Browsing by Author "Turpeinen, Ossi"

This thesis studies the relation between Thomas Ligotti’s fiction and non-fiction, demonstrating how the themes that the author overtly discusses in his philosophical work The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) have a more covert presence in his supernatural horror stories. By looking at select parts of Conspiracy, the novella My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002), and the short stories “A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing” (1997) and “Vastarien” (1987), I show how Ligotti’s writing functions as literary sublimation of negative thought and emotion. In this process of sublimation, existential agony is creatively transformed into an artistic form that has the potential to be beneficial to both the author and the reader. Conspiracy lays out Ligotti’s pessimistic philosophy, describing consciousness as an evolutionary mistake, humans as paradoxical puppets helplessly trapped in the uncanny play of being, existence as a meaningless nightmare, and the extinction of humankind as the ideal scenario. Ligotti also discusses supernatural horror at length in Conspiracy, tying it together with philosophical pessimism, which reads like a blueprint for his own weird fiction. From the murderous misanthropy of My Work to the static wish for disintegration in “Soft Voice” and the multilayered manipulation in “Vastarien,” philosophical pessimism permeates Ligotti’s stories in both implicit and explicit ways. Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman view the genre of weird fiction as a coded communique, an aesthetic enactment of pessimism. Their core idea is that pessimistic thought can better pass the reader’s defenses when it is veiled in the form of fiction, appealing to the audience’s emotions instead of trying to persuade them with philosophical argumentation. This thesis applies Packer and Stoneman’s theory to the analysis of Ligotti’s fiction and non-fiction, showing how each form of the author’s literary expression works to channel philosophical pessimism and sublimate existential agony.