The Ligottian Shift; or Three Scenes from Horror Games Not Played

I have been reading Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe, recently released as a Penguin Classic after being near-enough impossible to get hold of prior to that. I am a great fan of Ligotti. So I feel awful using the word "cliche" to describe the work of a writer who is so distinctive and special. But I do think, after reading most of his short fiction, that I have worked out the one element that appears with enough regularity to merit the term; last night I was thinking about this and decided to call it "The Ligottian Shift".

I don't want to spoil any of Ligotti's stories for those who haven't read them, but those who have will know what I mean when I mention stories like "Dream of a Mannikin", "Eye of the Lynx", "The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise", "Gas Station Carnivals", or "The Bungalow House". (There will be others - these are the ones I thought of off the top of my head.) What tends to happen is this: there is a setup which makes you feel very uneasy. Often it has a kind of mini-horror story which exists within the first half of the story proper, so that you get a sort of false climax before the climax proper. Then at some undefined point, in a very seamless way, the perspective changes so that you find that the narrator is now somebody or someone else, or in a radically different situation, but you don't quite know why or how. All of a sudden the terms on which you understood the story are different to what you thought they were. You had bought into one narrative and now you are reading something altogether different. Everything has turned itself around. (The last section of "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story" suggests to me that Ligotti is more than aware that this is his very special and unique trick.)

This is, of course, what makes Ligotti's work so compelling - the reader is not allowed to settle, because of the content but also because of the form. (In some stories, like "Purity", it feels almost impossible to work out quite how things are holding together, like the narrative is a kind of slippery eel you are trying to grab with wet hands. All you know is that you are scared and you don't know why.)

I got to thinking about this and how you might incorporate something like a Ligottian Shift into a horror or horror-inflected game. One of the key elements of the Ligottian Shift is not so much reversal as a side-step - things don't flip so much as reconfigure, like a kaleidoscope being twisted. What the DM would need to do would be to, at a certain point, change the fundamental assumptions on which the game has been based - it's not a plot twist that we're interested in, but a form twist. What kind of thing am I talking about?

Imagine that you are a playing in a gaming session. The DM describes your characters doing something typically Call of Cthulhu-esque - let's say they've broken into the mansion of some rich eccentric in search of clues because they think he is associated with a cult. They are looking in rooms, in desks, under furniture, and so on, but at some point it becomes apparent that actually they are not in his mansion house at all but are in his mind, in which they are now trapped - they are in a memory-construct of his house and "outside" the doors and windows there is only blank nothingness. Somehow, imperceptibly, things have shifted so that they are not in the real world, investigating the mansion house, but rather trapped inside the creation of the mind of their erstwhile target of whom they are now the unwitting playthings. Crucially, the DM has not informed them that this shift has taken place. It just has.

Or; imagine that you are in a dungeoneering session. The PCs come across a meek kobold who they put in a wooden cage and start interrogating. It is pliant and pathetic and snivelling. It answers all of their questions. But then one of the PCs notices that...hang on...the kobold isn't in a cage. It is on the outside of the cage and they are in it. And suddenly it doesn't seem so pliant and pathetic and snivelling. And suddenly, looking around, the walls and ceiling seem much higher and further to the PCs. And turning back to the kobold, it is not as small as it was. It is actually now much much bigger than them.

Or, imagine that you are in a World of Darkness or Unknown Armies sort of game. The PCs are sitting in the office of somebody they may, or may not, know is a magician of some kind. On the desk is a snow globe. The DM tells you that your character has noticed this snow globe and is particularly drawn to it. He asks you to describe an incident from your character's past in which heavy snow was falling. You think for a second and come up with some story about how when your PC was a child he went to the funeral of his favourite uncle (who happened to be the one who initiated him into the occult). At the funeral, the snow was falling heavily, so much so that people had to dig out the hearse. You warm to your tale in the telling, and start feeling pleased about your creativity. The DM tells you that your PC is now back in his memories of childhood snow - so vividly that he can practically feel the snow flakes touching his cheeks, and the chill pinch the top of his nose. But that as he steps away from watching his family members shovelling snow and turns around, he looks up and sees a strange curved glass screen in front and above of him. He can't go through it. It is like a clear, invisible barrier. He turns back, but his family, the hearse, the funeral scene have disappeared. There is now just snow and glass. He is trapped inside the snow globe. And in the shell of the body which he once inhabited, way back in the magician's office, is a spirit of snow which has replaced him.

I would like to do this sort of thing in a game some time.