The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales by Thomas Ligotti Page A

as a distraction from each lash real life was putting to the writer at a specific time in his life. In the religious universe, hell exists as a place for others, not as a fate for those who invented it. But figuratively speaking, we are all doomed to invent our own hells. And after becoming a resident of some pit, we look around for companions with whom to commiserate—parties to our pain, equals condemned for the same lapses or blunders, whether we intended to commit them or not.
    With the second group of stories herein, those featuring Dracula and the Wolfman, certain motifs began to emerge that came to be carried throughout the rest of the book. These figures cried out of loneliness, yearning, and the rites of romance gone horribly wrong. Rather than spoil these singular dramas, let us say no more about them in this prelude to an exhibition of pains that by all justice would shatter the world in which they transpire.
    There are many stories that might have been reworked and included in this museum of ever-echoing groans and endlessly twisting grimaces. One of them deserves special mention because it just may serve as a key to all the others. The story is Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and its plot is this: A man is convicted of a crime unknown to him until he reads it as a legend that has been inscribed into his flesh by the pain-inflicting harrow of an uncanny machine. The strangest aspect of this narrative of strange characters, terrains, and devices is the expression of awe upon the condemned man’s face as his crime is revealed upon his body by the piercing contraption. As the official of the penal colony who is in charge of the execution remarks: “Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted…A moment that might tempt one to get under the harrow itself” (which the official does in the end, only to his grief). The enlightenment of Kafka’s man on the machine need not be definitive, as it is in the original, but could be only the first in a series of enlightenments, each bringing into view a greater crime than the one before, and each a greater source of pain. As the harrow keeps writing, the flesh of the man shackled beneath it becomes a palimpsest upon which unimaginable crimes are written…until the greatest crime of all is disclosed. In the words of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who was an influence on Kafka, “We should regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.” Extending Schopenhauer’s statement to make it a bit more chilling, as well as more accurate, we might specify our crime not as that of simply being born, but as being born into the House of Pain.

 
     
     
    Three Scientists
    One Thousand Painful Variations Performed Upon Diverse Creatures Undergoing the Treatment of Dr Moreau, Humanist
     
    Dr Moreau is examining the manwolf strapped to the operating table. He has worked very hard on this one, tearing him by slow and torturous degrees away from his bestial origins.
    Today Dr Moreau is curious. He sees the manwolf gazing at his pretty assistant. He first tries to read the truth in the manwolf’s eyes but cannot. Now he must resort to an empirical test.
    Very casually Dr Moreau loosens the straps binding the wrists and ankles of the manwolf and then, quietly, leaves the room. He waits a few moments in the hallway, anxious to allow them enough time. Finally, opening a thin crack in the door, he peeks inside with one eye.
    Well, so much for that , he thinks, and suddenly steps into the room to confront his two subjects—the assistant: standing rigid with terror; the manwolf: down on one knee like a delirious knight before the menaced lady he would gladly save.
    “Idiot!” screams Dr Moreau, knocking the manwolf’s head a good forty-five degrees to one side with the back of his hand. “We’ve got a long way to go with these beasts,” he tells his