How 'Teatro Grottesco' Transforms Surreal Horror

Last time on this blog, I discussed Franz Kafka’s cult classic masterpiece ‘Metamorphosis,’ and how it perfectly embodies the core elements of one of my favourite genres of fiction, surreal horror.

But as mentioned in that essay, surrealism, and surreal horror in particular, is an inherently subjective kind of literature, and as such it is as malleable as it is capricious. Giving this space to another author inherently changes things, because that new author is their own individual, who therefore moulds surrealism in their own unique way to depict through their own subconscious lens, what they consider to be disregarded.

Thomas Ligotti is most well known as a writer of cosmic horror and the weird, but because of the stories through which I was first introduced to him, I have always considered him first and foremost a writer of surreal horror.

Even so, he is very, very different to Kafka.

So let’s take a look at Thomas Ligotti’s horror collection Teatro Grottesco, and ask ourselves the following question – how can the basis of surreal horror established a century earlier by Franz Kafka, be evolved today?

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My Case For Retributive Action is the scariest and best story in this collection, and if I was to break down its narrative, it might at first seem similar to ‘Metamorphosis,’ but there are also important differences that modernise and diversify the surreal horror backbone on which it operates.

The first major similarity is that our main character’s circumstance is the primary source of horror, the threat of the setting and our character’s role within that setting being the most prominent danger, one that is deepened with each new detail introduced.

We are immersed in a tiny, two street town, in which an office – distant from any of the company’s regional centres of operation – is to act as our protagonist’s new place of work. Here also is an apartment building where our protagonist lives alone in a single room on the top floor, in which noises can be frequently heard – he suggests mice or some other vermin live in the attic, the landlady promises it would be seen to, but it never is.

In true surrealist fashion, it is not simply the external reality of the setting that so distresses our protagonist. Instead, the personal, internal experience of the narrator in response to this external reality is the story’s main focus.

Immediately contrasting this tale from Kafka’s own is the first person narration in which our protagonist is writing a letter to a friend. This imbues the story with a very different atmosphere and feeling, emphasising the subjective aspects of surrealism as a genre via the bulk of the narration, while casting us, the readers, as this friend, an immersive, second person role we play which opens the story up to interpretation in a more overt way.

Our narrator relays that he has been on edge for reasons ‘you’ – the recipient friend – know, this being his nervous condition. On top of this, he is suffering sleep deprivation, partly but not entirely due to the verminous noises above his bedroom.

It’s also clear he is contemplating suicide, with one early passage having him pass a bottle of nerve medication from hand to hand. Wherever it stops will decide if he heads into work at this new job, or ends it all.

In this way the story has a much more direct focus on mental illness, with both the letter’s writer and recipient having seen the same doctor – a doctor we as the recipient are assumed to still be seeing.

As an internalised, subconscious genre, mental illness is a key part of surrealism – drawing from the unconscious mind, involving the hallucinogenic and the idea of dream states – and especially surreal horror. The dark psychology of mental illness, especially the bleak mindset tied to depression, anxiety, depersonalisation, is ripe for the kind of ‘in a character’s head’ writing that defines stories like this one.

In his long form, non-fiction essay, ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,’ Ligotti admits to being a nihilist, something which is evident enough when reading his bleak and cynical fiction. While Kafka thought of people as a source of fear who can never fully understand the tragic realities of a small few, Ligotti believes that life itself should be held with miserable contempt as the source of all horror.

It’s a different lens which allows for this surreal horror work to differentiate itself from its predecessor – ‘Metamorphosis’ was a tragic, evocative story, while the tales Ligotti tells are dark in a scarier, more unsettling way.

This is the cosmic horror writer in Ligotti colouring his surrealism – this is one of the core ways surreal horror has been transformed here, with genres and subgenres melding together and subverting one another frequently. As it turns out, it’s not just horror that is the perfect partner to surrealism, but cosmic horror specifically.

Like with Kafka, it is not only the personal feelings of a broken man that is the focus here, but the strange and strangely cruel work life he has been forced into.

The sour and briny smelling office in which he works is surrounded by thick, grey fog, permeating the town – this fog crawls down his throat and cuts off his breathing, but most importantly, it stops him from seeing outside the office. There is a symbolic interpretation I could give here that he is metaphorically but also literally unable to see beyond the workplace, but this is not entirely interpretive. There is no clock in the office, and no one ever seems to take breaks. He worries about the food in his briefcase and when it would get eaten, as well as the nerve meds he has left behind at the apartment. Feeling dizzy, he has almost finished his unexpectedly large workload, only to be dumped with a stack twice as large.

