Thomas Ligotti
Lo scriba macabro

In 2015, Elara decided to publish Ligotti's second anthology, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, originally released in 1991. For the occasion, in agreement with the writer himself, it was decided to translate the book's title to the effective Lo scriba macabro. The volume is somewhat the twin of I canti di un sognatore morto, so much so that Penguin Classics published them together in 2015. The temporal distance with which Elara published Lo scriba macabro compared to I canti can be partly explained by the fact that, thanks to True Detective by Nick Pizzolatto, the writer stopped being considered niche. Unfortunately, two very important stories are missing: “L’ultimo banchetto di Arlecchino” (which opened the original collection) and “I mistici di Muelenburg,” both already appeared in the mentioned Elara volume in 2008. This is not a solution that convinces me much, but on the other hand, rightly Corridore has made his assessments. Do not forget how he, along with Ugo Malaguti, was the first to notice Ligotti in Italy when no one was paying attention to him.

Reading Lo scriba macabro confirms that reading Ligotti is an extreme experience. Some can handle it in small doses or hate it: his writing is hypnotic, and if one lets themselves be caught by his art, there is a vivid feeling of living inside a nightmare. Subsequently, there is almost a feeling of discomfort, but I believe it’s an intended effect. The characters in his stories seem like puppets at the mercy of an inescapable fate, a fate permeated by the “madness of things,” as one can read in “Fiori dell’abisso” (present in this anthology) in this admirable passage:

“As a young philosophy student, I used to say to myself: I will learn the madness of things. It was something I felt the need to know... something I felt the need to confront. If I could face the madness of things, I thought, then I would have nothing else to fear. I could live in the universe without the sensation of falling apart, without the sensation of being on the brink of exploding from the madness of things that in my mind was the true foundation of existence. I wanted to tear away the veil that covers things and look at them as they are, not blind myself to them.”

The late Ugo Malaguti, curator of this series, might be right when he claims that he feels Ligotti closer to Poe than to Lovecraft. Lovecraft did not have the exaggerated and decadent sensitivity of Poe, while Ligotti, albeit in a different way, possesses a “sick” and nihilistic vision of existence. Indeed, his work could be defined as “nihilistic horror.” But this does not mean that one cannot also grasp references to the cosmic horror of the Recluse of Providence, as we can read in “Nethescurial,” where a manuscript full of dark omens appears: it tells of an abominable cult and how the remains of an idol have been shattered and scattered in unknown places. But the cult seems still kept alive by the members of a sect, and the ending, as in “ligottian” tradition, plunges us into the nightmare. However, beyond possible comparisons, his work maintains its unquestionable originality. Sometimes trivial objects like a pair of glasses can give us a glimpse into another dimension of reality: that is what happens to the hapless character in “Gli occhiali nel cassetto.” In contrast, in other stories like “Sognare a Nortown,” we witness disturbing nocturnal pursuits or, in “Miss Plarr,” we meet a governess whose soul is lost in the madness of hallucinatory “visions.” “I bozzoli” then manages to be disturbing with its bizarre experiments performed on beings of unclarified nature. Personally, I believe the masterpiece of this collection is “Scuola serale,” where the protagonist tries to attend a course given by a professor in a school whose building seems corrupt and whose corridors are enveloped in a liquid, foul-smelling substance. The only downside of this edition is the presence (as in the previous volume) of too many typos, while the graphic layout is well curated.