The boys read legendary author Thomas Ligotti's work, marking it as the first non-creepy pasta book on the channel. This episode covers three short stories from the author that showcase his wide range of style. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this episode and who is Thomas Ligotti?
welcome back to creepcast today we are diving out of the internet and we're diving into literature i should say not that we don't read literature on this show we we do there's classics there's beautiful pieces of art but today we are actually going into i believe our very first non-creepypasta published book that we actually got approval to read and i'm super stoked
we're moving up in the world. We're having like actual people in the real world be like, Hey, you could read this if you want. Yeah. Next thing you know, next thing you know, buddy, we're going to be the one taking advantage of young writers. I'm going to be, I'm going to be the one. Yeah.
I'm going to be the one to go up to people and be like, don't you want your book to be read on this show? Every story you've ever written $200. How's that sound? I need, I'm going to read your entire works for $7. Thank you. But the PR, the publicity, the exposure. The exposure, my friend. The exposure. Think of the exposure. They're going to be rich.
Thomas Ligoti, I have been recommended his stories by so many different people. That's why I'm really excited. I have buddies who are storyboard artists. I have people who are writers. I have people who are musicians. I've had so many people... Recommend Thomas Ligoti. And today we're going to be starting off with one of his very prominent short story, horror short story writer.
We're starting off the Red Tower, but we're also doing a collection where we're going to be reading from his collection of short stories from the songs of the dead songs of a dead dreamer and grim scribe. which is a Penguin Publishing book of stories. So it's going to be a nice day of cozy short stories and getting to read some very, some classics, dare I say. Also, we got new merch! Look at this.
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Chapter 2: What merchandise is featured and how can listeners support the show?
I'm wearing the new Eat Me Like a Bug shirt, boys. Look at that. Got tiny wines. Got amazing, it's amazing shirt. Look at this. Ooh, clean. It feels amazing. Which one are you wearing, Isaiah?
I'm wearing the My Better Half shirt, which features me as a Jeff Goldblum-esque scientist from the fly, with Hunter being the tumorous gross that comes out of my nipple, just like in real life. That's true. Just creepcast down the sleeves, and it is super comfortable, super high-quality print, and we also have a couple of other items, don't we, Hunter?
We have shorts! Beautiful gym shorts. We've got shorts. It's the spring. It's going to be into the summer where you've got to get your legs out. It's the guns of the legs. That's what they say. Guns of the legs. So you do that, and it pairs beautifully with our crew neck sweater. A Creepcast ghoul sweater. It's a nice little ghost. I have to say, dude, the fits together, diabolical. Unbelievable.
Mm-hmm. They go crazy hard. I will also say that if you have our previous merch drop of our heads hanging, the shrunken heads, you have to buy the shorts because the designs go perfectly together. It looks like you got a whole tracksuit on.
It's beautiful. They're very, very nice. I just want to also say that these shirts are... I don't know. Are they oversized this time? Put a thing up. Are they oversized? There was a lot of weird. We heard your feedback. People are being like, I didn't realize it was so big. All this kind of shit. This is the standard sizing. We're putting up a graphic here. This is the sizing.
Do with that what you will. That way you can't complain. Don't complain to me. Don't complain to me when you're like, hey, it's easy. You can complain to Hunter.
You complain to Isaiah this time. I think Hunter. No, no, no. I'm not going to. Well, actually, you can't complain because I don't look at it. I'll never know. It's just me over here. I hide everything. I don't even know if people are watching my videos. I can't.
I don't know. All I know is go to this link right here or click the link in the description of the comments. You probably have some shit there. Click it if you want to get some merch. If not, I don't. You know, it is what it is. All right. Do you have enough? You might have enough shirts. I don't know. If you don't, there's some options. That's all I got to say. Boom. Also.
And if you do, if you do have enough shirts, you still are obligated to buy this because we said so.
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Chapter 3: What is the story and setting of 'The Red Tower'?