Ligotti’s surreal horror depiction of the zealously work-oriented society we have built for ourselves is similar to Kafka’s but just like with mental illness, his writing is much more direct and explicit. His cosmic leanings seem predisposed to craft a bleak and malicious work life for his protagonist.

And when this protagonist is, finally, taken for a lunch break, we are given two important details. First, the office is perpetually shorthanded and therefore his hours are not simply irregular – but indefinite.

Again, the commentary is social, the horror small scale and personal rather than more broadly political. It’s the kind of subtle approach surrealism inherently lends itself to, letting the reader scare themselves with imaginings and implications. In this case, does the workload ever end, and what are they even working towards? Nihilistic and mundane realities of work life for many people, exaggerated with expressive horror writing. The irrelevance of mankind core to cosmic horror, blended masterfully with a surreal story’s focus on the individual.

The second detail is quite different, though. Inside the unclean, tiny coffee place that doesn’t serve food and has nobody inside, the narrator reveals that he doesn’t drink coffee – leading to his mentor Ribello’s nervous admission that “Hatcher didn’t drink coffee.”

This is another example of how Ligotti’s cosmic background changes things – where Kafka cast a surreal horror curse on an unfortunate, isolated character, here, the subtle horror at play in the world is a curse laid across all of the town’s strange inhabitants. Everyone suffers in this place, across generations, thanks to the corporate evil that is – Q. Org.

Tying the theme of our mental illness with the horror of our menial labour is the disturbing reality that our shared doctor wrote a job application working for Q. Org as if it were a prescription for medication. See, every doctor in this town works for Q. Org, and everyone in this town is taking some kind of medication to cope with the nightmare that is existence.

A motif here is our doctor’s claims that nothing is unendurable, but on the contrary, our narrator believes life itself is unendurable, a thing he can only respond to with passive terror.

This, to me, is the perfect fusion between Ligotti’s cosmicism and Kafka’s surrealism, the two enhancing each other to craft a much more direct, invasive and inescapable kind of surreal horror.

Because, while the basis of a disregarded truth being expressed through a genre of subconscious writing still runs true in this story, no longer can it be divorced from the reader. This story is written for us, as a letter from a suffering friend. A suffering friend in a town where everyone is oppressed by the pervasive rule of Q. Org, and where every doctor intends only to make you work ready for Q. Org. This is not something that can be isolated to a few – this is the surreal horror reality of our entire world.

While Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ depicts a single person suffering as a disregarded thing, Ligotti’s brand of surreal horror as seen in My Case For Retributive Action expands this out into the nihilistic and cosmic perspective that we are all disregarded things, suffering at the hands of an uncaring corporation, itself at work in an even less compassionate universe.

Therefore – Hatcher.

See, Hatcher lived in the same apartment building as our narrator, in the same strange town, working the same indefinite hours at the same job he too was given via his doctor. But he didn’t have a nervous condition. He had severe arachnophobia.

I’ll need to get into spoilers to discuss any more of Hatcher, but first of all, I want to look at the broader picture. Because the nature of exploring how an author can change and develop a genre means that I can’t simply talk about one story here. Conveniently, Teatro Grottesco is filled with surreal horror oddities as unnerving as they are fascinating.

To illustrate the variety on show in this collection, let’s talk about Ligotti’s other best, scariest story – The Red Tower.

Earlier in this essay, and also in the Kafka essay that preceded it, I talked about how surrealism so often utilises dream logic and dream feel – nightmare logic and nightmare feel in surreal horror specifically.

This is something that has drawn me to surrealism ever since I first discovered it. I’ve always been fascinated with dreams and nightmares, and I’ve always longed to capture that feeling in my own writing and discover that feeling in the writing of others.

The Red Tower is the closest, by far, that I have ever gotten to having that sense of being in a nightmare replicated with words on a page.

At first glance, this story shares the third person writing style of ‘Metamorphosis,’ a lens that delivers what seems to be a character-less sequence of descriptive writing focused on a large factory built of red bricks. No road leads up to this structure in the grey expanse surrounding it, and if a road did exist here, it would be useless, as there are no doors to the building, nor even any windows below the second floor.

