Thomas Ligotti knows something we don’t, something so dark and indescribable that we might go insane should we encounter it first-hand. We should be thankful to him, then, that he merely hints at whatever he sees in his writing, but even toned down you’ll find it difficult to ignore or deny the profound black emotions he portrays.

My Work is Not Yet Done brings together ‘three tales of corporate horror’ (as was the original Mythos Books sub-title) – the eponymous novella, a novelette I Have a Special Plan for This World, and a short story The Nightmare Network, and marks an evolution in Ligotti’s endeavours. Earlier collections immersed the reader in oddly bleak small town landscapes, the terrors of emerging memories and latent fears, coulrophobia, masks, puppets, loneliness, insecurity and anxiety. Indeed Ligotti has suffered from the latter condition all his life and this manifests strongly in many of his stories, especially in the seemingly personal and very accessible horror that is My Work Is Not Yet Done, but, and this is the evolution, so does a healthy vein of black, black humour.

Frank Dominio, or ‘Domino’ to his ignorant colleagues, works for a nameless corporation that produces unidentified products. As a middle-manager he attends bland and unnerving meetings with his management colleagues. He is afraid. The Seven Dwarfs, as he calls them, are a bunch of revolting individuals, all of whom he despises. But it soon becomes obvious that Frank is more than just your usual disgruntled, or nervous, employee. This man hates: “I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror.” And he hates because he sees no point in his own existence or that of those around him, and of the company he works for and the products they produce.

The first third of the novella revolves around Frank’s increasing paranoia, exasperation and strange sense of acceptance of the banality of his place in the scheme of things, an order he’s not convinced of anyway, as evidenced when he feels his Proposal has been stolen by The Seven Dwarfs and a colleague attempts to console him:

‘In the grand scheme of things,’ the voice continued before I grabbed it with both hands and wrung its neck, spitting out my words of contempt through gritted teeth -
A: There is no grand scheme of things.
B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity.
C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity.

Unceremoniously sacked, Frank hatches a plan to get even with The Seven Dwarfs, a special plan that involves a lot of guns and a massive Buck Skinner Hunting knife… but Ligotti does not take the easy way out – there’s no extreme version of Falling Down here. The story twists into unpredictable shadowy realms as Frank is abruptly overcome by a supernatural force, something he terms ‘The Great Black Swine’ which enhances his senses, empowers his actions and provides him with an understanding that only serves to justify his bleak world view and quest for revenge.

I Have a Special Plan for This World, the novelette, is set within the Blaine Company that has recently relocated to Golden City, (aka Murder Town), a city enveloped in a yellowish haze and renamed to attract corporate entities like the Blaine Company. And entity is exactly what it is, as ‘the atmosphere of tension had become so severe and pervasive that one could barely see more than a few feet in any direction’. Written from the perspective of an employee, who although keeping his head down, closely observes strange phenomena that restructures the Blaine Company, almost organically, and certainly supernaturally: as senior personnel are murdered near the company HQ, and office drones are gradually replaced by the city’s homeless, a Presence forms within the Blaine Company offices… a presence that still wants to ensure a profit. Summoned to meet this incorporeal management entity, our protagonist reveals some career aspirations of his own.

Much of Ligotti’s fiction is in the first person and both My Work is Not Yet Done and I Have a Special Plan for This World hold true to this viewpoint. Having read several interviews with him (and conducted one a long, long time ago) I find it difficult to separate the author from his characters – and this is what makes Ligotti’s fiction so impactful: you can feel him seething as he writes these words; and while obviously monstrously cynical about the corporate drudge, he infuses each tale with a dry and deadly humour that those of us who work in such noxious environments will be able to appreciate only too well.

Differing considerably in approach, the vignettes of The Nightmare Network present us with a series of initially persuasive classified adverts, propaganda and job vacancies that might have been written by any one of a million young advertising executives at the inflexible behest of a massive corporation’s publicity department: ‘Okay, here’s our Brief. Now go deliver. Oh and here’s what we want it to look, sound and feel like. We don’t NEED you, but do we want to USE you.’ Excerpts from a Supervisor’s notebook expose the extremes management are prepared to go to in order to maintain their position at the expense of their subordinates as the Company goes down. The adverts become increasingly desperate in tone, revealing the great uncaring vacuum behind the cosmic corporate bullshit – a bit like the current trend for those reassuringly pathetic ‘we’re GREEN and we CARE’  ads that assault us relentlessly. Considerably more experimental in tone that the previous two stories, The Nightmare Network left this reader nodding his head in agreement, as if he’d read a little bit of the truth.

I’ve been reading Ligotti for most of the twenty years he’s seen publication and the utterly convincing intensity and obscurity of his visions may be why he’s found it difficult to break out of the horror genre’s niche reading circles during this time. Admittedly his dark star has risen in the US over the last couple of years with 2 graphic novel adaptations of his work and a DVD release of the film adaptation of his short story, The Frolic. With the UK release of My Work is Not Yet Done (and his previous collection Teatro Grottesco also available as part of the Virgin Books horror line up) hopefully this situation will change.

Consider your weird fiction education incomplete until you’ve sunk into Ligotti’s disorientating literary darkness. His words will engulf you.

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