thomas ligotti the shadow at the bottom of the world

By the next day the stalk has disappeared ('It's gone back,' says the farmer who owns the field. In a vague communal panic, they dig deep into the earth to find the base of the stalk, but no matter how far they dig, they cannot find its end. They gather the next day to examine the scarecrow, and when they attack it and remove its outer garments, they discover not the expected wooden frame but 'something black and twisted into the form of a man, something that seemed to have come up from the earth and grown over the wooden planks like a dark fungus, consuming the structure' (Ligotti, GrimscribeĢ22). The sights, sounds, and smells of autumn ripen to an almost unbearable pitch, until one night the town's residents see a scarecrow begin to move in a grotesque fashion in a farmer's field on the edge of town. 'The Shadow at the Bottom of the World' relates the story of an unspecified rural town which experiences an unnatural prolongation of the autumn season one year. Specifically, I shall examine the ways in which the story uses the motifs of liminal terror and collective identity to achieve the acme of philosophical nightmarishness that has come to be recognized as the hallmark of Ligotti's fictional oeuvre. In this paper I shall examine this darkness as it relates to Ligotti's story 'The Shadow at the Bottom of the World,' which can be found in his collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works, as well as in his omnibus collection titled The Nightmare Factory.

Thomas Ligotti has long been known for the extreme darkness of his philosophical vision, and for the power his stories possess to imprint this darkness upon the reader's own outlook and mood. Thomas Ligotti, 'I Have a Special Plan for This World' When puppets turn to face the puppetmaster. In Thomas Ligotti's 'The Shadow at the Bottom of the World'īut I wanted to witness what could never be

Thomas ligotti the shadow at the bottom of the world