Abstract
The article is devoted to the work of a modern American writer, one of the representatives of weird fiction, Thomas Ligotti. Ben Woodard, a philosopher, writer and speculative realist, defines Ligotti's philosophical concept as «ventriloquial idealism». To achieve a state of horror, a person needs a sense of the supernatural, expressed in impossibility and emptiness, and arising from a collision of prejudices rooted in the mind with something that should not exist, but it finds a way out into the space of the real world, giving rise to new demons in it. Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the everyday and trivial, still inaccessible to full knowledge due to the undoubted imperfection of both our senses and the brain itself.
In Ligotti's symbolically named cycle of short stories, «The Spectral Link», one of the key motifs is the concept of entropy as a process leading to liberation from the suffering and horrors of existence. It explores the dark corners of human consciousness, raising questions about the nature of horror, death and destruction. In Ligotti's work, souls swallowed by the abyss of uninterrupted nightmare do not seem to be just the result of their own fears and doubts – on the contrary, in the author's philosophy, only they «saw the light», beholding the meaninglessness and absurdity of life in human freedom.
People everywhere strive for order and stability, trying in every way to avoid even the thought of something unpredictable and uncontrollable intruding into the usual rhythm, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the fact that Chaos is an inevitable consequence, the absence of regularity in the world where only disintegration has the right to stability. But what is the real world, and what remains an illusion, a product of consciousness, a ghostly dream accepted as the truth?
Keywords
Thomas Ligotti, weird fiction, «The Spectral Link», entropy, reality, madness, horror.