Nightmarish Graphic Novel: Review of Ligotti's Nightmare Factory Volume 2
Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 09:06AM My first introduction to the elaborate, grotesque world of Thomas Ligotti was through the first volume of Nightmare Factory comics. The second volume was released yesterday, and I grabbed it up and consumed it in a sitting. I must confess, I found the second volume to be even more surreal, paranoid, grotesque, and complex. I was very impressed with the fusion of an array of comic art styles with the Poe-like intensity of the narratives.
Each story in the collection is a comic book interpretation of a previously published Ligotti story, and this volume really impressed me with the startling originality of Ligotti's imagination, and I also gained a better sense of the distinctive characteristics of a Ligotti horror tale, which firmly sits in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, but maintains its own distinctiveness through a blend of the surreal and nihilistic.
Ligotti's stories, represented here by the comics, really display an innovative use of iconic imagery in the storytelling. For example, the clown puppet with his diamond yo-yo is absolutely unforgettable. Similarly, the imagery of the gas station carnival is also memorable and incredibly surreal (and disturbing). The combination of extreme modern philosophy and the horror genre is also evident in this collection with the repeition of "nonsense," meaninglessness, subjective madness, and the bleakness of the mental landscape.
I must note the very clever and innovative use of a first-person monologue with word bubbles in "The Chymist."
My very favorite aspect of this collection is the narrative storytelling. I love how Ligotti energizes the gothic horror tale with elements of dreams. It's not enough to call the stories surreal because the entire story is infused with the flavor of a dream, that sense of bizarre interior logic that only works inside the dream, and this storytelling style really works well with the horrors that are seen (sometimes glimpsed). I think Ligotti takes the tradition of mad narrators from Poe and really takes it to another level of subjective madness in the horror tale. Often, in this collection, when finally confronted with the "face" of the monster, it feels like it is time to wake up.
Now I need to read the original Ligotti stories!
 Nightmare Factory GN Vol. 02 Price: 14.39 |
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