_____ _ _ _____ _ |_ _| |__ ___ _ __ ___( )___ | ___(_)_ _____ | | | '_ \ / _ \ '__/ _ \// __| | |_ | \ \ / / _ \ | | | | | | __/ | | __/ \__ \ | _| | |\ V / __/ |_| |_| |_|\___|_|_ \___| |___/ |_| |_| \_/ \___| | __ )(_) | (_) ___ _ __ | _ \| | | | |/ _ \| '_ \ | |_) | | | | | (_) | | | | ____ |____/|_|_|_|_|\___/|_| |_| | _ \ ___ _ __ ___ | \ | | _____ __ | |_) / _ \| '_ \/ __| | \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / / | _ < (_) | | | \__ \ | |\ | (_) \ V V / |_| \_\___/|_| |_|___/ |_| \_|\___/ \_/\_/ + DRACULA PARISH NEWSLETTER 002: 19-01-2026 + Predictably I've not been updating this newsletter as often as I'd like. This is in part because I've been too brainfried by the lingering aftereffects of getting my PhD proposal together (which took way longer than anticipated, outcome pending). On a more positive note, though, I have also been holding off on writing it because I've been workshopping a found footage horror film. The genus of the idea came to me in a dream I had the morning of January 2nd. It consisted of three pretty disparate scenes: a girl standing in a park, rigidly addressing an unseen audience in a detached yet oddly candid tone; Donald Sutherland (possibly reprising his role in the 1978 version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers) overcome with the effort of suppressing his rage at being unable to intervene in a situation in the street outside in which a man is attempting to infect a child with some kind of "image virus"; and a visit to a rundown electronics shop in a small town in which, shot from a first person perspective, the viewer furtively enters the owner's apartment via a staircase in a back room and starts fucking around with their stuff. I spent the remainder of the morning and afternoon fleshing it out the narrative and thematic elements - surprisingly, I was able to accommodate all three extant dream sections more or less unchanged - and spent the following two weeks plotting key scenes, scoping out technicalities and looking for a transfemme Thespian to be my primary collaborator (whom I may now have found). But enough of that, it's time for CHURCH! + THE CHAIR COMPANY, THOMAS LIGOTTI AND THE CORPORATE EERIE + [Nb. Technically this is both the "film" and writing part as one thing - I will probably revert to my original stated format next month (Spoilers Imminent)] A couple of weeks ago I watched Tim Robinson's The Chair Company with my buddy Max over an evening and subsequent morning shortly before departing to spend Christmas in the home counties. It was a delightful conclusion to an absolutely dogsick fuck of a year. Yet had I done the same alone I feel like I might have come out of it feeling every bit as bleak as I did going in (as per my fate). The actual substantive parallels between The Chair Company and Thomas Ligotti's novel My Work is Not Yet Done are vanishingly few, and I am sufficiently uninterested in creating clickbait (even niche clickbait) to entertain any notions to the contrary [although I did have fun making this: https://dracula.church/worknotdone.png]. What they do share - or, at least, what stands out to me about both - is a common appreciation for the inherent eerieness of corporate life. Or rather, the disconnect between the reality of work and the language and aesthetics of *business*. When trying to encapsulate this feeling, I often go back to something I read many years ago about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Rand's valorisation of the industrialist was first and foremost a political decision stemming from her philosophy of vulgar Nietzschianism that idealised individualism above all else. It asserted that, rather than a necessary evil to be mitigated through acts of civic benevolence, the exploitation and "fuck you buddy" ruthlessness inherent in the practice of business was a thing to be valorised as an exercise of freedom and exaltation of the human spirit itself (or words to this effect). As such, her glombing on to the image of the austere, besuited, briefcase-wielding man was, in part, because they fitted into a particular mold shaped by these beliefs. Absent from this equation, however, was any first hand experience of actually doing any kind of work at executive level (besides, I guess, fucking Milton Friedman). What results then is a kind of fantasia of corporate life: a secular ecclesiasticy of ritual and costume and incomprehensible cant in cyclopean, art-deco towers - drawing as much from bastardised Soviet socialist aesthetics as the marble-lined modernity of her adoptive home - while far below in distant valleys, the wheels great machines turn in service