I began developing “Kissing Carrion” for an editor who wanted stories that were genuinely vicious rather than darkly Romantic, which had been my stock in trade up ’till then. The turning point came when I discovered an article in one of said ‘zines about those wacky folks down at Survival Research Laboratories (whose self-destructive industrial antics would later inspire NIN’s “Happiness In Slavery” video), which lead me to rent their performance tapes from Suspect Video—I was particularly struck by the infamous “rabbot,” a rotting bunny corpse hooked up to a system of rods and pistons and technical what-have-you which puppetted it around, making it parade itself back and forth until it started to fall apart. Mix well with the Pixies, and Pat Calavera’s Bone Machine was born. Ray and his fixations, meanwhile, evolved from both the confessions of Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilssen and the real-life female necrophile who inspired Lynn Stopkewich’s film Kissed. But things soon slid to a halt, as they often do with me, and the story lay fallow for years . . . I had vague ideas of submitting it for a zombie anthology like John Skipp and Craig Spector’s The Book Of The Dead, which is how the whole “triangle between a man, a woman and a corpse splits apart when the corpse objects to the arrangement” theme came into play.
Still and all, it took ’til 2000 for me to finally realize that the narrative perspective should come from Mr. Stinky, rather than Pat or Ray. A deadline was proffered by Ellen Datlow, for which I’ll be eternally grateful, even though the story itself didn’t turn out to meet her needs for the anthology in question. And the rest is history.
Q: “That’s a long time between idea and product. Is this kind of extensive percolation normal for you?”
A: “Normal”—no, not probably. Is anything?
My mind is a mulch-heap, deep and sticky; things pile up and, once they’ve piled, often need time to ferment. Some times the result is more explosive than others. I’ve written stories at a white heat, in a matter of hypnogogically-charged hours, and ended up shaking and babbling to myself while watching the walls bend. The more likely version of the process, however, reads the way it does above . . . a gestation period of almost a decade, with lots and lots of intermediary drafts, rejigging and thematic side-steps before I finally hit my stride and push through those last precious p
ages. Like the hoary old standby of brain-as-nautilus, I spiral slowly, non-linearly outwards, or inwards. Or—usually—
—downwards.
“Keepsake” clocks in at the very bottom of said spiral. It was written during one of my (more) depressive periods, which—as my husband will attest—I’m still prone to; the details about lying in bed and marking off the day by “TV time” came out of that, while my descriptions of what it’s like to be on the sparkler-side of a PMS-induced migraine are also, unfortunately, ripped whole and beating from real life experience. Rohise and Renny Gault, meanwhile, evolved in equal part from a wonderful photo of Quentin Tarantino and Juliette Lewis eye-fucking each other for a Details magazine article about their performances in From Dusk ’Till Dawn and some musings I once wrote down about the innate oddity of having siblings, as a concept—I’m an only child, as are most of my friends, aside from the two who happen to be identical twins, and as the old truism states (truism because it’s true), what you find exotic is almost always what you’re personally unfamiliar with.
Plus, I’ve always been far more Near Dark than Interview With The Vampire in terms of my ideas on vampirism—less “predators’ predators, killing angels feeding on us from above, lie back and wait with a beating heart,” more “dead people too angry to lie down and rot.” So I wanted to riff on the basic trope in such a way as to make it both potentially plausible and utterly unglamorous. I’d like to believe I succeeded.
“Keepsake” went straight to Wayne Edwards, editor/publisher of the now-defunct Palace Corbie magazine, because he’d been bugging me for stuff that was “more extreme.” He put it in #7 (Merrimack Books, ed. Wayne Edwards), then eventually reprinted it in The Best Of Palace Corbie (Stone Dragon Press, ed. Wayne Edwards.) Finally, this story has the dubious honor of having apparently grossed out enough (male) Showtime execs to make sure that I did not end up with one more sale to The Hunger under my belt for 1998—they were right with it up to a certain scene, and then . . . well. I think you’ll probably be able to spot the point of exit, if you try hard enough.
