Reading from Teatro Grottesco, Virgin, 2008, pages 3-31

Thanks to Mescaline Franklin for the loan of this book.

Daniel and his older sister, Elisa move from rented house to rented house with their eccentric father and chain-smoking mother. Their father works hard in the basement of each house and their mother takes Elisa on cryptic trips. Father preaches that everything, even ideas are rented and leaps at the chance to debate a door-to-door evangelist. Daniel has a secret, a friend named Candy who he discovers as he explores “the twisted paradise” of a neighborhood even worse than the one they rent in, the area where people like Candy live in vacant houses:

“The only light inside the house emanated from a small television on a metal stand. The television faced a sofa that seemed to be occupied from end to end by a black woman of indefinite age. In her left hand was a jar of mayonnaise, and in her right hand was an uncooked hotdog, the last one from an empty package lying on the bare floor…”

And so we journey with Daniel—who, like his sister, is unnamed until the end of the story—through a truly dark and realistic world of horror. Realistic, I say, for I have been in Candy’s house and Thomas Ligotti’s description of it and of her, rings sickeningly true.