The Horror of the World

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music….”
—Soren Kierkegaard

“To isolate the abstract purpose of horror, therefore, does not require a supplementary philosophical operation. Horror defines itself through a pact with abstraction, of such primordial compulsion that disciplined metaphysics can only struggle, belatedly, to recapture it. Some sublime ‘thing’ — abstracted radically from what it is for us — belongs to horror long before reason sets out on its pursuit. Horror first encounters ‘that’ which philosophy eventually seeks to know.”
—Nick Land. Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator

The Outlaws of Reality

“What exactly would it mean on this earth to be wholly unrepressed, to live in full bodily and psychic expansiveness? It can only mean to be reborn into madness.”
—Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

At the heart of existential thought from Kierkegaard to Cioran is this sense of having fallen into consciousness, thrown out of the paradise of fullness into lack – the void which we are seeking through self-reflection a way out of the human condition. From Prometheus’ legends come the sense that humans were from the beginning lacking something and the powers that be gave him this thing: consciousness – the fire of awareness. To be aware is to be aware of one’s nothingness. That is the central insight of existential thought. This deep and abiding dread of our existence the core of our disease. As Kierkegaard once suggested,

“The spirit (self-consciousness) cannot do away with itself [i.e., self-consciousness cannot disappear]…. Neither can man sink down into the vegetative life [i.e., be wholly an animal]…. He cannot flee from dread (the dread of being this nothingness we are).”

Yet, in our time there is a darker turn toward paranoia, the notion in the masses that deal with conspiracies: political, paranormal, ufology, ancient aliens, the unknown and noumenal surround, matrix, etc. This sense that things are not what they seem, that there is something wrong with our lives, meanings, and reality. In such thought as speculative realism it takes on the form of an indirect access to the Real – a thin veil or filter between us and the actual world going back to Kant’s great divide between the phenomenal and noumenal; or, Plato’s two-world theory of the World of Ideas-Forms-Unchanging and the deluded world of metamorphosis, illusion, appearances.

One thinker on Kant Henry E. Alison suggested that it was not an actual dualism of these two separate worlds, but rather a singular world in which our consciousness was dissociated from the truth of the whole world and had divided it into a realm of security and safety in which humans could be at home in the universe. We created a fictional and Unreal world against the chaos and contingency of a more daemonic world of an unbound energetic cosmos. We hide the truth from ourselves, masters of deception and self-deception we invented religion, philosophy, and the sciences to circumvent the Real. We sought to control reality rather than be controlled by its irrational forces of chaos and contingency. We invented Reason to stay us against these darker forces of the unknown. The curtain of the fantasy that hides the truth from us is in our time fraying at the edges, allowing these irrational forces of the universe to slowly unfold in the various psychosis of modernity. Civilization was always the mad and insane barrier against reality, and as it crumbles along with its ideological entrapments, we are being thrust into the void of the unknown…

“The inculcation of character has been seen as a primary function of culture and schooling, particularly since schools first appeared and there has been a lively debate about character formation for centuries.”
— James Arthur

The notion of character is as old as Aristotle if not before that in various forms in many different civilizations and cultures. Each society develops its own sense of character, shapes its virtues and forms. Our emergence from childhood becomes the project of character formation. It’s the greatest fantasy project that humans ever devised. We are the creations of a great lie, a deception and self-deceiving system of thought and feeling that seeks to protect and defend us against reality. Tout Court. Those that do not enter this character formation suffer its insolvency. They are the psychotic and deranged beings of our madness. From the German Romantics onward we’ve seen a dialogue with this essential breakdown of character formation and its socialization processes. Some like Nerval, Rimbaud, Bataille, Artaud, and Land among others innumerable have sought to eliminate this character formation and reenter the great psychosis of the Real. With every experiment in experiential exploration there is the promise of breakthrough, but most end up on the dark void of breakdown and schizophrenic psychosis. Blown apart as they break free of their character armor, their ‘human security system’.

Psychoanalysis was a study of the various defense mechanisms humanity has developed over the millennia against reality. Our fears, terrors, dreads, and anxieties of the chaos and contingency of existence. “Kierkegaard understood that the lie of character is built up because the child needs to adjust to the world, to the parents, and to his own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about himself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in his own character armor, unable to see freely beyond his own prison or into himself, into the defenses he is using, the things that are determining his unfreedom.”1 We live in a realm of total control and unfreedom; and, yet, we call it freedom and democracy. Most humans willingly enter their own self-imposed prisons to escape reality and freedom.