Q: “Were you always like this?”
A: Oh, baby: Bet your ass.
I started writing when I was maybe eight or so. My first love was science fiction, but that died pretty quickly after I realized that (aside from certain types of biology) I had little or no interest in science per se. By twelve I was reading Stephen King and writing monster stories to match—pastiches that definitely lent “No Darkness But Ours” (first published for no money down in City Alternative High School’s 1987 yearbook), which now frankly reads like the teaser to some King-esque novel, more than a little of its overall inspiration. But the rot started earlier on, I suspect; back when I was ten, I was already writing stuff like the wonderfully-titled “Gore In The Woods,” a sad tale of gratuitous supernatural torture which contains these immortal lines:
It hurt more as the [eerie, glowing green] worms began eating through the muscle wall and burrowed into his stomach. Then he could feel them slipping into his intestines and up his esophagus towards his mouth. Others burrowed into his veins and began drinking his blood as they slithered towards his brains. ”This is it,” he thought. “This is the end,” as one of the worms finally reached his heart. And it was.
This collection contains three of the oldest stories I still have floating around: “No Darkness . . . ” “Mouthful Of Pins”—my first true fiction sale (to Northern Frights 2, Mosaic Press, ed. Don Hutchison)—and “Skin City,” published initially in Grue #16 (Hell’s Kitchen Productions, Inc., ed. Peggy Nadramia) before being reprinted in A Crimson Kind Of Evil (Obelesk Press, ed. S.G. Johnson.) And while I think they’ve held up fairly well, I’ve certainly already spent a fair amount of the time since I wrote them trying to figure out why I’m so apparently compelled to revisit the themes of emotional isolation, sexual obsession, supernatural transcendence, repetitive patterns of loss and violence . . . the death of love, the love of death, the darkness which comes just before—and after—every night’s dreaming.
The only vague sort of conclusion I’ve reached, however, is that when it comes right down to it, the reason I’ve come to respect horror above almost every other form of literature is that its considerations simply seem more honest than those of any other genre. Through horror, we force ourselves to explore the things too much fantasy tries its best to avoid, to escape, to deny: The skull beneath the skin, the inescapable and unsettling knowledge that while some of us may indeed die sooner and in more inventive or spectacular ways, all of us will—eventually—travel the exact same ghost-road on our way to whatever lies beyond the undeniable fact of physical dissolution.
Seed becomes matter, matter becomes decay, energy moves unquantifiably forward; entropy in action, or maybe something more. But all we have to go on, or can create in the interim, is a shadow-puppet theater version of our own fears, our own desires . . . our own slim, yet unextinguishable, hopes in the face of apparent hopelessness.
Oh yeah: That, and the eerie, glowing green, blood-drinking worms. ’Cause they’re just cool.
Q: “A lot of these stories are pretty explicit, like boobie/penis-type explicit. Do you just think about sex all the time?”
A: Thankfully not, especially the way that sex usually turns up in this particular context. There was a period during the mid-1990’s when “erotic horror” was momentarily all the rage, though, which happened to neatly coincide with my first few invitations to participate in genuine paying anthologies—the Hot Blood era, as I like to call it, when body-parts and blood were juggled to produce an effect which was supposed to be equal parts titillation and terrification. This was a good market . . . indeed, it occasionally seemed, the only market. I wanted in. ‘Nuff said.
Of course, the urge which lay behind this trend has never really gone away, since sex and death still form a primal, if subliminal, link in most people’s minds. Nevetheless, because such stories’ potential content tends to be somewhat limited, the plain fact is that these pieces often end up with a kind of “porno pacing” first popularized by books like John Clelland’s Fanny Hill; you slow time to a crawl, poring over every possible detail, to disguise the fact that nothing really happens for pages and pages except what, in your average screenplay, would probably just read like this: “They have wild, passionate sex.”
“Rose-Sick” (c. 1996) was written for one such anthology, Seductive Specters (Masquerade Books, ed. Amarantha Knight.) I vaguely remember deciding on erotic asphyxiation as the motor of choice behind my plot mainly because of a slightly disturbing encounter I’d had—while taking part in one of those inevitable midnight panels on Sex & Death for some convention the year before—with a fan who seemed to be totally obsessed by the subject. I also seem to recall soon becoming really, really bored by the literal mechanics of making sure the horror-to-”erotic” quotient stayed balanced; at least one draft I initially submitted came back with the comment that it needed “about a hundred more words of sex,” prompting me to fantasize about just adding the words “hot” and “wet” to every other sentence. I.e.: You walk down the hot, wet corridor into the hot, wet room. It’s hot in there—hot, and wet.
(And DARK.)
Still, it’s not like this didn’t pay off, eventually. Doing “Rose-Sick” for Amarantha led to her asking me to submit to another, similar anthology, which meant I got very familiar with the subgenre’s specifications, very fast . . . and since erotic horror was the stock in trade of The Hunger, it all worked out. “Skeleton Bitch” (first published in Palace Corbie #5, Merrimack Books, ed. Wayne Edwards), written around the same time, definitely seemed to benefit from my having already had a bit of practice at being exactly as explicit as I needed to be; I’m also kind of proud of having been able to slip my real-life, Lovecraft-gained sex toy expertise in there, right near the end.
Q: “In some of these more explicit stories, you’re writing from the perspective of being a man—a gay man. What’s that about?”
A: Aside from it supposedly being part and parcel of being a writer that you get to pretend you’re anybody you want to, as long as you do it convincingly . . . ?
I’ll readily admit that I’ve always been fascinated with man-to-man sexual tension, so much so that it counts as (one of) my personal kink(s), along with those nasty little recurrent consent, power disparity and moral ambiguity issues. Maybe it comes out of having gotten most of your childhood sex ed from Penthouse Letters rather than Yellow Silk, and thus not recognizing a lot of yourself in those giggly, garter belt-wearing female meat puppets with the always-available array of holes which populate most popuLAR porn—an innate impulse to identify with the do-er rather than the do-ee.
Or maybe it’s just that lure of the alien again, the spectacle of watching guys interact with each other on a supremely violent or oddly vulnerable level. My favorite TV show IS OZ, after all—Homicide: Life On The Street creator Tom Fontana’s operatic/realistic six-season pay-TV evisceration of the prison system—just like my favorite characters on OZ are Tobias Beecher (the upper-middle-class rage addict with bad to no impulse control) on the one hand, and Vern Schillinger (the White Supremacist rapist with serious family issues) on the other. Which—along with Edward Norton’s performance in American History X, plus some re-reading of various texts on Viking culture and berserker shamanism—certainly did feed into the writing of “Bear-Shirt,” first published in Queer Fear (Arsenal Pulp Press, ed. Michael Rowe); I wanted to take a good, hard look at a particularly icky yet attractive subset of my own fetishes, a lingering Anglo-Saxon pull towards those who share my propensity for “blood in the face.”
Which is not, obviously (though this can never be made too obvious), that I’m hugely sympathetic towards people like Karl Speller; not hugely. Small-ly. Like I’m sympathetic to a whole host of other, equally fucked up people . . . so far, at least, as to want to write either about them or from their point of view. People like Dave Proulx, for example, main character of “Torch Song” (first published in Transversions #8
/9, ed. Dale Sproule and Sally McBride)—a fairly overt homage to L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy, especially in his White Jazz mode, with a sidebar of bitch-slap for all those who grew up thinking Aphrodite was a nice Goddess just because she’s the patron mythodaimon of “love.” Love being, after all, such a very many-splendored thing: The black end of the spectrum, along with the red.