of velocity itself, like Duchamp's mechanical bride. Gradually, the mask slips to reveal absurdities: homemade aircraft and tractors - machine tooled from self-mined, self-smelted ores at the hands of early-retired steel magnates. A magical realism in which human will is more powerful than physics. And, in its own way, a nightmare. While the idealisation of corporate man is itself a model of self-fashioning that dates back to the industrial revolution - a latent manifestation of the kind of aristocratic preening that undergirded the semiotics of power across continents and millennia - the archetype of the sharp-suit-brick-cellphone-shit-eating-grin, permanently overbooked, permanently golfing executive is a creation of the neoliberal era. And while Rand was not, in the strictest sense, a neoliberal - her model of sanctified rapaciousness didn't need a benevolent god of the market to justify what it chose to devour - nevertheless, hers was the ethos around which the culture and aestehtics of this "late" capitalist mode would cohere. Yet, even at its peak, people saw the hollowness of this facade. In works like Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) we see the exemplary evil yuppie, Patrick Bateman, essentially just fucking around and watching porn in his office all day while the business of *business* continues through inertia and secreterial grit. It is, however, this disconnect between the act and the aesthetic that has ensured the longevity of the image, the chiaroscuro avatar of Jamesonian postmodernity. Because its power relies on alienation - a kind of purity ensured by its unattainability, so that even to those on the putative inside of corporate existence, arrayed in all the requisite trappings of "making it in this world", one is never really certain that theirs is the authentic embodiment of the thing itself. This is maybe why Bateman, having fully accepted the vacuity of both the image and his own humanity, is the only real definite article - he, and his personal avatar who hovers spectrally over Ellis's New York, one "Donnie" J. Trump. It's also probably why the majority of Rand's most ardent and most active followers, these days anyway, are drawn not from the CEO class but constitute a disparate horde of McDonald's franchise owners, dentists, used car salesmen and local politics gadflies. How this disconnect manifests in The Chair Company is a curious one. While Ron Trosper is not a man without ambitions - he has a father figure whose bridge building-bonafides, oddly reminiscent of the steel-age heroics of the early 1900s, frame the defining wound of his failed Jeep tours venture - his flaws, and the misfortunes they incur, originate not from vanity but an excess of genuineness. The same can't be said, however, for his boss, Jeff Levjman, whose affectations extend beyond his absurd Pier 1 old money office and Scotch-fuelled managerial retreats to include aspirations of musical virtuosity and physical prowess. And while every bit the smalltown John Galt wannabe of the contemporary Randian set, his function as a conduit for the Platonic ideal of the CEO is the ultimate source of both the humour and the horror at play in The Chair Company. Because, even if it's Ron's show, it's his world. To bastardise the ancient phrase, we live inside a dream, and Jeff is the dreamer. On its debut last november, Miles Klee (with whom I shared a billing in an experimental horror anthology in 2016 [YIKERS ten years ago]), writing for Rolling Stone, described it as "a show about the horror of enshittification". And he's not wrong, but I think that is itself part of something greater. The endemic strangeness of the world we see through Trosper's eyes is what I think of a kind of nightside to the squeaky clean corporate aesthetics Fisher Robay and their ilk like to portray. That in order for the CEO class to sustain their grandiose self image, they have made the lower rungs of their domain a repository of all their repressed neuroses and strange lusts. And in so doing, have bred a monstrous strain of diseased thought that, in this era of the perennially blurred business/pleasure interface, has managed to break containment and spread to their customer base. Thus is born a cartoonish crapsack world of low level conmen, deranged obsessives and garden variety psychopaths that is the unquestioned norm of day-to-day life in the 2020s (my thoughts on "Beau is Afraid (2023) as documentary" are familiar to anyone who knows me at this point). In this context, the Kafkaesque nightmare dimension of roboticised customer service and fake LinkedIn profiles reads more like a firewall to protect