Michigan Basement, by Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz

Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz have written two screenplays, both unproduced, and both now published by Chiroptera Press. The first was Crampton, a 2000 reworking of a 1998 proposed X-Files episode into an original full length feature. It appeared in print in 2002, and was reprinted by Chiroptera Press in early 2024. (I reviewed this edition in this blog on March 17, 2024.) The second, Michigan Basement, was written soon after Crampton, and it is now published for the first time. Its breezy introduction by Brandon Trenz notes that it was begun as an attempt to adapt Ligotti’s Lovecraftian short story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” into a film, and the filmscript retains the basic idea of an academic encountering a very weird town festival, but it adds much to it, and cannot in the end really be considered an adaptation of Ligotti’s story. Michigan Basement follows Jeffrey Haller, haunted as a boy by Nightwatchers, who becomes an anthropology student (and later instructor), mentored by one Dr. A. Rekalde. Some years after Haller has broken with Rekalde, Haller receives enigmatic communications that lead him to a bizarre winter carnival in the small decayed town of Skinner, Michigan, which includes clowns and which reunites Haller, Rekalde, and the Nightwatchers. It’s not a terrible read, but it over-utilizes filmic cliches while it under-utilizes the elements of Ligotti’s prose that makes his stories so interesting. Admittedly, those qualities would perhaps be impossible to translate into a visual medium. In the end, if produced, Michigan Basement would have ended up as a offtrail B-movie that promised more than it could ever have delivered.

Crampton, by Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz

In 1998 Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz wrote a spec-script for an episode of The X-Files, but efforts to get it read by the television show's producers were unsuccessful. A few years later, they removed all references to the tv show and expanded the script into a feature-length screenplay. Both versions were titled Crampton, and the feature-length screenplay has just been reprinted in an elegant limited edition. Though some of Ligotti's surface-level obsessions (mannequins, degenerate small towns, etc.) appear in the screenplay, what's missing are the qualities of Ligotti's prose that make his fiction so good. Reduced to mere dialogue, there isn't much worth experiencing here, and less for any quality actors to grab onto. Sure, with special effects, this screenplay might have made a passable B-grade movie, but with the stock characters and a contrived, unsatisfying ending, one wonders if a B-grade film is the highest this work could aspire to be. I wanted to like this, but must sadly admit it simply isn't very good.

Pictures of Apocalypse, by Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti, as a prose writer, is one of the best post-Lovecraftian horror writers. He has also published a small number of poem cycles, and Pictures of Apocalypse is I think the fifth of these. It is illustrated (quite admirably) by Jonathan Dennison, and the book (with accessories) is very well-produced by Chiroptera Press. The volume consists of some twenty poems in the cycle, some very short, some long, with a prose introduction. But like his other poem-cycles, the form fails to show Ligotti at his best. There are occasional striking images ("The sky above was streaked with veins, / winding like rivers of color, sickly pale" from VI. "The Cult of Melancholy"), but despite Ligotti's talent for poetic prose, the poetic form itself seems to limit his ability to achieve the qualities found in his prose. There, his mesmeric style can grow into something more potent as he goes along. Here, though, with techniques like repetition (even with slight differences), it leads to unsatisfying things like "A Poetics of Existence" (IV), which is only eight lines long, and the first four are dull: "We had grown tired of the cycle: / beginning, middle, and end, / beginning middle, and end, / beginning, middle, and end." This early in the volume, the sentiment is prophetic for the rest. Ligotti's stories are essential reading; his poem cycles are not. Ligotti's devotees will enjoy this, but readers new to Ligotti should begin with the fiction.