THE DEEP ONES: "The Red Tower" by Thomas Ligotti

"The Red Tower" by Thomas Ligotti

Discussion begins September 23.

First published in The Nightmare Factory (1996).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/12/the-red-tower-by-thomas-ligotti/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?92337

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Nightmare Factory
Teatro Grottesco
The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners

MISCELLANY

http://www.teemingbrain.com/interview-with-thomas-ligotti/
http://www.horrorgarage.com/horror/interview-thomas-ligotti.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ligotti
http://tinyurl.com/nk5ugoj
http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/exclusive-interview-thomas-ligotti-on-weir...
http://tinyurl.com/pkawdod

Apologies for the late posting on this! Online for me.

>2 semdetenebre:

Is your move underway? Hope it's going / gone well. Appreciate your efforts here in the meantime!

That interview with Ligotti posted at Weird Fiction Review (and listed under MISCELLANY) showcases the editors copy of In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land with accompanying soundtrack by Current 93. I smiled at that: my introduction to Ligotti was through that work by C93, in fact, though I didn't read his work until joining this group many years later. (My copy was from a friend's original, I only saw the book briefly.)

>3 elenchus:

Thanks for asking - and remembering! Won't be moving until the end of October, but all books are now packed up in boxes until then. It'll be hard not having access to them for that long. For now the web is my friend as far as Deep Ones readings...

>5 semdetenebre: I feel your pain. There's nothing like a move to make you reconsider your bibliomania.

There are boxes and stacks of books piled in strange and inaccessible places about my house now too. Until the men with jackhammers leave, I'll also be doing my Deep Ones reading online.

Online for me, too. Good luck with your book withdrawals, fellas.

I dread the thought of having to move...

I'll be reading from The Shadow at the Bottom of the World.

Listening to Brian Eno's Lux* while reading. Works pretty well, actually.

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhbgte_6YXfFFNnS6QZd9Xv_hx2LQ40uJ

Unsurprisingly, the sense of unease and foreboding are well established by Ligotti, I quite like how much is unstated.

I noted two devices in this story which worked very well.

First, the fact that no people are foregrounded, other than the circumspect narrator, Ligotti preferring to phrase things as though the Factory were sentient:

The ruined factory stood ...
... the Red Tower put into production ...
... the unique inventions of the Red Tower ...
... the factory had now gone into the business ...

If there's something sentient here, and of course there is, the focus would appear to be the factory itself, and any other creatures would be secondary. In fact, there's a strong implication any such creatures are as likely to be raw material as to be working there.

The other device I admired: the language of the story. The mix of technical and unusual terminology brought to mind a precision report, if not by scientists then by an engineer. Not colloquial speech but something more rigourous, a specialty language.

It all adds up to an understated triumph of body horror.

Ligotti as said the weird story should have an inexplicable mystery, and this story certainly does.

What is the tower? A symbol of life differentiating itself in process and color from the entropic sameness of the surrounding countryside? A Marxist symbol of capitalist production of disturbing and pointless novelties?

I think this is the most Poe like of the Ligotti stories I've read. The prose seems a bit more antique than Ligotti's usual. The opening also reminds me of "The Fall of the House of Usher", another story with a building as character.

The first time I read this story, years ago, I thought of Blackwood's "The Willows" because I thought the Red Tower a sinister aspect of the landscape. On this reading, it does not seem that way.

There also seems to be some escalation of weirdness and chaos going on with the "birthing graves" and a "perfection of defect and disorder". The latter phrase is, logically, impossible, but it works to evoke a feeling.

>10 elenchus: I agree about the language mixing two tones.

And, to top it off, we find out the narrator has never actually seen the Tower. Is the whole thing folklore, madness, the distorted perception of others?

The narrative voice didn't seem to be scientific or technical to me. It seemed rather to be that of a humanistic scholar or perhaps a bureaucrat. The narrative absence of people is conspicuous, though, as is the lack of geographic specification.

I thought this story was Borgesian as all get out, and as I often do with Borges, I was driven to muse about its possible allegorical readings, with frustratingly thin results.

Having been doing some study of ancient Gnosticism lately (I just posted my review of The Tree of Gnosis), I couldn't help but see the tower as a Gnostic demiurge of some kind: itself created, but resented as a disruption of the prior void, and churning out queerly defective but ingenious "products" with strangely ambivalent life to them.

The image of the "birthing graves" was especially intriguing and resonant.

I love the surrealistic idea of evaporating machinery.

...whole of the Red Tower, as the factory was known, had always been subject to fadings at certain times. This phenomenon, in the delirious or dying words of several witnesses, was due to a profound hostility between the noisy and malodorous operations of the factory and the desolate purity of the landscape surrounding it, the conflict occasionally resulting in temporary erasures, or fadings, of the former by the latter.

Intriguing. "Desolate purity" vs. the "malodorous" tendencies of the factory says a lot about the Ligotti point of view.

Then there are the novelty items produced by the Red Factory, their disbursement through a system of snaking underground tunnels and their final destinations in the back of closets and under piles of junk, seemingly lurking for an encounter with the unwary:

These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes.

You can still find those in the more obscure second-hand shops!

The Weird Fiction Review interview mentioned Ligotti's humour. I found the regular asides quite funny, in which Ligotti characterised the mental state of his sources for all this information.

According to these strictly hallucinatory accounts ...
Despite their ostensibly mad or credulous origins, these testimonies
... numerous accounts rendered in borderline gibberish.
In accord with a tradition of dumbstruck insanity ...
... shuddering and badly garbled whispers ...
... choking scraps of post-nightmare trauma.

I'm left with a comic image of the narrator trying to relay information while at the same time completely vilify the source of that information. A bit like "the ethically challenged, dubiously-accented Hugh Simon (Kenneth Mars)" in the movie, What's Up, Doc?.

Posting here to keep track of this thread. Ligotti is one of my favourites and I am delighted to see his work becoming more visible.

I enjoyed reading the Red Tower some time ago and enjoyed it at the time. Now I am in need of a re-read.

>12 paradoxosalpha: That's an interesting interpretation. It's further reinforced by the Tower's creation and activity being done underground, far from the celestial sphere normally associated with the traditional Creator of Christianity.

>12 paradoxosalpha: >16 RandyStafford:

Less specific but parallel is the sense the Red Tower embodies evolutionary life, generative but without telos, spitting out various lifeforms into an environment indifferent if not hostile, and without concern for those lifeforms once birthed. No-one's ever seen "it", but we talk about it all the time when we talk about everything and anything we encounter in this world ....

>17 elenchus:

That was the sense I had as well, on what is my second reading of the story. However I may this time have been influenced by Mark Samuels' recent work, which I think demonstrates a debt to Ligotti but with a positive spiritual (if not religious) agenda which has a horror of the idea of a scientific, atheistic universe. That horror is expressed in images much like the Tower here.

Ah-hah! Another candidate for a future DEEP ONES reading, is there a particular story that you'd recommend?

>19 elenchus:

I'll give it some consideration, but I imagine it could be a problem if there's no online version or US print edition (that's also why I've fought shy of nominating the likes of Reggie Oliver or Mark Valentine).

>20 housefulofpaper: It would be nice to do a Deep Ones with Reggie Oliver -- but, yeah, hard to find in inexpensive editions. (I've only read a couple of his stories.)

Okay, I reread this about a week ago but am only just now getting around to commenting.

>11 RandyStafford:

You covered just about everything I was going to (and probably more articulately to boot!). Jeff VanderMeer sees a (presumably Marxist) "commentary on consumer society" here as well.*

The cadence of the prose reminds me quite a bit of Poe as well. Look at these sentences from his "Cask of Amontillado", and particularly the author's use of italics (which I have retained):

"At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk."

"I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation."

Now look at these from "The Red Tower" (again, I'm retaining the author's italics):

"According to these strictly hallucinatory accounts, the whole of the Red Tower, as the factory was known, had always been subject to fadings at certain times."

"Thus the encrimsoning of the factory was a betrayal, a breaking-off, for it is my postulation that this ancient structure was in long-forgotten days the same pale hue as the world which encompassed it."

The rhythms are very similar, aren't they? (Come to think of it, the lack of specificity in the narration of "The Red Tower" is reminiscent of "Cask" also (we never do find out what exactly Montresor is taking revenge on Fortunato for, do we?)).

>10 elenchus:

the fact that no people are foregrounded

A classic motif of weird fiction/cosmic horror. You'll recall the famous quote from HPL:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes... {w}hen we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity—and terrestrialism at the threshold.

This is pretty close to what we see in "The Red Tower", I think.

*See http://www.vulture.com/2014/08/thomas-ligotti-true-detective-guide.html

>19 elenchus:
>21 RandyStafford:

I've had a go at finding books or individual stories that might be fairly easy to get hold of. The paperbacks and ebooks are listed as available from the relevant publishers' websites. Volumes of Best New Horror were published in UK and USA and I presume are available on the second hand market.

Mark Samuels:
Paperbacks:
- The White Hands (Tartarus Press)
- The Man Who collected Machen (Chomu Press)
Ebooks:
- The White Hands (Tartarus Press)
Included in Best New Horror (ed. Stephen Jones):
- Losenef Express #22
- The Tower #23
- Destination Nihil by Edmund Bertrand #20
- A Gentleman From Mexico #19
- Glyphotech #17
- Sentinels #18
- The White Hands #15

Reggie Oliver:
Paperbacks:
- The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Tartarus Press)
- The Flowers of the Sea (Tartarus Press)
- Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (Tartarus Press)
Ebooks:
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Tartarus Press)
The Flowers of the Sea (Tartarus Press)
- Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (Tartarus Press)
- The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (Tartarus Press)
Included in Best New Horror (ed. Stephen Jones):
- Between Four Yews #24
- The Game of Bear (M R James and...)#21
- Quieta Non Movere #23
- The Children of Monte Rosa #19
- A Donkey at the Mysteries #20

"The White Hands" is, I believe, the story that first brought Mark Samuels critical attention. The Story "The Tower" is the one I was reminded of by "The Red Tower" (unsurprisingly!). "A Gentleman from Mexico" is explicitly Lovecraftian (have we already been done it? I can't check whilst writing this...

The three most recent Reggie Oliver Stories anthologised in Best New Horror are atypical in that they are a completion of an unfinished M R James story, a conscious homage to James, and a combined prequel/sequel to M R James' "A School Story". If you can get hold of The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, the story "The Skins" has got some notice for the novelty of the central idea and is also one of Reggie Oliver's stories that are set in last days (30-40 years ago) of local repertory theatre and seaside end-of-pier shows.