management from joining the ranks of the infected. The proverbial Thiel bunker where they get to wait out the ravages of those wars and environmental collapses they are almost wholly responsible for bringing about. What called Ligotti's book to mind when watching Tim Robinson's series was not actually the primary narrative of Frank Dominio's disgruntled apotheosis, but a scene in the first of two quasi-postscripts entitled, respectively, (and quite beautifully,) I Have A Special Plan For This World and The Nightmare Network. It details the fallout from the executive decapitation at the hands of a disincarnate junior manager, wherein the incident is linked to the appearance of a pervading yellow haze that descends on the Golden City, bringing with it a proliferation of fresh killings. The scene in question depicts a de facto meeting held in the basement of Blaine Company's decaying art deco office - the only room large enough to contain the full compliment of its staff - in which they are to hear about the *Document Manipulation* firm's profoundly unrealistic designs on becoming a "dominant force in the global marketplace". But it's the uncanny apparition of the new Vice President - combined with the cognitive dissonance of his heralding a new era when the time of monsters is not even at its crescendo - that struck me as peak Robinsonian grotesquery: "During the course of Mr. Winston's address, none of us could help noticing that he seemed terribly out of place among the other members of senior management who occupied that rickety wooden platform constructed especially for this meeting. His suit appeared to have been tailored for a larger body than the bony frame that now shifted beneath the high-priced materials which hung upon the old man. And his thick white hair was heavily greased and slicked back, yet as he spoke it began to sprout up in places, as if his lengthy, and in some places yellowed locks were not accustomed to the grooming now forced upon them." Save for a scattering of distinctly Tim moments throughout the book - Perry's jazzman pretensions, Sherry's alcoholism (the image conjured by the line "Sherry suddenly smiled, a mouthful of coffee and vodka almost spilling forth" made me think immediately of Patti Harrison nailing the role), the recurring nightmare about Richard's Mickey Mouse glove hands - the similarities are few. But I think this is more a matter of time and positionality than a divergence of ethos. As Klee noted, The Chair Company is a show for the age of enshittification. My Work Is Not Yet Done (though technically published in 2002) reads as a perverse relic of a world before 9/11. One in which Patrick Bateman's 1980s is not a wistfully scintillating pseudo-VHS rip, but a shambling, degraded thing in an overlarge suit; decrepit and very much alive. An age in which job security and stable rents leave idle minds to nurse archetypally Gen-X complaints - the ubiquitous inauthenticity of nascent mediatization, the daily humiliations of petty squabbles over office supplies, and the mindnumbing effects of "swinish" watercooler talk - to the point of homicide. The timing has another significance, however. Thinking about the role Ayn Rands outsider status played in the creation of her unintentional Ur-text of the corporate eerie, I was prompted to look into where Ligotti fell on the spectrum vis a vis proximity to upper management. My impression was uncertain since the details about Dominio's eponymous "Work" are, for narrative purposes, necessarily vague. Likewise, his Golden City, home of Blaine Company head office, is consistent with the fairytale universe of non-places in which the bulk of his stories take place. A brief survey of his biography (as it can only be, given his Pynchonian love of mystique) immediately turned up a crucial datapoint. For much of his professional life, Ligotti had worked for the academic publishers Gale, starting sometime shortly after graduating from Wayne State University in 1978 before resigning in the summer of 2001. So, it turns out, he was writing as every bit the alienated insider to the corporate world. And if My Work Is Not Yet Done is intended as the final *fuck you* to his colleagues of twenty three years that the timing of its release strongly suggests, it gives a fairly colourful impression of how his tenure apparently went down. I don't really have much more to add but on a personal note, I have something of a history with Gale myself, having used its newspaper database to gather my primary materials when writing my MSc dissertation (and will probably do likewise for my PhD if that ends up happening). Eerie. Really eerie.