We are aberrations–beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities. From across an immeasurable divide, we brought the supernatural into all that is manifest. Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts. Their graves are marked in our minds, and they will never be disinterred from the cemeteries of our remembrance. Our heartbeats are numbered, our steps counted. Even as we survive and reproduce, we know ourselves to be dying in a dark corner of infinity. Wherever we go, we know not what expects our arrival but only that it is there. Thomas Ligotti
About This Quote

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" is a story about Death, a mysterious figure who haunts the dreams of citizens of the fictional European country of Zembla. Death first appears to a man named Prince Prospero, who becomes obsessed with finding out what Death is and how it has affected him. When Death appears to Prospero's daughter, she falls in love with him, inspired by his kindness and beauty. After her death the people are frightened by the sudden appearance of a mysterious figure called Red Death.

The plague which might spread across the country begins to spread as well, but Prospero believes that his daughter's death is what caused Red Death's return. He plans to protect her tomb from Red Death, until he realizes that he can't stop him.

Source: The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

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  1. And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them....
  2. So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together...
  3. .. nature did not make us to feel too good for too long (which would be no good for the survival of the species) but only to feel good enough to imagine, erroneously, that someday we might feel good all the time. To believe that...
  4. The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s...
  5. Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.
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