My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror by Thomas Ligotti (2002)

Hardcover, published June 1st 2002
Mythos Books

My Work is Not Yet Done: Unfinished business, say the psychiatrists, is responsible for most mental illness, and when Frank Dominio is demoted before he can present his plan to market a New Product, he decides that blowing his seven co-workers to kingdom com will prove more therapeutic than any medication or psychotherapy.

Before he can carry out his plan something happens to him, something unspeakable – in fact even he doesn’t know exactly what it was – but after it happens he finds that some black, preternatural force is flowing through him which now enables him to visit many ghastly forms of revenge on his former colleagues which previously would have been beyond anything he could have imagined, let alone carry out.

Whether Frank is unhinged, has persecution mania, or is descending into breakdown, are possibilities some readers will consider. Take for instance his assessment of colleague Sherry:

Thomas Ligotti and friends

I declared earlier in this document that, ‘with one exception,’ there was no cuteness among The Seven. Sherry was the exception, although a serious qualification must be appended to this statement. Physically she was attractive, not to the point of being a harrowing beauty, but enough to put her over the line between women of average or even ‘good’ looks into the company of those who possessed across-the-room attraction. (If anyone believes that I’m perpetuating some arbitrary or twisted image of the world, that’s fine with me – I wish them well in their transactions with social reality.) The qualification to which I made reference above is this: if you happened to cross that room on the other side of which stood Sherry, what you confronted was… I can’t even name it – some kind of thing inhabiting the body of an attractive woman, an alien from some diseased planet or a creature of low evolutionary stature that by some curious means had insinuated itself into a human being at some stage in her development, the result being this Sherry-thing.

Frank’s relationships with others are not tender then. But he is capable of feeling something like affection for his landlady Lillian who rents him an apartment above the Metro Diner (he does have saving graces, so is not impossible to empathise with).

The presentation of the story in the form of a document Frank is writing, adds to the story’s intensity. No room here for those literary ‘benches’ described by Shirley Jackson, which allow the reader to pause and take a breath while characters take in the view. Frank does take in the city’s views occasionally as he’s in the habit of wandering in the seedier districts taking photos of decrepit and disgusting ruins and remains (which later provide settings for some of the more colourful murders).

I don’t really understand why Thomas Ligotti has such a divisive effect on readers; for some he’s achieved a form of totemism, helped no doubt by reclusive tendencies which no doubt add to his mystique. Those who dislike his work usually complain of its ‘bleakness’ and nihilism, though it is also possible to find work illustrating life-enhancing beliefs (e.g. The Medusa).

There is a passage in My Work is Not Yet Done in which Frank Dominio crushes a cockroach underfoot: When I pressed my boot down to the floor I could feel everything go still and silent within that little body where before there had been only a vicious thrashing in blackness. I even felt a little part of myself – the part of me I had allowed to leak into the bug – grow still and silent. It felt good. Very good, however fleeting the feeling had been. I can truly say that it was the only moment of real well-being I had ever experienced in my life, if my present state of existence could in fact be considered part of that fabrication I called my life.

Thus expressing an idea possibly not far removed from the idea of the Nirvana some believe will come into being when the Universe and all reincarnation end and life with all its conflicts is replaced by a vast nothing? Aside from all this stuff, is it a good story? Yes, I think so. So is the next one.

I Have a Special Plan For This World: The offices of the Blaine Company are located in an elderly building in a place once known as Murder Town. Stress in the Blaine building affects the staff so greatly that their sight is affected to the point that distinguishing fellow workers in corridors and offices becomes impossible. Outside a dense yellowish haze fills the streets of the place which has come to be known as Murder Town, a fog whose origin and nature has defied explanation by scientists. When the fog is at its thickest the murder rate in the streets rises, so that when the air clears again it’s to reveal the beaten and mutilated corpses of the latest victims.

Is there some evil intelligence at work here, or is there something in the fog that causes this apparently mindless carnage? At any rate the Blaine building seems at the centre of it. Ligotti conjures a pleasantly murky and murderous atmosphere with this story, which was previously published in Horror Garage and reads like a sequel of the previous story, indicating the logical development of the Frank Dominio character (maybe a sort of nihilistic variation on Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion?)

But with the third story, The Nightmare Network any pretence at presenting characters we can sympathise with is abandoned as a multinational corporation advertises for “individuals willing to trade their personal lot for a share in our dream.” The dream is one of universal domination, of huge collective entities which exist solely to overcome or swallow everything not part of them, regurgitating them as mutant extensions of themselves, until finally all reason for existence ceases, there’s nothing left to swallow. This one reads a bit like experimental science fiction from the late fifties or swinging sixties. It’s twelve pages long but feels longer.