What changes things from weird to surreal is the shift that happens when Ligotti returns to his preferred first person narration to bring back that personal, subjective element of the genre via a once again nameless character’s fascination with the titular building.

This character’s description of The Red Tower bounces between varying mundane yet weird aspects, such as the building’s subterranean access, and vague references to ‘when’ it was in full operation, now only a ghost of a building left to ruins.

Most important, though, is our narrator’s description of this factory’s equipment having evaporated soon after the ceasing of operations, and a hostility between the noisy factory and the desolate purity of its surroundings. What’s more, he shares a theory that it didn’t used to be red, that an “encrimsoning” took place on what was once as grey as its surroundings.

With one extended piece of descriptive writing, Ligotti blurs the line between not only surreal horror, psychological horror and nihilistic cosmicism, but now also the supernatural.

In ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,’ Ligotti describes cosmic horror as equivalent to supernatural fiction. This is not a common perspective, but the fact that it is Ligotti’s perspective expresses to me just why this author is so capable of blending disparate sections of horror together to craft unique and interesting works.

Basically, Thomas Ligotti sees it all as one flavour of how humanity – and artists in particular – examine the oppressive horror at work in the universe.

I mentioned earlier that the individual author is important to the subjective, subconscious and open to interpretation nature of surrealist writing. Ligotti’s own individual perspective on horror and the weird being this one cohesive space in which to flex the creative muscles has greatly aided his ability to write surreal horror.

His descriptive writing in The Red Tower is, to me, the epitome of the subgenre.

The prose here combines the real with the fantastical to describe first the construction of the tower itself, before moving into the objects this factory was tasked with creating, finally shifting into the locations and pathways by which these novelty items are delivered to their recipients. Every one of these stages becomes increasingly strange and creepy in isolation before growing and mutating into subsequent stages. The end result is something at once impossibly believable, yet uncanny.

What strikes me is how well that intense imagery we try so hard to remember from nightmares is captured here, combined with an almost biographical writing style that emphasises the mundanity of what should feel like intensely frightening horror scenes. In a strange way, they feel more frightening, because that subtlety feels so out of place that the fear response is exacerbated. Just like a nightmare.

You know when you wake and can’t explain why your dream was so frightening? That’s how this story feels. Scary, and fascinating, and familiar, all in one stroke.

The Red Tower is more akin to the surrealist painters than to authors like Kafka – visual and descriptive rather than plot based, it encapsulates a moment, an emotion, an idea.

What elevates the story yet further, though, is the ambiguous psychology of our narrator. This character is fascinated by The Red Tower, but has never actually seen it. He is only relaying what he has heard – by others who have also never seen it.

Apparently, everyone is talking about this environment, and everyone is seeing it all the time, even as they do not know they are seeing and talking about it. This is the kind of twisted logic I find so effective in a surreal horror – the ambiguity, the subtlety, that is paradoxically intense and focused, distorting the supernatural into the super real.

So, this all brings us back, finally, to My Case For Retributive Action, and the severe arachnophobia of Hatcher. And how this extra detail towards the end of that tale leads to a further twist in Ligotti’s transformation of surreal horror.

*There will be spoilers ahead*

The thing about the doctors working for Q. Org is that they don’t seem to want their patients to become better, healthier, happier individuals. They don’t especially want to off-set the horror of this cosmic existence. They only want their patients to become more work ready.

Unfortunately for poor Hatcher, he was not work ready when given his prescription for work.

As a result, his arachnophobia led to a crisis at the office, after which he was thrown out and fired. Things only got worse from there. The very specific cigarettes he smoked, then the food for his specific diet, and finally the medicine for his arachnophobia, all became unavailable. With no purpose and no comforts remaining, Hatcher found himself taking spider venom for treatment. Lastly, he went missing.

And here is where Ligotti goes one step further. Like with The Red Tower, he twists a unique take on supernatural horror into the end of this story on top of everything else it plays with.

After one too many shocks and frights, and too much conflicting, ambiguous information from his colleagues, our narrator is done imagining the nature of everything he has been subjected to over his first day working for Q. Org. So, he heads into the attic, the source of those verminous noises, and finds dead, eight-legged rats.

