Episode 6: A World Where Everything is Ultimately Peculiar and Ultimately Ridiculous.

If Thomas Ligotti’s narrative cadence somehow sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because of Matthew McConaughey.

Entire sections of Ligotti’s pessimistic essay The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, along with Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust Of This Planet, were lifted, wholesale and without permission, for Rust Cohle’s monologues in True Detective. I guess the lesson here is that if you’re going to plagiarize, plagiarize from nihilists —who will see no point in suing you.

This story is odd for a number of reasons. First, it’s a short story that contains five shorter stories (and a framing device). Second, the fleeting brushes with a deranged cosmos those stories describe are just plain odd. It poses vague questions about the nature and purpose of existence, and offers no answers. There is no pretense of meaning beyond that which we as readers supply, which is what makes it so horrifying.

And that, as it happens, is also the most horrifying thing about our existence.

Hosted by The Fundertaker

Music by Gothic Husband

40 minutes