I'm licking my oatee. I'm licking my oatee. I'm licking my oatee. We're about to lick our oatee. I'm about to lick my Odie.
I'm about to lick that Odie all over the place. Spread me open and lick my Odie. You always somehow, regardless of what the conversation is, you come back to spreading or... Split me open. Spit me up until you see my Odie. That's your classic move. It's all I know.
Spread, smear, scrape. She smear my leg until I get my Odie.
Oh, that's rough. She creeping my cast until I... You creep my cast until I lig my Odie.
Fuzz.
Yeah, that's good. I like that. See, now it's going.
So after we've already besmirched this man's name, we should be, now we're primed to be won over by his beautiful story. Which, like I said, we'll get into it right now. The first story of today. Snuggle on up, dear listener or viewer. The first story is called The Red Tower.
Let us begin. The ruined factory stood three stories high in an otherwise featureless landscape. Although somewhat imposing on its own terms, it occupied only the most unobtrusive place within the grey emptiness of its surroundings, its presence serving as a mere accent upon a desolate horizon.
No road led to the factory, nor were there any traces of one that might have led to it at some point in the distant past. If there had ever been such a road, it would have been rendered useless as soon as it arrived at one of the four red brick sides of the factory, even in the days when the facility was in full operation. The reason for this was simple. No doors had been built into the factory.
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Chapter 4: How does the Red Tower factory produce strange and unsettling items?
Thus, the encrimsoning of the factory was a betrayal, a breaking off, for it is my postulation that this ancient structure was in long-forgotten days the same pale hue as the world which encompassed it. Furthermore, with an insight born of dispassion to the point of total despair, I envisioned that the Red Tower was never solely devoted to the lowly functions of an ordinary factory.
Beneath the three soaring stories of the Red Tower were two, possibly three, other levels. The one immediately below the first floor of the factory was the nexus of a unique distribution system for the goods which were manufactured on all three of the floors above. This first subterranean level in many ways resembled, and functioned in the manner of, an old-fashioned underground mine.
Elevator compartments enclosed by a heavy wire mesh, twisted and corroded, descended far below the surface into an expansive chamber which had been crudely dug out of the rocky earth and was haphazardly perpetuated by a dense structure of supports, a criss-crossing network of posts and pillars, beams and rafters,
It included a variety of materials, wood, metal, concrete, bone, and a fine sinewy webbing that was fibrous and quite firm. From the central chamber radiated a system of tunnels that honeycombed the land beneath the gray and desolate country surrounding the Red Tower.
Through these tunnels, the goods manufactured by the factory would be carried, sometimes literally, by hand, but more often by means of small wagons and carts, reaching near and far into the most obscure and unlikely delivery points. The trade that was originally produced by the Red Tower was in some sense remarkable, but not, at first, of an extraordinary or especially ambitious nature.
These were a gruesome array of goods that could perhaps best be described as novelty items. In the beginning, there was a chaotic quality to the objects and constructions produced by the machinery at the Red Tower, a randomness that yielded formless things of no consistent shape or size or apparent design.
Occasionally, there might appear a peculiar ashen lump that betrayed some semblance of a face or clawing fingers, or perhaps an assemblage that looked like a casket with tiny irregular wheels. but for the most part, the early production seemed relatively innocuous.
After a time, however, things began to fall into place, as they always do, rejecting a harmless and uninteresting disorder, never an enduring state of affairs, and taking on the more usual plans and purposes of a viciously intent creation. So it was that the Red Tower put into production its new, more terrible and perplexing line of unique novelty items,
Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black, reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the subterranean levels beneath the Red Tower?
This mutation apparently demanded the excavating of a system of tunnels as a means for distributing the novelty goods which, for a time, the factory produced.
As the unique inventions of the Red Tower achieved their final forms, they seemed to be assigned specific locations to which they were destined to be delivered, either by hand or by small wagons or carts pulled over sometimes great distances through this system of underground tunnels. Where they might ultimately pop up was anybody's guess.
