A source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti as well as associated authors and ideas

STATUS:
ON INDEFINITE HIATUS

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.