Character formation develops zombies, automatons, puppets and mannikins of the human; copies of its outward forms. Most people sleepwalk through existence never realizing that they are living in a real matrix of virtual lies. “Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security: “Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs…. Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial….” (Becker, p. 76) Civilization is a madhouse for normalization processes that turn humans into inhuman machines that live out their lives secure and limited by work, play, and family. Anyone who steps beyond the proscribed limits of social character formation and its prison become the outlaws of reality.

Nick Land once suggested there is one simple criterion of taste in philosophy: that one avoid the vulgarity of anthropomorphism. It is by failing here that one comes to side with cages. The specifics follow straightforwardly:

1. Thoroughgoing dehumanization of nature, involving the uttermost impersonalism in the explanation of natural forces, and vigorously atheological cosmology. No residue of prayer. An instinctive fastidiousness in respect to all the traces of human personality, and the treatment of such as the excrement of matter; as its most ignoble part, its gutter…
2. Ruthless fatalism. No space for decisions, responsibilities, actions, intentions. Any appeal to notions of human freedom discredits a philosopher beyond amelioration.
3. Hence absence of all moralizing, even the crispest, most Aristotelian. The penchant for correction, let alone vengefulness, pins one in the shallows.
4. Contempt for common evaluations; one should even take care to avoid straying accidentally into the right. Even to be an enemy is too comforting; one must be an alien, a beast. Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked. Libidinal materialism is the name for such a philosophy, although it is perhaps less a philosophy than an offence.

Historically it is pessimistic, in the rich sense that transects the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille as well as those of Schopenhauer. Thematically it is ‘psychoanalytical’ (although it no longer believes in the psyche or in analysis), thermodynamicenergeticist (but no longer physicalistic or logicomathematical), and perhaps a little morbid. Methodologically it is genealogical, diagnostic, and enthusiastic for the accentuation of intensity that will carry it through insurrection into anegoic delirium. Stylistically it is aggressive, only a little subhyperbolic, and—above all—massively irresponsible…2

Politics is an ordering of the prisoners within the cage of society. It’s civilizing processes shape what is and is not the limits of our cage of existence. Education is a form of inculcation into this prison system of society we term socialization. We are early on told this is the way of life, existence, reality. All other paths lead to madness. But this a lie — a lie to control us and shape us to the powers of illusion and delusion that will bind our minds and bodies to the dictates of the few. Escaping this prison house of lies is a difficult if not impossible task. Very few succeed beyond the first stages of awakening into reality.

The Way of Psychosis

“The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses”
― Arthur Rimbaud

Wouter Kusters in A Philosophy of Madness speaks of the via mystica psychotica, a path that takes the wary experientialist down the rabbit hole of the four vehicles of detachment, demagination, delanguization, and dethinking:

“Speed; Desynchronization; Absorption; Insight and Power; Beyond the Law; Conflicting Commands; and Death and Rebirth.” These stages along the mad-mystical path are a thread that runs through the via mystica psychotica…”3

The ancient Gnostics were harbingers of this outlaw philosophy that sought to overcome the dark masters of what Philip K. Dick termed “Black Iron Prison”:

We are not products of this world but voyagers here— one thinks of Gnosticism at once. We have come here from another place and will eventually find the unexpected orthogonal axis and ascend to the next. Ah! Eventually we will chafe against the bonds— restrictions, determinism, limitations— of this world too, and seek release, as we did before with the “heavier” world. Maybe this world is neither heaven nor hell to its natural inhabitants; it just is. Maybe to us it started out as a place of release— heaven— but gradually and inexorably becomes another prison; in relation to the next an iron prison Rome. Then the black iron prison is wherever you are in relation to the freer next world— which fully, at last, answers my question as to where the vision of the black iron prison stands in relation to this world. The sense of this being so is an indication that one has reached the point of wanting to move on up.4

For those within the prison house of reality, the normal world of most humans this is the ramblings of insanity. But to those outlaws and voyagers of the Real this is the opening gambit to a world much larger and freer where the monstrous truth is revealed. In his study High Weirdness Erik Davis speaking of Dick as one of the outlaws of reality tells us: “The whole of the Exegesis is regularly interjected with dreams, whose accounts Dick interprets as coded communications from the Beyond, and whose substance and language sometimes make their twisty way into his later fictions.”5 We let the Outside in through these unconscious processes that unbound from the nomos of society allows us a glimpse of strange things. As Davis says,

The overriding message of these cracked revelations was that our world—or rather Dick’s early seventies California world—was a colossal cosmic illusion. Dick came to believe, at least some of the time, that he was still living in apostolic times, and that the intervening centuries of history were a fabulation. He and everyone else were trapped in a frozen block of causal determinism and political oppression he called the Black Iron Prison, whose paradigm was Rome but whose contemporary expression was the Nixon administration.

The wars and atrocities, the reactionary turn, the politics of dominion and conquest, the forces of control all point to in our time that the illusions and delusions, the character formation and reality twisting that make up the ‘Human Security System’ (Land) are coming undone. This is what the poet William Butler Yeats hinted at in the early Twentieth Century:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

At the heart of modernity is this dark circle of fear that Christian civilization and the West are crumbling under their own weight of delusions; and, yet, along with them we see the same happening across the multifarious forms of civilization in Russia, India, China, Middle-East, Africa, South America, etc. The world is falling outside the borders of the ‘Human Security’ regimes and into chaos and contingency.  Philip K. Dick intuitively apprehended as much:

For Dick, this visible logic was not just unjust and totalizing but deterministic. To exist is to be subject to the unforgiving engines of necessity, the implacable fate (or wyrd) that appears in Dick’s writings in various forms: as the Black Iron Prison, as “engramming,” and as “astral determinism,” the ancient notion that destiny is set by the daemonic astrological clockwork of the heavens. Another word Dick threw in here was karma, a Hindu concept that had already been transformed by Theosophy into a kind of scientific mechanism or impersonal “natural law” by the time Dick came to use the term. (Davis)

This turn toward the Wyrd-Weird in the literature of the outlaws of reality from Poe to Ligotti are just this opening of the Outside into our existence once again. As Davis surmises: “The turn towards the weird in contemporary theory, briefly discussed in the introduction, is itself a symptom of a broader shift in consciousness, culture, and material conditions that amplifies this once marginalized word, into something that is at once a concept, a cultural space, and a mode of being. The weirding of our contemporary world no longer exactly means the “classic” weird—the weirdness that coursed through and congealed in pulp fictions, druggy subcultures, “counterhegemonic narratives,” and all manner of profane and heretical scenes and practices. Like so many undergrounds, that weird has become a cultural standing reserve, a raw material to fuel media’s need for the simultaneously new and familiar. The weird that saturates culture today is present often through its memetic banalization, like magical sigils serving as corporate logos.”

Even as the outlaws of reality open doors the cultural agents of order (ever vigilant!) seek to close them up through propaganda, lies, policing, media-tainment, and any and all forms of delusion and illusion. Dick himself was considered mad, out-there, beyond the pale, all the cliches that society loves to throw at anyone who dares to let the Outside in. Dick is representative of so many others who have littered the world of this outlaw philosophy: “the saints, shamans, werewolves, vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed, and whose names are absent from this text, even though their words have infested my own beyond extrication.” (Land)

To step beyond the proscribed limits of the social norms and nomos is to court madness in the eyes of society. Becker tells us the Kierkegaard understood that psychosis is neurosis pushed to its extreme. (75) As a clinician Becker saw “what we call schizophrenia as an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed. It is as though the freedom of creativity that stems from within the symbolic self cannot be contained by the body, and the person is torn apart. This is how we understand schizophrenia today, as the split of self and body, a split in which the self is unanchored, unlimited, not bound enough to everyday things, not contained enough in dependable physical behavior.” (76)

Let me begin at the beginning, so beginners get it too. For the good of the cause, if we can maintain this ignorance of the crystal for just a little while, we may conclude that the recipe consists of four parts. Four is the secret number of madness, truth, and wisdom.
—Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness

Even that old pessimist knew of the fourfold: “That is precisely why I have taken the trouble in this essay to present the principle of sufficient reason as a judgement that has a fourfold ground – not as four distinct grounds that produce the same judgement by chance, but as one ground presenting itself as fourfold, which I figuratively call the fourfold root.”6 Why fourfold? What is this strange number world of the fourfold? Even the speculative realist Graham Harman speaks of this as the “fourfold structure of objects, which serves as one of the methodological pillars of OOO.”7 As Harman continues,

The notion of a fourfold structure of things was an idea floated by Heidegger in his 1949 lecture ‘Insight Into That Which Is’, though in such an obscure poetic form – earth, sky, gods, mortals – that even his most loyal disciples have made little headway with the concept. In The Quadruple Object, Heidegger Explained, and elsewhere, I ventured an interpretation of Heidegger’s fourfold, trying to show how it both resembles and differs from the fourfold of OOO. Since there is no need to explain the details of Heidegger’s quadruple object philosophy in this book, we will now discuss only the OOO version of the fourfold. (153)