It might be in the back of a dark closet buried under a pile of undistinguished junk where some item of the highest and most extreme novelty would lie for quite some time before it was encountered by sheer accident or misfortune. Conversely, the same invention or an entirely different one might be placed on the night table beside someone's bed for near immediate discovery.
Any delivery point was possible, none was out of reach of the Red Tower. There has even been testimony, either intensely hysterical or semi-conscious, of items from the factory being uncovered within the shelter of a living body, or one not long deceased. I know that such an achievement was within the factory's powers given its later production history.
But my own degenerate imagination is most fully captured by the thought of how many of those monstrous novelty goods produced at the Red Tower have been scrupulously and devoutly delivered solely by the way of those endless underground tunnels, daringly remote places they would never be found, nor ever could be. Truly, the Red Tower worked in mysterious ways.
Just as a system of distribution tunnels had been created by the factory when it developed into a manufacturer of novelty goods, an expansion of the system was required as an entirely new phase of production gradually evolved.
Inside the wire mesh elevator compartment that provided access between the upper region of the factory and the underground tunnels, there was now a special lever installed which, when pulled back or possibly pushed forward enabled one to descend to a second subterranean level. This laterally excavated area was much smaller, far more intimate than the one directly above it.
As could be observed, the instant the elevator compartment came to a stop and a full view of things was attained. The scene which now confronted the uncertain minds of witnesses was in many ways like that of a secluded graveyard surrounded by a rather crooked fence of widely spaced pickets held together by rusty wire.
The headstones inside the fence all closely pressed against one another and were quite common, though somewhat antiquated in their design. However, there were no names or dates inscribed on those monuments. Nothing at all, in fact, with the exception of some rudimentary and abstract ornamentation.
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Chapter 6: How do the hosts interpret the themes and symbolism of 'The Red Tower'?
As implied by their designation as hyper-organisms, this line of goods displayed the most essential qualities of their organic nature, which meant, of course, that they were wildly conflicted into their two basic features. On the one hand, they manifested an intense vitality in all aspects of their form and function.
On the other hand, simultaneously, they manifested an ineluctable element of decay in these same areas. To state this matter in the most lucid terms, each of these hyperorganisms, even as they scintillated with an obscene degree of vital impulses, also, and at the same time, had degeneracy and death written deeply upon them.
In accord with the tradition of dumbstruck insanity, it seems the less said about these offerings of the birthing graves or any similar creation, the better. That's so cool. The bottom is filled with graves. And then these, these, they birth out as these organisms that are, they jerk and they move with vitality, but they have a degeneracy and death.
I'm just, I'm processing stuff too. I'm getting, I'm just getting hit by all these things. It's so far. I mean, I was going to kind of say this towards the end, but I was going to say, it just, just feels like such a,
almost somebody articulating beautifully and they're like nightmare or their dream like a guy like almost like a guy who works at an amazon factory having a fucking nightmare about his work and it like manifesting and you know just like being like it was the most it was the most detailed dream i've ever had it it's just uh i don't know man it's fun this is it's just it's beautiful
I mean, there's no getting around. It's just fucking beautiful.
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Chapter 7: What are the connections between Ligotti’s work and SCP stories?
Yet there are indications that believe that three stories above the ground factory, below the first and the second underground levels, there exists a third level of subterranean activity. Perhaps it is only a desire for symmetry, a hunger for compositional balance in things, that has led to a series of the most vaporous rumors anent this third underground level.
In order to provide a kind of complementary proportion to the three stories of the factory that rise into the gray and featureless landscape above ground,
At this third level, these rumors maintain the factory's schedule of production is being carried out in some new and strange manner, representing its most ambitious venture in the output of putrid creations, ultimately consummating its tradition of degeneracy, reaching toward a perfection of defect and disorder, according to every polluted and foggy rumor concerned with the issue.
