One against the modern-day Philistines

Over his career, James Morrow has shown little patience with fanaticism, especially of the religious order. His latest novel, The Philosopher's Apprentice, doesn't spare the rod for anyone -- religious extremists, scheming capitalists or followers of science. And at the center of the book is someone who seems to be the most useless of all modern-day academics: the philosophy major.

The book follows Mason Ambrose, who -- while at a dead-end in his academic career -- takes a job as a tutor on an isolated island in the Florida Keys. He finds that his charge, a youngster named Londa, has no sense of morality at all. It is his job to fill in that empty void in her life. The why of this quickly becomes clear -- Londa has been grown by mother Edwina, a rich and brilliant scientist. And Londa has two sisters, grown to different ages, so the dying Edwina can experience motherhood at different ages before she passes away.

And that's just the opening salvo here... Morrow goes on to follow Londa's adult career. While Ambrose succeeded in bringing Londa closer to humanity, she undertakes her moral explorations with the single-minded dedication of a scientist. In the end, she decides to battle against the "Philistines" and attempts to affect a change on them via force. That all of this happens aboard a recreated Titanic packed to the gills with rich industrialists, politicians and moral guardians (whose leaders had used the technology to create Londa and her sisters to unleash a plague of creatures born from aborted fetuses on their "parents"). 

Though it's fairly clear where Morrow' sympathies lie here, he -- like all good satirists -- pokes and prods at all sides of the issues here, from the rather self-absorbed narrator to the decidedly amoral actions of both Edwina/Londa and the Christian crusaders allied against them. And in the end, it is the philosopher, after endless lessons, who needs to make a real-life "impossible" decision. It's an impressive work -- and another sign that Morrow is one of the best authors of any genre writing these days.

At his best, Thomas Ligotti casts a spell over the reader akin to a waking nightmare. The actions in his stories are often beyond any experience that we could know in our everyday life, but the relentlessness and detail of the narration draw us in nonetheless. His worldview is uniformly bleak and most of his writing has been done for obscure journals or in limited-edition volumes, but his legend has grown to the point where Ligotti is an oft-cited (if perhaps not as often read) figure in weird fiction.

The Nightmare Factory takes his writing to a new medium. In it, four of Ligott's short stories are reinterpreted by teams of comic book authors/illustrators. It ends up being a mixed bag. Ligotti's literary spell can easily be broken if the reader is distracted, and the art within the stories at times does this. This hurts the most in the opening "Last Feast of Harlequin." The story is certainly Ligotti's most famous work, one where he takes Lovecraftian expectations and merges them with a nihilistic vision that even the misanthropic Lovecraft would have found to be a bit harsh. Yet recreating it in a visual medium (albeit with excellent Colleen Doran art) robs the story of much of its sense of growing dread.

Ted McKeever, whose ragged art style matches Ligotti's off-kilter visions, does better with "Dr. Locrian's Asylum," driving home the story's madness with an equally mad art style. The other two stories, "Dream of a Mannikin" and "Teatro Grottesco" fall in between these, with expected, in-the-middle results. The Nightmare Factory is a nice experiment, and hopefully brings new readers to this singular author, but really the best way to experience Thomas Ligotti is on the page -- preferably alone, late at night, perhaps with the windows shut against the cold and rain.