At the same time, patches of brilliance engaged in a territorial dispute with the oncoming onyx of the storm. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums.

Perhaps it was this very obscurity that allowed them the excitement of their central purpose, which seemed to be a precarious flirting with personal apocalypse, the striving for horrific dominion over horror itself. Instead, they maintained a kind of blasphemous fatalism, a doomed determinism which brought them face to face with realms of obscure horror. Their chief aim, in true mystical fashion, was to transcend common reality in the search for higher states of being, but their stratagem was highly unorthodox, a strange detour along the usual path toward positive illumination. As I suspected, hallucinogenic drugs were used by the sect, and there was no doubt that they believed themselves communing with strange metaphysical venues. Their raison d'etre was a kind of mystical masochism, forcing initiates toward feats of occult daredevilry - 'glimpsing the inferno with eyes of ice', to take from the notebook a phrase that was repeated often and seemed a sort of chant of power. “Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates.

To think that we might have found comfort in a world suited to our nature, only to end up in one so resoundingly strange!” If only it actually were deranged by invisible powers, if only it were susceptible to real strangeness, perhaps it would seem more like a home to us, and less like an empty room filled with the echoes of this dreadful improvising. There is only our own world and it alone is alien to us, intrinsically so by virtue of its lack of mysteries. And these are merely a few of the infinite variations on the themes of the natural order as it is usually conceived.īut is there really a strange world? Of course.

Hence, it may appear to some that a leafless tree is not a tree but a signpost to another realm that an old house is not a house but a thing possessing a will of its own that the dead may throw off that heavy blanket of earth to walk in their sleep, and in ours. It does indeed seem that the strict order of the visible world is only a semblance, one providing certain gross materials which become the basis for subtle improvisations of invisible powers. “From the earliest days of man there has endured the conviction that there is an order of existence which is entirely strange to him.

The nightmare factory by thomas ligotti