The Tsalal

“In “The Tsalal,” Ligotti renovates the Biblical apocalypse by integrating it with the cosmicism of Poe and Lovecraft. The title is supplied by Poe; it refers to his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Toward the end of that story, the main characters are shipwrecked on an Antarctic island populated by people who are completely black, teeth and all, and who have an ineffable horror of the color white. Beyond this island is an inexplicable void, out of which a white figure emerges. This vision is the last event of the story. The island is called Tsalal.
Ligotti takes this invented word from Poe and makes it a singular title, attributed by Reverend Maness to a transcendental cosmic principle of chaos: The Tsalal. Poe is plainly one of those that Maness refers to as the “elite” of the Tsalal, that is, a gnostic group of individuals who, purely by an accident of temperament, guess at at the existence of that greater chaos, just as certain sensitive types are touched by the dreams of Cthulhu. The cult of the Tsalal, like the cult of Cthulhu, does not indoctrinate people into any belief, but rather attracts people who already, in some way, believe, and who are looking to be supplied with some way of articulating that belief. Poe was one of these, and so was Lovecraft.
The title is not Tsalal, but “The Tsalal.” Ligotti has turned a place name into something like a singular noun; this may be an aspect of Ligotti’s Lovecraftianism, not just the use of ideas from Poe but the migration and modification of those ideas in a specific way. Lovecraft resituated Poe’s word “Tekeli-li” in accordance with his technique of historicizing past fictions, turning them into documentation, so that the cry appears as “correlated contents.” Ligotti also resituates something from Poe, but this time he turns it into a unique essence: Tsalal is the island of perfect blackness at the far end of the world, right at the threshold of the void, the most void-contaminated of places.
In addition to the cult, this story also involves a forbidden book, also called Tsalal. Poe’s main characters, in exploring the island of Tsalal, discover a labyrinth in the island’s interior. Their sketches of the labyrinth suggest that what they’re really seeing is actually a gargantuan engraving; that the passages are actually the contours of vast Ethiopian, Egyptian, and Arabic letters inscribed directly into the ground, so the original island of Tsalal is already also a kind of page with writing and drawing on it. The word Tsalal is linked by Poe to these inscriptions, presumably to those which refer to darkness.”