The Nightmare Factory, Vol. 2

I had found the first volume sort of hit and miss and was hoping that the second would preserve the strengths while avoiding some of the pitfalls of the first. While it is more consistent, it's still sort of weak and made me realize how difficult it can be to translate from one medium to another, especially when dealing with such an odd, singular vision such as that of Thomas Ligotti.

I've found that Ligotti's best stories have such a powerful sense of language that after reading one, I'll have a phrase or a whole sentence bouncing around in my head for a while. To transfer these stories successfully into a visual medium would probably require a visual imagination equally as twisted and powerful as Ligotti's literary imagination. Sadly, none of these pieces reflect such an achievement.

Of the stories adapted, “Gas Station Carnivals,” which is the first of the four, is easily my favorite. The story centers largely around a story that one character tells about weird little carnivals located adjacent to gas stations, which his family would come across on road trips. Among the attractions was a sideshow which would sometimes feature a sinister figure called The Showman, who never shows his face to the audience. From this little bit of reminiscence, the story spins off into a strongly Kafka-esque sense of paranoia. The visuals are adequate though not spectacular, and the choice to fully reveal The Showman, while an arguably defensible choice, reveals the pitfalls of this sort of adaptation. Also, the illustrator, perhaps because he was aware of the importance of language, has chosen to highlight important terms in the dialogue, which makes the whole thing feel like the world's strangest Mark Trail comic.

The next story is “The Clown Puppet,” is a weaker story than Gas Station Carnivals. The story is of a man who has experienced occasional visitations from a clown puppet, a literal puppet that will suddenly appear in his presence and mostly just proceed to creep him out. These experiences have turned him into something of a drifter, and so as the story begins he finds himself behind the counter of a little drugstore after closing hours. The clown puppet shows up, but the events of that evening deviate somewhat from his previous experiences. Because it is a lesser story, one would imagine there's a little more the illustrator can do, yet it also means the story is even more strongly dependent on the language. The art pushes more towards the surreal, with a certain washed-out look which emphasizes the artificial lights of its nighttime setting. However, it doesn't really compensate for the weaker story.

The third story is “The Chymist” from Ligotti's debut collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I confess I've never thought this was a great story. Ligotti does have a talent for a unique sort of psychopath who despite a certain awful glamour also happens to be completely aware of his own insignificance in the universe, a combination of malevolence and lucidity I find chilling. In this story, the psychopath is also the narrator, which means instead of seeing the story from the point of view of someone we might identify from we see it through someone completely repellent, which makes it less able to get under my skin. The narrator is an actual chemist who works for a pharmaceutical company, and the story involves his picking up a prostitute in a bar, going back to her place and him giving her a drug with certain (literally) nightmarish effects. It's not a great story, and the art doesn't help. At some points, it does sort of evoke the peculiar take on urban decay that is a prominent Ligottian theme, but the figure of the chemist himself, whether in his leisure-suit wearing regular day self or in his mad scientist alter ego, is just a bit too cartoony. A better artistic representation might have made this unlikable character a little more interesting, but the cartoony approach just makes him even less interesting.

The final story is “The Sect of the Idiot,” a story about a man who moves to a new city, an older city which he finds almost transcendent in its age and decay. One night he has a dream about certain strange, inhuman figures gathered in a room. During the course of the dream, he comes to realize that not only do these figures somehow control reality but that they are themselves in turn controlled by even more powerful, more inhuman beings. This story is also from Songs of a Dead Dreamer and the original, while pleasant enough, never struck me as one of his stronger pieces. The adaptation is interesting, though as with “Mr. Locrian's Asylum” in the first volume, I got the sense that the story had been trimmed a little too much, so that much of the sense of atmosphere was lost. Aside from saying that I liked the way the figures in the room reflected the story's strongly Lovecraftian element, I thought the art decent but not strong enough to compensate for the abridgment of the text.

Overall, I'd say only “The Chymist” is a disappointment, though perhaps it was unrealistic to hope an interesting approach would redeem a lesser story. The other stories, while never really elevating the original material or perhaps even living up to it, are enjoyable though not quite a match for the originals.