human Race, one of the most pessimistic books in existence. Ligotti is a philosopher as well as a fiction writer, and it is his takes on reality that make these stories truly horrifying. This collection is truly weird weird-fiction, but while the scenarios it describes all contain an element of the fantastic, their reality is never far enough from our own to void the message they deliver. While they always contain some kind of unpleasant element, they also have to be similar enough to our day to day lives to actually disturb us, and it’s this fact that gives this Teatro Grottesco a truly nightmarish quality. It is the second book that I have ever read that actually gave me nightmares. This isn’t bump in the night stuff it’s black, oily, suffocating horror.

This collection of short stories makes most of the horror fiction I’ve read seem like a children’s cartoon. Virgin Books – 2008 (First published 2006)

Teatro grottesco by thomas ligotti