Thomas Ligotti’s bungalow universe and the transversal aesthetics of the weird

Abstract

This essay discusses the distinct atmosphere of weirdness that characterizes Thomas Ligotti’s supernatural horror. The cult writer combines horror and philosophy in a uniquely interlaced manner, producing an intellectually infective horror affect, which escapes the realm of the fictional. I describe the writer’s aesthetics as transversal because, with the help of certain postmodern literary techniques, it cross-cuts across the planes of reader and text, exteriority and interiority, fiction and philosophy, obliterating the boundaries that tend to separate these dimensions. I argue that Ligotti’s horror effect depends on the dissolution of these boundaries. To show how such transversality is achieved, I examine the writer’s short story ‘The Bungalow House’, which creates concentric conceptual and imagistic circles so as to express the universal via the particular, the remarkable through the banal. I treat this short story as exemplary of how Ligotti’s writings generally function; they present a complex transtextual mechanism of veiling and unveiling of one single horrifying essence, conceptually akin to Arthur Schopenhauer’s will to life. Ligotti’s philosophical horror and Schopenhauer’s horrifying philosophy, as it were, destroy the human subject’s centrality, the notion of free will and the meaning of existence. It is the human that is revealed to be the supernatural.