{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

In the Humor in Horror thread, I mention Vastarien: A Literary Journal

It's home is at https://grimscribepress.com/

From their Home Page:

A source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti as well as associated authors and ideas

Vastarien. : The forbidden tome. The impossible otherworld. A textual entryway into ...

...   a place where everything was transfixed in the order of the unreal. . . . Each passage he entered in the book both enchanted and appalled him with images and incidents so freakish and chaotic that his usual sense of these terms disintegrated along with everything else. Rampant oddity seemed to be the rule of the realm; imperfection became the source of the miraculous — wonders of deformity and marvels of miscreation. There was horror, undoubtedly. But it was a horror uncompromised by any feeling of lost joy or thwarted redemption; rather, it was a deliverance by damnation. And if Vastarien was a nightmare, it was a nightmare transformed in spirit by the utter absence of refuge: nightmare made normal.

Our name is drawn from Thomas Ligotti’s classic story of the same title (quoted above), which S. T. Joshi has characterized as “Ligotti’s most searching exploration of the forbidden book theme.”

Our interests include but are not limited to the following subjects:

• Supernatural horror (both fiction and film)
• Philosophical pessimism
• Gnosticism
• Buddhism
• Nihilism
• Surrealism
• Decadent and fin de siècle literature
• Pessimistic and morbid poetry (Trakl, Thomson, Brennan, Leopardi, Larkin, Wiloch, Barnitz, etc.)
• Aberrant psychology (depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, anhedonia, depressive realism, etc.)
• Euthanasia/Right to Die
• Horror in the visual arts
• Antinatalism
• L’école belge de l’étrange
• Corporate degradation
• The architecture and topography of Detroit and its suburbs
• Horror and pessimism as it relates to most any field (geography, psychology, astronomy, music, film, etc.—kind of a catchall category)
• Any crossovers or hybrids of these categories/writers

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Which book is the story, Vastarien, contained in?  Is it not in The Nightmare Factory?   I would not go trying to hunt that book down ... why do we have such expensive taste?   It is because we are not of the masses, and that which we are drawn to is not mass produced. 

Vastarien was first published in Crypt of Cthulhu #48 (1987).   No legal online versions found.

According to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (http://www.isfdb.org/), Vastarien can be found in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, The Nightmare Factory, The New Lovecraft Circle, Teatro Grottesco, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, American Supernatural Tales, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe; and yet, I have a copy of Teatro Grottesco, and while it certainly does have "Purity" as well as "The Town Manager," there is no Vastarien to be found.   Could it only be in the German Language edition?  That's fucked up, excuse my French.