January 10th, 2026

​Is Horror All There Is? Is It All That Exists? Some Ruminations on the (In)Human Condition

I had a sort of rough Christmas season. Not as rough as the Reiner Family’s (too soon?) but as much darkness as light certainly. Part of that is just the kind of weather we had here in the Nasty Nati. It was blistering cold and overcast, for the most part. And when the chill finally let up, the rain started falling, threatening to become ice and snow as soon as the cold returned, which it always inevitably did. Someone once said that Cincinnati only had two seasons, freezing winter and scorching summer, with only a couple weeks of fall and springtime thrown in. Whoever said that knew what they were talking about.
Another thing that made the Christmas season hard was seeing how frail both my mother and father have become. I know, it’s the human condition and I should be grateful they even made it into their late seventies like this. Especially considering the old man is a former smoker and the old lady is still smoking (both weed and cigarettes.) I haven’t talked to old Ned Ryerson recently, but I’d still venture they’ve both already beaten their odds on the actuarial table. I should be more grateful, but gratitude is the hardest of virtues to muster, and is usually only forced on us when we see someone else in even greater distress.
It hurts to think about what’s coming for them (and the rest of us, no matter what), and a sense of dread accompanies every parting with them, that question lingering in the background of our every interaction. When? Even my dog, once a feisty little terrier with a black coat, is now a gray dame with no teeth, bad eyesight, and poor hearing. At least, though, the olfactory bulb is still in working order. I know this because every time I drop the smallest piece of food on the floor, she comes alive and starts rooting around like a truffle pig let loose in the forest.
Part of what made the time gloomy, though, was what I was reading: horror author Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” subtitled, “A Contrivance of Horror.” In the book, Ligotti argues convincingly that all of human existence is a horror, that in an ultimate sense horror is the only thing that is real.
Ligotti further makes the case that human consciousness is different from the awareness that exists in other animals. It is an outgrowth of instinct, or rather a mutation, that has allowed us to think about thinking (metacognition), but also forced us to think constantly about our own mortality and the meaning of our existences. In Ligotti’s opinion, every invention of man is in some way designed to try to solve the unsolvable problems created by this mutation. Some turn to religion for answers, but the answers it provides are lies or delusion. Others try to distract themselves with hedonistic pursuits, blighting the pain with drugs or orgiastic sex. But as both sex and drug addicts can tell you, there comes a time when the pursuit stops killing pain and starts causing it.
Ligotti offers no solution in his book, because—unlike almost everyone else—he simply cannot bring himself to lie. He faces the void as long as anyone can without blinking, and though the book was depressing—terrifying even—his unwavering commitment to the truth as he sees it is admirable. The closest he comes, in fact, to a solution is a philosophy of anti-natalist nihilism. He’s not talking about drowning babies in the bathtub; he simply refused to bring children into a world whose pains outnumber its pleasures by some great order of magnitude. Like William Burroughs, Ligotti thinks pleasure an illusion, or simply “relief from pain.” The “pleasure” the addict feels when indulging their addiction is always greater when they indulge it after a long time without the drug. Because the pain prior to fixing was then at its most intense, and the abatement of pain is confused by the human animal as pleasure. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that among the biographical tidbits available about Ligotti online, it is mentioned that he is a lifelong sufferer of anhedonia. When he won the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, he chose that time to make a speech in favor of assisted suicide. The man is almost sui generis in his commitment to ending what he perceives as the farce of existence for the human animal, a puppet motivated mostly by pain.
There is a time, without a doubt, when I would have been less receptive to Ligotti’s arguments. Had I read the book as a fifteen year-old on a breezy summer day, its rhetorical perfection probably would have had a quite different effect on me. It’s hard to feel much besides lust—let alone think—when the endorphins are pumping and the hormones are swimming as they are at that age. Naturally, as a middle-aged man in the dead of winter being visited by his ageing mother and paying visits to his frail and trembling father, the book hits differently.
There were times I wanted to quit the book, and yet there were also times when the sublimity of the guy’s prose was its own compensation. The film critic Roger Ebert once said that a well-made film with a dark subject can leave the viewer feeling exuberant, and the experience was something like that. Ligotti is so good—so erudite in his interdisciplinarity—that the book remained a fun read even when he was basically telling me I was doomed and any arguments to the contrary I could proffer were born of delusion. Yes—horror of horrors (at least from Ligotti’s perspective)—the book was actual fun. After all, how many people can go from talking about G.K. Chesterton to the Buddha to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in a single paragraph? The man simply has a gift.
After a couple weeks of slow reading, I finished the book and reviewed it over at Goodreads, then I went on to the next thing. Of course, it has continued to linger in my mind, as evidenced by this blog post here. And I still worry about my mother and father. They both have good and bad days, but the bad days are seeming to start to outnumber the good ones, especially for the old lady. There was one day when she fell on the lawn and could not get up, and reached out to me for help. Alas, I couldn’t help much, either, as I had torn my shoulder apart in the army and have to be careful about lifting more than twenty-pounds. She’s thin, shrinking by the day, but she still exceeded my twenty pound limit by nearly a hundred pounds. And it wasn’t just the torn shoulder preventing me from being much help. Recently I had been diagnosed with “afib” (atrial fibrillation) and an aortal aneurism had been found in my heart. It’s treatable with pills, diet, and exercise, but still, it’s another reminder of my mortality. Am I the guy who used to max out his PT tests in the Army? The guy who could do eighty-something sit-ups in two minutes then run two miles in 13:30 even after a night of hard drinking and chain smoking? Clearly that guy and I share the same name and fingerprints, but he is no longer who I see in the mirror.
My terrier, it turns out, is not the only one who has gone from black to gray…
I recall an interview with Ligotti I read some years back, before I had read “Conspiracy,” before I had encountered much of his fiction. The interviewer asked him what advice he would give to those who want to write horror. Ligotti’s answer was succinct, and a little terse, a rarity for him. “Don’t,” he said, or words to that effect. “Unless you absolutely must, in which case, I’m sorry.”
In the past I have written some horror stories, some of which even saw publication and earned me a few dollars and even a few words of praise. But it was not a matter of necessity with me, a feeling of obligation to stare into the void and write about that and nothing else. Now, though, I’m starting to feel like I may write nothing but horror, at least for a time, and that maybe that time will be the rest of my life.
In any case, on the day writing horror becomes a simple must rather than an option, I will accept Mr. Ligotti’s apology, and of course extend my own to him as well. Not, however, that my sympathy can save him, any more than anything else can. Besides which, he’s sort of hard to find. He doesn’t go to conventions and after more than three decades in the field, I can only find three photos of the guy online. It would seem, like a lot of geniuses, the man is something of a recluse.