Perhaps it seems that I have said too much about the Red Tower, and perhaps it has sounded far too strange. Do not think that I am unaware of such things, but as I have noted throughout this document, I am only repeating what I have heard. I myself have never seen the Red Tower, no one ever has, and possibly no one ever will. Yet wherever I go, people are talking about it.
In one way or another, they are talking about the nightmarish novelty items, or about the mysterious and revolting hyperorganisms, as well as babbling endlessly about the subterranean systems of tunnels in the secluded graveyard whose headstones display no names and no dates designating either birth or death.
Everything they are saying is about the Red Tower, in one way or another, and about nothing else but the Red Tower. We are all talking and thinking about the Red Tower in our own degenerate way. I have only recorded what everyone is saying, though they may not know they are saying it, and sometimes they have seen, though they may not know they have seen it.
But still, they are always talking, in one deranged way or another, about the Red Tower. I hear them talk of it every day of my life, unless, of course, they begin to speak about gray and desolate landscape, that hazy void in which the Red Tower, the great and industrious Red Tower, is so precariously nestled.
Then the voices grow quiet until I can barely hear them as they attempt to communicate with me in choking scraps of post-nightmare trauma. Now is just such a time when I must strain to hear the voices.
I wait for them to reveal to me the new ventures of the Red Tower as it proceeds into even more corrupt phases of production, including the creations being turned out by the shadowy workshop of its third subterranean level. I must keep still and listen for the voices. I must remain quiet for a terrifying moment, and I will hear the news of the factory starting up its operation once more.
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Chapter 8: What is the plot and characters introduced in 'Masquerade of a Dead Sword: Faliol's Rescue'?
I feel like I just gave birth. I feel like I just came out of, like, what felt like a dream that was seven years long or something, where it felt like you lived every second of it. It's just...
so beautifully woven together there's so many different ways i feel like you can look at this i mean my my gut reaction of my college level you know giga chad brain thinking of me going to a liberal art school is me thinking that this is it almost feels like commentary on like a capitalistic kind of like uh just like i guess it's like a capitalistic run of like i don't know like just fucking mankind doing that kind of stuff even the way the deal like no one's ever seen the red tower no one ever will it's almost just like in a way god this sounds so cringy i'm sorry i
it's just like, it feels like that idea of like wanting to get ahead. Like, you know, I'm like an American dream kind of thing.
You know, you speak about it, you want it, you pursue it through even like the way that like the organisms and stuff, it all feels like little, just like cogs in the machine of people working at a place that is like churning out absolute fucking garbage for people that people are, you know, consuming. They are, uh,
interacting with it like in a way they don't even want you know but they're still buying it like it to me it feels like a fucking red tower to me feels like an amazon nightmare is what it sounds like it sounds like people getting trinkets and shit you don't need but you have it and being like forced into it even the idea of like we don't know how they do it like the tunnels like fucking prime delivery and all that kind of stuff it just feels like you know they even have stuff too where it's like they're delivered inside of them
It's just kind of, I don't know. It makes me think there's this place in Kansas City called the East Bottoms or West Bottoms. Yeah, one of those. One of those direction bottoms. But it used to be a place where that's where the industrial part of Kansas City used to be. And then it got this huge flood came and it fucked up the whole town. So they had to move the city up on this hill.
And there's all these empty giant industrial buildings down in this area with just like broken out windows. And, you know, they're just like shells. And it kind of makes you think of like, I mean, this is back in like the 20s or something when this happened.
So it's like it just it gave me that vibe of like being down there, you know, and I love the continuous nature of like something, a translucent, almost phallic thing coming out of the ground that would like would just existed in the gray until it like ornated itself with a reddish hue. And like, you know, it would be a thing that you'd be like, oh, fuck, it's standing out.
But it's like it's almost like I want you to see how like. fucking evil and disgusting it is, you know, like this factory with no doors or any, it's just kind of, it's just so, uh, uncanny. I'm rambling, but yeah, I just have a lot to say, I guess.
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