Kissing Carrion (25 page)

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.

Or vice-versa.

Q: “Most people say you should ‘write what you know.' Do you agree?”

A: In a way, yes. With certain qualifications.

Let's take the case of “Hidebound,” for example—first published in
Transversions #5
(ed. Dale Sproule and Sally McBride), then optioned for adaptation by
The Hunger
(the resultant episode aired during the show's 1998 season.) Now, I'm very fond of this one, even though I had no (official) input into its screenplay adaptation—primarily since it has dry-voiced, perpetually unimpressable, blessedly full-figured Brooke Smith (probably best known as “the girl down the well” in
Silence Of The Lambs
) playing main character “Lee,” better known as “Gemma with a slight dye-job and far more obvious ass-kicking capabilities.” But “Hidebound” is also rife with autobiographical elements—liberal use of details gleaned from several sites I worked as a security guard, “Lee's” painful break-up with her fiancé forming a continual subplot to the considerably more dramatic pseudo-werewolf foreground, etc.

So: Do these elements add or detract, in the end? Or, considering most readers who don't know me can't possibly know what's “based on a true story” and what's not unless I tell them, do they even matter?

I don't really think you can ever
avoid
putting bits of yourself into original characters; obviously, some turn out more “you” than others, but the “you” parts will always be the parts that make things
work
, essentially. They're the parts that resonate. And it took me a very long time to accept this fact, because it sounded so much in my mind like that “Why don't you write what you
know
?” thing Mom always used to say to me, and I always used to resent so bitterly: I write fantasy, I don't write reality. But the fantasy spirals off from reality, and it's that little core of “real” that makes the fake that much better, more original, more rooted in some sense of a larger, understandable reality—that makes the impossible more possible, in other words.

The older I get, the more I realize that the reason I wasn't able to finish some earlier projects had less to do with a lack of invention than with a lack of emotional
understanding
which can only come from actual, physical, real-life experience. Inevitably—when I revisit abandoned stories, screenplays, whatever—I find that the true fault lay in an inability to see exactly why and how the things I somehow knew had to happen would, or could, happen: the subconscious, synaptic connections between instinct and impulse, action and reaction, which take actual human beings years to untangle.

So often, we rarely understand our own motivations except in hindsight—and things only become more complex, less black and white, the further we move away from them. In other words, the events themselves don't change, only the way we perceive those events . . . and the way we perceive them only changes because
we
change enough to recognize the distance between who we are now, and who we once were.

All of which is utterly essential, to my mind, when trying to create a realistic, resonant character. Because if your characters can't be at least as marginally self-aware as you yourself are, then what's the point of writing them at all? The more detailed and realistic the character, the more the reader—a detailed, realistic character him/herself—can identify with them, developing an empathy for their situation and problems which goes far beyond the easy evocation of shallow sympathy most simplistic stereotypes evoke.

Weirdly, the more specific a detail, the better it travels; people somehow know that it's
just
distinctive enough to ring “true.” Which is why, in the end, you should never be afraid to “write what you know.” . . even if your mother once told you to.

“Hidebound,” partially based on my break-up with one fiancé, was written during my break-up with another. A year after the episode premiered, my second fiancé ran into me at a party and boasted about how his Dad, watching late-night TV, had been appalled to realize that this scenario about a woman making sure her ex got ripped apart by supernatural beasts (the patented “
whammo
!” ending, added in translation for maximum Hollywood North effect) was based on something I wrote. “'No, no, that's about Gemma's
other
ex,'” my second fiancé told me he'd assured my former prospective father-in-law, then laughed: Pretty funny, eh? Oh yeah, I agreed—adding: “And the
really
funny part is, I actually just sold them the one that's about
you
.” (That'd be “The Diarist,” first published in
Transversions #7
[ed. Dale Sproule and Sally McBride]; the episode based on
it
aired during
The Hunger
‘s 1999 season, shot from a teleplay written by yours truly.)

Another “writ[ing] what you know”-type trend I've stumbled across recently in my work is the deliberate evocation of script format, as in “Folly” (written for the official 2001 World Fantasy Con CD/ROM, ed. Nancy Kilpatrick, on a theme of “Ghosts & Gaslight”), “Job 37” (first published in
Dark Terrors 6
, ed. Stephen Jones and David Sutton, from Gollancz) and ”Seen” (first published in
The Narrow World
Chapbook for World Horror Con 2001, ed. Stephen J. Barringer, Quantum Theology Publications.) On the one hand, I teach screenwriting for a living these days, and format really counts; the biggest struggle, for most of my students, is simply having to accept the fact that what they're writing is basically more a list of suggestions than any kind of holy writ—a blueprint for a coalition of other artists to enlarge upon, over which you have little or no control after the first draft is sold. On the other, this means that getting your point across is a real exercise in directness
and
subtlety . . . and since I often think I overwrite anyways, in terms of trying to render the sensual “reality” of a given situation as exactly as possible (I remember once reading a section of Caitlin R. Kiernan's
Low Red Moon
‘blog in which she lamented having spent approximately half a day trying to get one of her characters to cross a room and flick off a light switch, and thinking:
Yeah, that's about the size of it
), having to occasionally keep everything strictly “off-stage” is good for me.

