Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2018 January 19 • Friday

Thomas Ligotti is one of the few living authors I know of who write "weird fiction" and "weird tales". This interesting book, My Work Is Not Yet Done, collects three such stories, two short and one long.

The title piece is a novella that starts out normally enough as a satire of corporate office life and "culture", if that's the right word. This is certainly a worthwhile environment for satire, pervasive and powerful and dehumanizing as it is. Ligotti sketches it neatly and clearly.

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 business of its kind dream about selling, creating that which our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate produt — 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 the purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.

While the tale begins in a recognizable setting, it smoothly switches tracks from mundane white collar horror of the most familiar kind to supernatural vengenace limited only by our narrator's will and imagination and, crucially, one other mysteriously finite resource.

The short story "I Have a Special Plan for This World" subverts the capitalistic imperative of constant growth by having as the main character an employee whose special gift is, perversely and ironically, to enable such a thing, in a certain way. In this case, it involves the gentrification and rebranding of an urban neighborhood known as Murder Town into Golden City, to which our narrator's company relocates.

A yellow fog pervades Golden City, growing larger and thicker as the number of murders increases — and increase it does.

Finally there's "The Nightmare Network", which is reminiscent of J. G. Ballard both in content and in presentation, a series of short bursts of writing, some no longer than a paragraph, each with its own heading, e.g., "Orientation video" or "CLASSIFIED AD III".

Here's "CLASSIFIED AD II":

Major Supercorp in the process of expanding its properties and market-base has limited openings for Approved Labor in domestic and off-shore sites (real and virtual). We are among the biggest legitimate multi-monopolies on the world scene and our Corporate Persona is one that any AL can adopt in good conscience. Experience in sensory-deprived conditions preferred. Knowledge of outlawed dialects on the Nightmare Network a plus. Standard survival package of benefits. Prehistoric ALs okay with biologic documentation from transport agency.

Among the many pleasure of this book, the imagination, the tone, the targets, the unexpected destinations, one of the most pleasing is Ligotti's writing itself. It's old-fashioned in a good way, reminding this reader of the weird tales from a hundred years ago but very much up to date, not a pastiche but the style of a strong, inventive, literary writer.