Ligotti wastes no time dithering over whether the cause of these dead, deformed rats – a cat-sized, spider monster with a protrusion like a human head – is or is not Hatcher, our protagonist, as stated, done with ambiguity. Instead, he watches Hatcher inject his own spider venom into another rat, which shuffles off to undergo its own painful transformation.

Finally, Hatcher lifts his throat for our narrator to end his existence in this cruel life.

It is the letter framing device that ends this story, our protagonist confessing he will not be going back to work, and that he is watching his doctor undergo the same transformation before he will kill him, and take his medication – putting both of them out of their misery.

He has sent the second vial of venom to us, either to fulfil our own obsession – the specifics of this left unsaid – or to remind our doctor that nothing is unendurable.

What works here is that despite Ligotti’s heightened bleakness and intensity, the horror remains subtle, open to interpretation, and personal. The reason for this is because, even though our protagonist’s horror is arguably solved, the horror as a whole is definitely not.

We aren’t given closure. The town is still strange and uncaring. The doctors are still owned by this company. There are probably still supernatural spider… things… scuttling around any number of attics. And worst of all, we as a character unwittingly transported into this horror story still have decisions to make, and conflicted information to collate in our own minds.

In my essay on ‘Metamorphosis,’ I claimed that leaning into the fantasy and doing something more intense, more overtly horrific is the “typical” horror approach, and that Kafka was brilliant for not doing this for his story. Meanwhile, the ending to My Case For Retributive Action is a lot like that kind of ending, and I’m praising it just as strongly.

So… What’s going on here? Is it better for a horror story – and a surreal horror story in particular – to be more subtle, or more intense?

Did Kafka make the smarter choice or was Ligotti right to take things further?

Well, neither. And both.

Kafka’s subtlety allowed that story to communicate more sociopolitical meaning and focus on the themes he wanted to explore. Meanwhile, Ligotti’s intensity allowed this story to more directly deliver on the raw feeling of living the nightmare that is existence in this universe. Each approach benefits either subtlety or intensity. Neither one is inherently better than the other – it depends on the story being told. With the personal, subconscious nature of surreal horror, this is even more relevant a point to make.

While it would have been the wrong ending for Kafka’s horror, an ending like this feels a lot more right for Ligotti’s story, as the level of intensity develops and undergoes its own metamorphosis over time. In the end, the intensity and vivid imagery of a contemporary horror story is not typical in any way, but immersive, and transformative.

In fact, what really works here is that once the intensity passes, Ligotti smartly lets the story slip back into the subtle and personal realm of the surreal rather than letting the more overt nature of the supernatural get the last word. Our narrator passes his torch to us, the reader, in the narrative itself, but also in terms of our own personal interpretation – we, then, get to decide what part of this tale is important, is disregarded, and even what is most frightening.

Surreal horror, by its nature, is an extremely personal, open to interpretation genre that draws from the subconscious elements unique to the specific author writing it. In Teatro Grottesco, we can see three clear ways this author has shifted the genre into something entirely his own.

1. As a cosmic nihilist, Thomas Ligotti has a uniquely bleak perspective on life, which allows him to deliver a uniquely bleak version of the realism half of surrealism. Seeing the universe as an uncaring source of horror we are unwillingly forced to partake in, his subconscious delivers a style of writing dark, cold, and yet compassionate in its desire for something better – or at least, something poetic.

2. Seeing the cosmic and the supernatural as connected elements in one larger pool of inspiration from which any writer of the weird and horrific can draw from allows Ligotti to blend different aspects of the fantastical together before weaving them into his surrealist stories as a complete whole, subverting every aspect of his work, and further diversifying the story.

3. Writing in the contemporary horror space has allowed Ligotti to intensify his fiction, writing with more directness, and more explicit horror, but without sacrificing the subtlety and open to interpretation nature surreal horror is most attributed.

Surreal horror is one of my favourite genres of fiction, and it is thanks to Franz Kafka and Thomas Ligotti that I became so interested in this original approach to writing. Hopefully, analysing Kafka as a classic, and Ligotti as a contemporary, has gone some way to convincing you of the depth and versatility of this underappreciated genre.

This only leaves us with one place to go.

What is unique to you as a writer, or as a reader? What aspects of your subconscious mind can deliver something unique to the literary world? And how are you going to make it all fit together into one fascinating, terrifying whole?