Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (1991)

 Well, I'm a convert. This was published five years after his first collection. He seems to have settled into a more uniform mode in this one. The tone is one of American small and middle-sized towns, and of night. Some are lonelier and darker, some marked with the colours of downtown and carnival. The Lovecraftian part of him records a lot of this like an anthropologist of the less often touched parts of the secret soul. It also has the weightiness of that kind of prose, a formality. Then his Poe side takes up the heavy skein and thwacks it alive with something like poetry. It's a very involving mixture, though, like Lovecraft and Poe, it definitely survives better in small amounts. The image-making is shot through with shadows, and a weird kind of "bright murk". This is I'm guessing influenced by the artworks of horror during the period in which he grew up, or the design ethos of movies of that period - scarecrows under moonlight and so on. But his originality comes in, it seems to me, in a willingness to take that trope and extend it intellectually - we are led into refinements of mood and psychology which plumb a further sea little sailed upon. And it's this effort which marks him out for me - there are very few writers I've read from recent times who have the chutzpah to do this, to even want to do this. It's redolent of the intellectual appetite of writers of longer ago, who are my main fare - a crazily comforting thing to find that someone still "respects" that space - has the wish to go there. One other thing: I wonder if David Lynch was a fan. There's something about the "burnt people" in the last (2017) series of Twin Peaks, existing as blackened shadows buzzed alive with sporadic blasts of electricity in what appears an abandoned 50s small-town service station, emanating evil, which is very Ligotti, somehow.

Portable Magic by Emma Smith (2022)

 Can't say I'm not relieved that this one is over. It feels, to use a shortcut, like a very "Islington" book. The chattering middle classes of the twenty-first century performing. That's not to say that there aren't interesting things in it. One is left with the feeling of having been apprised of a few worthwhile titbits of information, and having waded through a slough of other stuff, mainly "theoretical". It strikes me that the author is the equivalent of someone like David Olusoga - a retailer in a thirsty domain, books in her case, social history via houses in his. The thirst brings us to them, and the hyperbolic stew of language pushes us back again: the "subverting of expectations", the "disjunctions between form and content", the "dematerializing the book as object". It's not that statements of that ilk are not true or correct in some cases, it's the toxification that comes from overconcentration on signifier-language over straight statement. It's also the case that too much of that kind of Islingtonism is indeed a drawing away from useful truth, an obfuscation. So any power that might have come from the piece's simpler facts is traduced. Olusoga operates in such an interesting territory, its only practitioner, that one still looks forward to his programmes, despite expecting to be irritated. Unfortunately Smith's is very trodden ground. The case (she calls it that) that she wishes to make here is that the form of books is as important as their content. She seems to feel that this is new and exciting. I have no idea how new it is (has no-one covered the importance of form before? I'd be surprised) but it's definitely not exciting. Books ultimately are about content, and form can take on importance in some cases. That's it. And the proof of the pudding is in the feeling one has on finishing: I've not been told anything conceptually new. I am enlightened about some interesting instances of form in books. I wish I could thank her for those, and do, but with the proviso that I'd like to have been saved the energy of dealing with everything else.