“From outside one couldn’t say for sure what purpose the structure, which occupied almost half a city block (not including the field of weeds and broken concrete adjacent to the building), had once served. The words painted across its side had been reduced by time to a few fragmented letters which themselves had all but found their way to the other side of invisibility.” - My Work is Not Yet Done, Thomas Ligotti



Even though it’s set in the Louisiana bayou, True Detective bears the mark of Detroit.

The series spurred accusations that Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective’s creator, had lifted writing for Rust Cohle’s dark, iconic, monologues from the horror writer Thomas Ligotti. This was my introduction to Ligotti, and I was quickly tugged past the plagiarism argument when I learned Ligotti’s spent most of his life in and around Detroit. I couldn’t help but hear the echo of the city in Cohle’s pessimism.

Ligotti was born in Detroit, raised in the suburbs (I assume Grosse Pointe, as he graduated from Grosse Pointe North in 1971), got a BA in English from Wayne State in ‘75, and spent the next 20 or so years working at Gale Research in the Penobscot Building, and becoming the best horror writer you’ve never heard of.

In addition to horror writing, Ligotti is an antinatalist philosopher — a view of human existence that insists the worst thing that ever happened to you was your birth. Ligotti’s nonfiction book that advances this philosophy, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” contains gems like:

“…the human race will never do the honorable thing and abort itself.”



And:

“Whatever else we may be as creatures that go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it, we are meat.”



Detroit in the ‘70s and ‘80s had to be fertile ground for the development of those views on human life.

Though Detroit is never explicitly mentioned as the setting for pieces like “My Work is Not Yet Done,” it’s hard to mistake the setting for anyplace other than Detroit. As someone who acknowledges the more nihilistic qualities of Detroit, I find Ligotti’s work skewering our tendencies toward narcotic optimism a sobering, and important, counter to the overly rosy pictures we paint for ourselves, such as the one now forming in Detroit. It’s to our own detriment that the darkness is ignored.

In an interview with Lore, Ligotti was asked about the influence of Detroit’s landscape on his work:

LORE: Your stories are often set in blighted areas of urban decay. Did growing up in Detroit influence you to write about marginalized industrial areas?

T.L.: I didn’t actually grow up in Detroit. I grew up in an upper-class suburb neighboring on Detroit. But I’ve always been attracted to blighted, forlorn landscapes. They actually instill in me a sense of calm … as long as I don’t have to live there.



The paragraph that follows the one at the top of this post, taken from Ligotti’s excellent novella, “My Work is Not Yet Done”

Tell me you can’t hear Rust Cohle delivering lines like these: