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We Will Speak Again of The Red Tower
"The ruined factory stood three stories high in an otherwise featureless landscape…”
With these words, Thomas Ligotti begins one of the most influential short stories in the canon of horror and weird fiction. “The Red Tower” is a singular work, extraordinary even within Ligotti’s exemplary oeuvre, and has long been admired by scholars and enthusiasts alike. It is unlike any other story you’ve ever read.
“We are all talking and thinking about the Red Tower in our own degenerate way…”
The eight artists of these pages have come together, if not as representatives of the Tower itself, as adherents of its twisted, creative force. Each of them have seen the blasted factory, been touched by its encrimsoning, and have produced for your consideration these novelties from its ruddy depths. Perhaps once you have read them, you too
“…will be able to speak again of The Red Tower.”
—featuring work by—
Joelle Killian | Carson Winter | Jack Klausner | Joe Koch | Rhiannon Rasmussen | C.J. Subko | TJ Price | RSL
With these words, Thomas Ligotti begins one of the most influential short stories in the canon of horror and weird fiction. “The Red Tower” is a singular work, extraordinary even within Ligotti’s exemplary oeuvre, and has long been admired by scholars and enthusiasts alike. It is unlike any other story you’ve ever read.
“We are all talking and thinking about the Red Tower in our own degenerate way…”
The eight artists of these pages have come together, if not as representatives of the Tower itself, as adherents of its twisted, creative force. Each of them have seen the blasted factory, been touched by its encrimsoning, and have produced for your consideration these novelties from its ruddy depths. Perhaps once you have read them, you too
“…will be able to speak again of The Red Tower.”
—featuring work by—
Joelle Killian | Carson Winter | Jack Klausner | Joe Koch | Rhiannon Rasmussen | C.J. Subko | TJ Price | RSL
- GenresHorror
ebook
First published January 1, 2025
4 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
About the author
Carson Winter
35 books111 followersCarson Winter is an award-winning author, punker, and raw nerve. He's written two novels, The Psychographist and A Spectre Is Haunting Greentree. His short fiction has appeared in over twenty publications, including Apex, Vastarien, and Chthonic Matter Quarterly. He lives in Saint Paul, MN.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 30, 2025
Guess who’s back
Back again
Ligotti’s back
Tell a friend
(expect you’re reading Ligotti so you obviously don’t have any)
Back again
Ligotti’s back
Tell a friend
(expect you’re reading Ligotti so you obviously don’t have any)
Read
December 19, 2025🤷🏼♀️ I liked Carson Winters’ and RSL’s pieces, the latter being a meta fiction + analytical essay on the titular TL story and the preceding stories in this collection, which made me feel like I just didn’t get the stories that I didn’t care for. YMMV.
January 1, 2026
The mark of Thomas Ligotti is to be found throughout "We Will Speak Again of The Red Tower". The collection is of course, directly inspired by his story "The Red Tower", but reaching beyond that, the rusty ochre tinged fingerprints of the man in question, can be found in every corner of this book.
It's very appropriate that this collection is the final book I've read and reviewed this year. This was the year i finally took the opportunity to dig into his collected works : Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe. Each of the authors, with stories included in this collection, bring stories that are quite clearly born of their style and imaginations. Perhaps this is the testament to Ligotti's impact on Horror Fiction. If the connections weren't explicitly pointed out, the man and his ideas would continue to linger. The silent shrouded specter, at the topic of this vast structure of prose, pain and mystery, moving the thoughts and ideas of each author.
Coming to Ligotti's work, by way of contemporary indie horror authors, was like discovering a secret code, written into a myriad of books, a silent cabal within the larger horror community. "We will speak of The Red Tower", carries a markedly different aura about it. Herein we find select members of this same silent cabal ( Joelle Killian, Carson Winter, Jack Klausner, Joe Koch, Rhiannon Rasmussen, C.J. Subko, TJ Price and RSL, gathered together, shaking with nervous energy, paranoia and fear. They readily reveal their stories, and each still hesitates, not sure if their stories are inspired by the Tower, or were instead brought forth from it. An excellent read, full of stories that stand on their own, solid like red stone bricks in a gargantuan structure.
It's very appropriate that this collection is the final book I've read and reviewed this year. This was the year i finally took the opportunity to dig into his collected works : Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe. Each of the authors, with stories included in this collection, bring stories that are quite clearly born of their style and imaginations. Perhaps this is the testament to Ligotti's impact on Horror Fiction. If the connections weren't explicitly pointed out, the man and his ideas would continue to linger. The silent shrouded specter, at the topic of this vast structure of prose, pain and mystery, moving the thoughts and ideas of each author.
Coming to Ligotti's work, by way of contemporary indie horror authors, was like discovering a secret code, written into a myriad of books, a silent cabal within the larger horror community. "We will speak of The Red Tower", carries a markedly different aura about it. Herein we find select members of this same silent cabal ( Joelle Killian, Carson Winter, Jack Klausner, Joe Koch, Rhiannon Rasmussen, C.J. Subko, TJ Price and RSL, gathered together, shaking with nervous energy, paranoia and fear. They readily reveal their stories, and each still hesitates, not sure if their stories are inspired by the Tower, or were instead brought forth from it. An excellent read, full of stories that stand on their own, solid like red stone bricks in a gargantuan structure.
November 4, 2025
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: A chorus of hallucinations keyed to Ligotti’s “The Red Tower,” this DIY anthology retools rumor, product, and decay into a surprisingly coherent nightmare. Highlights bend domestic dread, found documents, and theory-as-horror into new shapes. A couple pieces wobble, but the signal cuts through the static. Strong recommend for weird heads who like their dread industrial strength.
The spark here is Thomas Ligotti’s classic “The Red Tower,” first collected in The Nightmare Factory and later grouped among the Teatro Grottesco tales, where a nameless narrator relays hearsay about a ruined factory and its obscene, ever evolving output. Ligotti’s career reads like a who’s-who of the macabre magazines of the 80s and 90s, and his cold ventriloquism of rumor remains the template this book riffs on.
If you haven’t read the story and don’t want it spoiled, skip the next paragraph:
In the story that inspired this collection, a nameless narrator relates only what he has heard about a three-story red-brick factory standing alone in a gray wasteland. There are no doors or ground-level windows. The machinery inside reportedly evaporated after the factory ceased operation, as if the desolate landscape itself erased the offense. Below ground lies the first subterranean level, a distribution hub built like a mine with mesh elevators, crude beams, and a honeycomb of tunnels that carry goods across the country to unlikely delivery points. The factory’s first phase produced “novelty items” that grew from formless lumps into perverse objects with specific effects: a music box that gurgles like a death rattle, a pocket watch whose hands are tongues and whose numbers are quivering insects, carpets whose abstract patterns resolve into fever images. Eventually production moves entirely below ground to a second level that looks like a fenced graveyard lit by phosphorescent walls. The headstones have no names. These are not graves for burying the dead but birthing sites for the factory’s second phase: “hyper-organisms,” creations that embody both obscene vitality and inbuilt decay. They move and function in ways no witness can describe without ruining themselves. The surrounding gray world strikes back. First the machines fade. Later the graveyard level is viciously destroyed in a shattering episode that seems to end the Tower’s career. Yet rumors persist that there is a third level where production continues by stranger means, aiming for a perfection of defect. The narrator closes by admitting he has never seen the Red Tower and that perhaps no one has. He only repeats the delirious reports people whisper everywhere, and he waits for the voices to reveal the next corrupt phase of production so he can “speak again” of the Red Tower. The final sting is that the story itself is the distribution system. You never visit the factory. You just receive its products as rumor.
The anthology is openly a tribute project and says so, which lets the contributors focus on variation over homage cosplay.
• “The Project” (uncredited framing essay). A brisk primer that explains why “The Red Tower” matters and sets the rules of engagement for tribute rather than pastiche. Think midnight pep talk before a heist into an abandoned plant.
• “Files Recovered from the Wreckage of [REDACTED] State Hospital, Future Site of RedTower Industries” by Joelle Killian. Found psychiatric files track a patient with escalating somatic complaints at a shuttered hospital destined to be reborn as a corporate campus. The voice is clinical, the implications are not.
• “Conversations From Whence You Came” by Carson Winter. An anxious return to a flat prairie hometown becomes a slow, familial pressure cooker. The sky is too big, the small talk is camouflage, and something just outside the window is taking notes.
• “You Know Where It’s From” by Jack Klausner. A collector acquires a mysterious “device” from a shopkeeper who will not name the maker. Ownership turns into a relationship problem you cannot fix with polish.
• “Jar of Arms” by Joe Koch. A whole town argues over whether a colossal jar filled with severed limbs truly appeared in a derelict lot. Scale, denial, and rumor do cartwheels while the kids insist there was never anything there.
• “Tolerance” by Rhiannon Rasmussen. A single, scorched voice recounts a civic disaster that pulled FEMA and rubberneckers into a borough that refuses to name the thing erected near the playground. Grief, mud, and a taboo name everyone knows.
• “We’re Selling an Experience” by C. J. Subko. Brand and print nerds attempt to standardize the Red Tower’s color. Memos, deltas, and footnotes turn into an occult case study in corporate euphemism.
• “[]he []a[]r[] of th[] []e[] []r [] []o[] [_____]t[]” by TJ Price. A reckless infiltrator tries to figure out what the factory actually sells, then wakes up on the line in a red jumpsuit. Curiosity becomes shift work.
• “Draft of Ligotti’s Children: an Exploration of the Fictional Realities ‘The Red Tower’ Creates” by RSL. A hybrid essay that starts as criticism and gradually acts like a forum thread possessed by the very story it is analyzing.
Prose textures vary in a way that feels curated rather than chaotic. Winter’s scenes breathe with concrete sensory detail and awkward, believable dialogue, the TV game chatter functioning as white noise over a growing familial wrongness. Koch’s writing tilts lyrical but keeps its boots in dirt and plastic. The found document pieces commit to their formats without cute winks, and the meta-essay leans into a stitched, self-questioning voice that stays readable. Structurally, the book understands Ligotti’s trick of distance. Instead of straight imitation, most pieces adopt oblique angles, reproducing the feel of testimonies, memos, or overheard talk. The image system of tunnels, shipments, and objects is handled with restraint, which keeps the shared mythos from turning into licensed merchandise.
Two threads do the heaviest lifting. First is the manufacturing of identity and belief. Ligotti’s narrator famously never sees the Tower, only reports what everyone else is saying, and the anthology extends that logic to families, fandoms, and markets. We are all talking about the Tower, which means we are all selling it to each other. Second is the escalation itch, the hunger for a third level of production where things get worse and stranger. That rumor of ever more corrupt phases becomes a structural dare, and most contributors honor it by ending on sharpened ambiguity rather than big monster reveals. What lingers is a bad breath of commerce and grief. The next day, you remember the nothing in that device’s eye and wonder which parts of your day were shipped to you from somewhere below your feet.
This slots alongside recent indie tributes that expand single seminal stories into shared laboratories, but it does so with refreshing transparency. The book openly credits and contextualizes Ligotti’s story and publication history while staking a 2025 timestamp and an intent to make rather than mimic. For readers who already know the original, it feels like a conversation at 3 a.m. among people who can quote the final paragraph by heart. For newcomers, it functions as a guided tour toward the source.
A well built, idea-forward homage that manufactures fresh unease from rumor, format, and family talk, then quietly loads the truck for another delivery. If the Tower thrives on repetition and variation, this anthology keeps the line humming.
Read if you crave rumor-powered dread more than creature stats; you can handle collage structures and metafiction that mutters to itself; you love watching domestic spaces curdle without jump scares.
Skip if you need tidy lore with clear rules and a map; you hate mixed formats like faux files or essays in your fiction; you require clean resolution rather than cut-to-black unease.
TL;DR: A chorus of hallucinations keyed to Ligotti’s “The Red Tower,” this DIY anthology retools rumor, product, and decay into a surprisingly coherent nightmare. Highlights bend domestic dread, found documents, and theory-as-horror into new shapes. A couple pieces wobble, but the signal cuts through the static. Strong recommend for weird heads who like their dread industrial strength.
The spark here is Thomas Ligotti’s classic “The Red Tower,” first collected in The Nightmare Factory and later grouped among the Teatro Grottesco tales, where a nameless narrator relays hearsay about a ruined factory and its obscene, ever evolving output. Ligotti’s career reads like a who’s-who of the macabre magazines of the 80s and 90s, and his cold ventriloquism of rumor remains the template this book riffs on.
If you haven’t read the story and don’t want it spoiled, skip the next paragraph:
In the story that inspired this collection, a nameless narrator relates only what he has heard about a three-story red-brick factory standing alone in a gray wasteland. There are no doors or ground-level windows. The machinery inside reportedly evaporated after the factory ceased operation, as if the desolate landscape itself erased the offense. Below ground lies the first subterranean level, a distribution hub built like a mine with mesh elevators, crude beams, and a honeycomb of tunnels that carry goods across the country to unlikely delivery points. The factory’s first phase produced “novelty items” that grew from formless lumps into perverse objects with specific effects: a music box that gurgles like a death rattle, a pocket watch whose hands are tongues and whose numbers are quivering insects, carpets whose abstract patterns resolve into fever images. Eventually production moves entirely below ground to a second level that looks like a fenced graveyard lit by phosphorescent walls. The headstones have no names. These are not graves for burying the dead but birthing sites for the factory’s second phase: “hyper-organisms,” creations that embody both obscene vitality and inbuilt decay. They move and function in ways no witness can describe without ruining themselves. The surrounding gray world strikes back. First the machines fade. Later the graveyard level is viciously destroyed in a shattering episode that seems to end the Tower’s career. Yet rumors persist that there is a third level where production continues by stranger means, aiming for a perfection of defect. The narrator closes by admitting he has never seen the Red Tower and that perhaps no one has. He only repeats the delirious reports people whisper everywhere, and he waits for the voices to reveal the next corrupt phase of production so he can “speak again” of the Red Tower. The final sting is that the story itself is the distribution system. You never visit the factory. You just receive its products as rumor.
The anthology is openly a tribute project and says so, which lets the contributors focus on variation over homage cosplay.
• “The Project” (uncredited framing essay). A brisk primer that explains why “The Red Tower” matters and sets the rules of engagement for tribute rather than pastiche. Think midnight pep talk before a heist into an abandoned plant.
• “Files Recovered from the Wreckage of [REDACTED] State Hospital, Future Site of RedTower Industries” by Joelle Killian. Found psychiatric files track a patient with escalating somatic complaints at a shuttered hospital destined to be reborn as a corporate campus. The voice is clinical, the implications are not.
• “Conversations From Whence You Came” by Carson Winter. An anxious return to a flat prairie hometown becomes a slow, familial pressure cooker. The sky is too big, the small talk is camouflage, and something just outside the window is taking notes.
• “You Know Where It’s From” by Jack Klausner. A collector acquires a mysterious “device” from a shopkeeper who will not name the maker. Ownership turns into a relationship problem you cannot fix with polish.
• “Jar of Arms” by Joe Koch. A whole town argues over whether a colossal jar filled with severed limbs truly appeared in a derelict lot. Scale, denial, and rumor do cartwheels while the kids insist there was never anything there.
• “Tolerance” by Rhiannon Rasmussen. A single, scorched voice recounts a civic disaster that pulled FEMA and rubberneckers into a borough that refuses to name the thing erected near the playground. Grief, mud, and a taboo name everyone knows.
• “We’re Selling an Experience” by C. J. Subko. Brand and print nerds attempt to standardize the Red Tower’s color. Memos, deltas, and footnotes turn into an occult case study in corporate euphemism.
• “[]he []a[]r[] of th[] []e[] []r [] []o[] [_____]t[]” by TJ Price. A reckless infiltrator tries to figure out what the factory actually sells, then wakes up on the line in a red jumpsuit. Curiosity becomes shift work.
• “Draft of Ligotti’s Children: an Exploration of the Fictional Realities ‘The Red Tower’ Creates” by RSL. A hybrid essay that starts as criticism and gradually acts like a forum thread possessed by the very story it is analyzing.
Prose textures vary in a way that feels curated rather than chaotic. Winter’s scenes breathe with concrete sensory detail and awkward, believable dialogue, the TV game chatter functioning as white noise over a growing familial wrongness. Koch’s writing tilts lyrical but keeps its boots in dirt and plastic. The found document pieces commit to their formats without cute winks, and the meta-essay leans into a stitched, self-questioning voice that stays readable. Structurally, the book understands Ligotti’s trick of distance. Instead of straight imitation, most pieces adopt oblique angles, reproducing the feel of testimonies, memos, or overheard talk. The image system of tunnels, shipments, and objects is handled with restraint, which keeps the shared mythos from turning into licensed merchandise.
Two threads do the heaviest lifting. First is the manufacturing of identity and belief. Ligotti’s narrator famously never sees the Tower, only reports what everyone else is saying, and the anthology extends that logic to families, fandoms, and markets. We are all talking about the Tower, which means we are all selling it to each other. Second is the escalation itch, the hunger for a third level of production where things get worse and stranger. That rumor of ever more corrupt phases becomes a structural dare, and most contributors honor it by ending on sharpened ambiguity rather than big monster reveals. What lingers is a bad breath of commerce and grief. The next day, you remember the nothing in that device’s eye and wonder which parts of your day were shipped to you from somewhere below your feet.
This slots alongside recent indie tributes that expand single seminal stories into shared laboratories, but it does so with refreshing transparency. The book openly credits and contextualizes Ligotti’s story and publication history while staking a 2025 timestamp and an intent to make rather than mimic. For readers who already know the original, it feels like a conversation at 3 a.m. among people who can quote the final paragraph by heart. For newcomers, it functions as a guided tour toward the source.
A well built, idea-forward homage that manufactures fresh unease from rumor, format, and family talk, then quietly loads the truck for another delivery. If the Tower thrives on repetition and variation, this anthology keeps the line humming.
Read if you crave rumor-powered dread more than creature stats; you can handle collage structures and metafiction that mutters to itself; you love watching domestic spaces curdle without jump scares.
Skip if you need tidy lore with clear rules and a map; you hate mixed formats like faux files or essays in your fiction; you require clean resolution rather than cut-to-black unease.
October 30, 2025
This collection is filled with horrors, yes, but it's also so much fun. I guess this is appropriate since the stories are inspired by a Ligotti story, "The Red Tower," and I love Ligotti most when he makes me laugh. There are many bizarre factory objects in these stories, and there are even glimpses inside the tower. All eight stories (including one hybrid creative essay that I'll still call a story) are inventive and haunting. They make me think twice about going shopping, buying anything too novel. These fascinating stories feature pickled arms, enticing boxes, pocket watches ticking inside bellies, the struggle to be yourself, desperate devices, howling children, encrimsoning ink, ominous family dinners...and all of it is born inside the Red Tower.
January 6, 2026
This was cool! I think most of the stories captured what made the original so spooky and took it to an interesting place. I think the more modern ones were slightly too out of the mood I liked, and the last story was so meta I couldn't really follow, but I had a great time with this.
4/5 stars
4/5 stars
December 12, 2025
Can we get a physical edition of this please?
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews