Thomas Phillips

Malingerer Thomas Phillips

Like its precursor, The Light is Alone, Malingerer is what might be called a discursive inverted cross. On one level, it aims to exhibit various manifestations of Satanic practice because, quite simply, the latter's representation in the horror genre offers a perverse but delectable pleasure; the liminality of horror always entails an element of fun. And yet the collection is also devoted to perpetrating a kind of violence against those evils that are distinctly unpleasant, specifically the Luciferian nature of religious and political fundamentalisms, abominations of conscience. Hence Malingerer's alignment with the aesthetic diabolism of Lovecraft's powerful oeuvre, among those of other esteemed writers and thinkers, while it carefully critiques and collapses the convoluted bigotry that, for better and most certainly for worse, found such sublime, unholy expression in the picturesque city of Providence.