So, what is this OOO version of the fourfold? Why is it important? What does it have to do with madness and reality? I don’t want to burden the reader with the inner workings of Harman’s strange amalgamation of philoosophy, metaphysics, and metaphorics. The point is not to understand Schopenhauer or Harman’s or Heidegger’s use of the fourfold in their work. More to the point is how it enters the via mystica psychotica presented by Kusters as the Crystal World of the Mad: “the quadrated world” a fundamental aspect of the mad world: “Quadrated world: A fourfold structure of the world or cosmos is established, usually in the form of a quadrated circle (four continents or quarters; four political factions, governments, or nations; four races or religions; four persons of the godhead; four elements or states of being).” (ibid.) He goes on to epostulate,

The fourfold form of the crystal can be interpreted in different ways. The interpretation that is most deeply embedded in our being is the division of earth, air, water, and fire, discovered by early Greek philosophers such as Empedocles and Pythagoras. Diogenes Laërtius wrote this about Pythagoras’s teaching: “The first principle of all things is the monad; arising from the monad, the indeterminate dyad serves as the substrate of the monad, which is cause. From the monad and the indeterminate dyad arise numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, perceptible bodies, of which there are four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. These elements interact and change completely into one another, and from them arises a universe animate, intelligent, and spherical, with the earth (which is also spherical and widely inhabited) at its center.” (ibid.)

E.R. Dodds in his The Greeks and the Irrational speaking of the ancient shamans and their own via mystica psychotica: “A shaman may be described as a psychically unstable person who has received a call to the religious life. As a result of his call he undergoes a period of rigorous training, which commonly involves solitude and fasting, and may involve a psychological change of sex. From this religious “retreat” he emerges with the power, real or assumed, of passing at will into a state of mental dissociation.”8 This process of training in psychosis is at the heart of Kusters on Philosophy of Madness: “there’s no need to defend the Doctrine of the Four, or the Doctrine of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. We’re going to use it only as a means to an end, to attain a higher purpose. Making crystal is our only goal, and as soon as the crystal is made, the elements are no longer needed.” (ibid.)

Why Crystal? Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennia tells us:

This taste for geometrical composition, of which we could trace a history in world literature starting with Mallarmé, is based on the contrast of order and disorder fundamental to contemporary science. The universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas of order, portions of the existent that tend toward a form, privileged points in which we seem to discern a design or perspective. A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which   the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning— not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism. Poetry is the great enemy of chance, in spite of also being a daughter of chance and knowing that, in the last resort, chance will win the battle.9

Calvino argues that the notion of the crystal and crystalline offers us an emblem of existence: “The crystal, with its precise faceting and its ability to refract light, is the model of perfection that I have always cherished as an emblem, and this predilection has become even more meaningful since we have learned that certain properties of the birth and growth of crystals resemble those of the most rudimentary biological creatures, forming a kind of bridge between the mineral world and living matter.” (ibid.) He will go on to say,

Crystal and flame: two forms of perfect beauty that we cannot tear our eyes away from, two modes of growth in time, of expenditure of the matter surrounding them, two moral symbols, two absolutes, two categories for classifying facts and ideas, styles and feelings. A short while ago I suggested a “Party of the Crystal” in twentieth-century literature, and I think one could draw up a similar list for a “Party of the Flame.” I have always considered myself a partisan of the crystal, but the passage just quoted teaches me not to forget the value of the flame as a way of being, as a mode of existence. In the same way, I would like those who think of themselves as disciples of the flame not to lose sight of the tranquil, arduous lesson of the crystal. (ibid.)

Kusters like Calvino is of the “Party of Crystal”: “Madness is like an enormous bulldozer, turning over both city and countryside and leveling it into a megazone of destruction and nothingness.” (Kusters: Earth) Kusters speaks of the earth as our prison much like the Gnostics, and as well offers us that old shaman – Empedocles: “Empedocles was not of this earth. He came down from the top of the pyramid and said, “I walk about like an immortal god …” As the elders say of Empedocles (quoted in Kingsley 1995, 380), “It was as a fugitive from the anger of God that he too came to this world, for when he came down to this world he came as a help to those souls whose minds have become contaminated and mixed. And he became like a madman, calling out to people at the top of his voice and urging them to reject this realm and what is in it and go back to their own original, sublime, and noble world.” (ibid.)

