There is no doubt: you either love Thomas Ligotti's work or you just can't get a hold on it, depending on one's emotional state ... I, for one, found this book most fascinating and enthralling.

The story caught my interest with the very first lines and let me say just this: if you've known a company like the one that employs Mr. Domin(i)o and IF (and only IF) you're familiar with Mr. Domin(i)o's personality you will love this story.
It's brilliant, it's wonderfully written and you will be unable to put this one away until the last paragraph. The chances are, that you will start re-reading it right away. ( )

I struggled with this one. I really didn't like any of the characters; but you weren't really supposed to like most of them... I persevered with it, thinking that I'd get into the writing style. I didn't. Even though the "horror" aspect of the book wasn't that bad, the nasty negative feeling pervades. I feel I need to go & read a Persephone to cleanse myself. ( )

Despite being a very short volume, this was a very satisfying book. Ligotti provides us with three stories: The first, the title story, is mostly realistic, concerning an office drone with scores to settle (or at least it starts that way). The second, "I Have a Special Plan for This World," drifts more into the realm of the fantastic dream-like millueu that Ligotti used so effectively in Grimscribe. The third, "The Nightmare Network," is in the experimental style which I have not seen Ligotti use since "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror" and is made up of a series of memos, short scenes, press releases, ending with the most cosmically nihilistic ending I have ever read. Ligotti's use of divergent story-telling styles allows him to tell three tales of horror in the workplace from three very different angles. I also think there was a certain direction to the order of stories, moving from the personal to the universal.

The first story (MWINYD) appears to be at first a story of a man, Frank, who doesn't completely fit in among his peers at work, gets pushed out, then proceeds to "go postal." However, he undergoes a sudden transformation which places him in an ontologically indeterminable state; far from stopping his vengance, it transforms it into something more fascinating. (This character is in some ways a throwback to the evil first person narrators of early Ligotti, ie. "The Chymists", "The Eyes of the Lynx," etc.)

However, it is not only Frank's victims who get bled, as Ligotti proceeds to eviscerate and mutilate every last bit of sympathy we could have, both for the narrator and the human race. It is one of Thom's strange talents that his writing appears to be able to move in two directions at once. (Witness for example, how he mocks the hackneyed quality of horror stories in "Nethescurial" as a way of setting up one of the most chilling horror stories I've ever read/listened to.) The less Frank insists that he deserves our sympathy or any sympathy whatsoever, the more interesting and engaging I found him. In some ways, Frank strikes me as analogous to the John Doe character from "The Frolic," full of evil, primal power yet fully aware of how little that means, all the more fascinating for his terrible self-awareness. ( )