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Vastarien_V5-Issue2-front
A source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti as well as associated authors and ideas
STATUS:
CLOSED. We will open for submissions in June 2023

Vastarien.  The forbidden tome. The impossible otherworld. A textual entryway into

a place where everything was transfixed in the order of the unreal. . . . Each passage he entered in the book both enchanted and appalled him with images and incidents so freakish and chaotic that his usual sense of these terms disintegrated along with everything else. Rampant oddity seemed to be the rule of the realm; imperfection became the source of the miraculous — wonders of deformity and marvels of miscreation. There was horror, undoubtedly. But it was a horror uncompromised by any feeling of lost joy or thwarted redemption; rather, it was a deliverance by damnation. And if Vastarien was a nightmare, it was a nightmare transformed in spirit by the utter absence of refuge: nightmare made normal.

Our name is drawn from Thomas Ligotti’s classic story of the same title (quoted above), which S. T. Joshi has characterized as “Ligotti’s most searching exploration of the forbidden book theme.”

Our interests include but are not limited to the following subjects:

  • Supernatural horror (both fiction and film)
  • Philosophical pessimism
  • Gnosticism
  • Buddhism
  • Nihilism
  • Surrealism
  • Decadent and fin de siècle literature
  • Pessimistic and morbid poetry (Trakl, Thomson, Brennan, Leopardi, Larkin, Wiloch, Barnitz, etc.)
  • Aberrant psychology (depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, anhedonia, depressive realism, etc.)
  • Euthanasia/Right to Die
  • Horror in the visual arts
  • Antinatalism
  • L’école belge de l’étrange
  • Corporate degradation
  • The architecture and topography of Detroit and its suburbs
  • Horror and pessimism as it relates to most any field (geography, psychology, astronomy, music, film, etc.—kind of a catchall category)
  • Any crossovers or hybrids of these categories/writers

See our Submission Guidelines for more specific information.

Read about our Editorial Board for a look at who’s behind this project.

17 thoughts on “Home”

  1. Pingback: Vastarien, rivista letteraria | Weirdiana
  2. Pingback: Pseudopod » Blog Archive » PseudoPod 490: Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown

  3. Awesome idea, gentlemen! Looking forward to the evolution of this project and hope it is a fruitful one!
    Tim Jeski

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  6. Hi, Kendra. If you’re logged into wordpress, you should be able to click a Follow button in your admin bar. I’ll look into adding a subscribe button that can be easily accessed. Thanks!

    Like

  7. Just backed the Kickstarter with a few days to spare! I’m looking forward to its release very much. My podcast “Counter Esperanto Podcast,” which is dedicated to Weird Fiction and Twin Peaks (with themes both separate and related) will have something to say about this once we end our hiatus. We are big fans of Ligotti, and of the writers associated with this publication.

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  10. I’m hoping to request review copies for the New York Public Library’s new Best Horror committee — who can I contact about that?

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  11. Hello, my name is Brad. I just got my copy of “The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature”, and decided to check you guys out when I looked at the publication logo on the side. I have to say, when I saw the words “Buddhism” and “Gnosticism” in the site description, my interest was piqued. I’ll be following you guys closer, I suppose.

    Like

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