I would only argue that there is not separate, other world, but that it is our broken consciousness, our divided self – our fall into this delusion and illusionary character world of socialization against reality that is at stake. We will not need to enter some “other world” but as William Blake in his “mental fight” foresaw: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) The point being we are already there, we are in the realm of reality but have been shaped by evolutionary forces to hide that fact from ourselves because it is too intense, too overwhelming and monstrous. It makes us anxious and full of dread. As Kusters puts it in “Air”:

If madness is like a spiral-shaped tornado, what are its beginning and end points? Does the spiral turn inward or outward? Or is madness like a four-dimensional spiral? As the element of air, the spiral in tornado form can lift you up, let you float and turn, carry you along, and set you down in very distant places. As the element of air, the spiral can release you from the earth, temporarily or forever. It’s the spaceship of the anonymous astronauts. It is Janus-faced: terrifying from the outside but serene and calm in the eye of the storm. Because of the invisibility and intangibility of the element of air, the tornado escapes from our grasp. We don’t know if we’re inside or outside the tornado, how spacious the eye is, or what there is to “see” there. We can enter the tornado only by moving through its wall. And whether we— as “we”— will survive such a move is unknown. (ibid.)

Then we enter the whirlpool of psychosis whereas Kusters quoting Deleuze says: “The crystal-image was not time, but we see time in the crystal. We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological time, Cronos and not Chronos. This is the powerful, non-organic Life which grips the world. The visionary, the seer, is the one who sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing of time as dividing in two, as splitting.” (ibid.) To enter the waters of psychosis is to “renew contact with “fellow sufferers,” with seers and fools and those who don’t really exist.” (ibid.)

Then you enter the flames… “Within time the spark burns outside time. You stare into the fire and focus on the firing of the fire. Past the fire, past the becoming of nothingness and the being of eternity, you see a four-spoked wheel in the fire, and it’s melting. … Like a fakir who has passed through fire, you escape philosophy and arrive in the magic realm of the crystal, in the company of alchemists and wizards.” (ibid.)

“The full-blown schizophrenic is abstract, ethereal, unreal; he billows out of the earthly categories of space and time, floats out of his body, dwells in an eternal now, is not subject to death and destruction.”
—Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

This all sounds so enchanting, and yet I wonder why those who do not see this realm of wonder, alchemy, and magic as a place and site of metamorphic transformation and delight but rather as a realm of hellish paradise. Ligotti is one such, and so many other poets, thinkers, and dark mystics of negation and negative visions of this mad realm who see it not as blessing but as curse. What of them? Where do they fit in to Kusters grand vision of crystal and flame? As Ligotti says as if in rebuttal of this beatific vision:

My focus has fairly consistently been on what I have thought of as an “infernal paradise,” a realm where one wallows in something putrid and corrosive that lies beyond exact perception. In his stories, Lovecraft’s adventurous expectancy ultimately has its origin in something terrible, and not the child’s picture‐book wonderland you find in the work of a lot of writers of fantastic fiction. But it’s still thrilling in its own way. It isn’t purely hellish, as is the case with my stories. Lovecraft was an astronomy buff as a child and so this feeling probably stemmed from that time. I was a pathological Catholic as a child, and one might make a connection between my early life and my later writings on that basis.10

“But man is not always so lucky… If the lie that he attempts to live is too flaunting of reality, a man can lose everything during his lifetime—and this is precisely what we mean by psychosis: the complete and utter breakdown of the character structure.”
–Ernest Becker

For some like Ligotti the crystal world is a frozen wasteland and infernal paradise of undeath where the terrors of life live on in a realm of pure ecstatic dread and wonder. Maybe the image of the Medusa rather than the Crystal or Flame is more fitting for Ligotti’s and the pessimal outlaws of literature:

It is possible that only the dead are not in league with the Medusa. We, on the other hand, are her allies—but always against ourselves. How does one become her companion… and live? We are never in danger of beholding the Medusa. For that to happen she needs our consent. But a far greater disaster awaits those who know the Medusa to be gazing at them and long to reciprocate in kind. What better definition of a marked man: one who “has eyes” for the Medusa, whose eyes have a will and a fate of their own.11

---

1. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death (p. 73). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Land, Nick. A Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Routledge, 1992.
3. Kusters, Wouter. A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking. The MIT Press (December 1, 2020).
4. Dick, Philip K.. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
5. Davis, Erik. High Weirdness (The MIT Press). The MIT Press.
6. Arthur Schopenhauer. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings. Cambridge University Press.
7. Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (p. 16). Penguin Books Ltd.
8. Dodds, Eric R.. The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures) . University of California Press. Kindle Edition.
9. Italo Calvino. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Kindle Locations 917-922). Feedbooks. Kindle Edition.
10. Weird Fiction Review. “Thomas Ligotti and the Realm of Nightmares.” [Interview] Weird Fiction Review. 15 October 2015. weirdfictionreview.com/2015/10/interview-thomas-ligotti-and-the-realm-of-nightmares.
11. Ligotti, Thomas. The Medusa. First published in Fantasy Tales, Winter, 1991.