Or so I explain it to myself.

In terms of inspiration, meanwhile, “Seen” is related to an old Irish fairytale about a midwife called upon to deliver a fairy baby retold in Georgess McHarque's
The Impossible People
, while “Folly” owes a roughly equal debt to
The Legend Of Hell House
(with Roddy McDowell!) and an article on cthonic rituals in ancient Greece I read in an issue of
Archaeology
magazine, or somewhere similar. “Job 37” is the result of an interview read in
Harper
‘s magazine, extensive web-searches on crime-scene clean-up, and probably too many episodes of
CSI: Crime Scene Investigations
.

Q: “How come so few of your main characters are nice, likeable people?”

A: Are most people “nice” or “likeable,” generally? I know
I
‘m not. Are you?

It's funny. On the one hand, I'm increasingly willing to admit that being a hero is probably ten times harder than being a villain, in much the same way that the Dark Side of the Force always beckons twice as hard and seductively as the . . . Um . . . Not-Dark Side; anger, hatred and fear are such
easy
emotions to evoke, after all, just as compassion, balance and hope are such incredibly difficult ones to sustain. But admiration only takes me so far: In the final analysis, it really
is
always a bad-ass that makes (this) girl's heart beat faster. I like slippery people, difficult people, self-justifying people—people with issues, yo—and thus the characters I choose for my protagonists usually end up fitting that particular bill.

“Blood Makes Noise,” first published in
Transversions #11
(ed. Dale Sproule and Sally McBride), evolved because I started thinking vaguely about how cowards rationalize their own behavior—is “the fate worse than death,” whatever it may be,
really
all that worse (especially if you're scared shitless of dying)? Regis Book himself, meanwhile, owes an equal debt to Alex Krycek from
The X-Files
—I
was
at Ad Astra, Toronto's biggest yearly multifandom geek romp, when I got the initial idea—and the conspiracy rants of Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra; many details about deep sea life come from William J. Broad's
The Universe Below
, amongst other sources.

And speaking of Ad Astra . . . “Pretend That We're Dead,” first e-published in
The Three-Lobed Burning Eye #7
(ed. Andrew S. Fuller), is the direct byproduct of a Shared World Project developed by myself, Sandra Kasturi and Jason Taniguchi for the 1998 version of said convention. I'd therefore like to acknowledge their input into this piece, thank them for their support and friendship generally, and gently bug them to fix up and submit the stuff
they
wrote that year within what we came to call the Toronto: The Infestation universe.

Q: “Okay. What next?”

A: Aw, you know. Same old same old.

I've been writing—and publishing, amazingly enough—short stories for about fifteen years now: Won an award and carved out a bit of a name for myself, just like I once made the equivalent of a whole year's salary with a single sale (my own script adaptation of the story “Bottle Of Smoke,” for [you guessed it]
The Hunger
)—which probably, if I dare say so myself, isn't something a lot of other people can claim to have done. People tell me the next logical evolutionary step is to write a novel, and I believe them; this collection, along with another one I have coming out from Prime Books pretty soon, is sort of designed to help hothouse what last few short stories I still have lurking around on my hard drive to ripeness and fruition, so they'll stop interfering with that all-important process. I guess we'll find out if it works.

Which brings us neatly to the last story here: “Dead Bodies Possessed By Furious Motion,” first published in
The Narrow World
chapbook (ed. Stephen J. Barringer, Quantum Theology Publications.) I see it as a return to my roots, somewhat . . . pseudo-science fiction, liberally larded with those anti-Rice vampirism theories I talked about earlier. A bit thick on the metaphor rather than the logic, but I'll freely admit I love Elder and her febrile world dearly; it's maybe two-thirds the visual sense and style of Stephen Norrington's
Blade
mixed with Mike Mignola's
Hellboy
, but the rest of it is mine, I tells ya . . .
alllll
mine.

(Oh, and watch for at least one of these characters to pop back up in
The Worm
. . . as well as making a not-so-cameo appearance in that book I'm already currently laboring on; no, no hints. It's so much more
fun
that way.)

At any rate. The leap into the long, cold dark, with only hunger for your friend and guide: A good note to end on, don't you think? And so, farewell. Thanks for listening.

You've been a most gracious—and attentive—audience.

Michael Rowe

MY RELUCTANCE TO
write this Afterword, however flattering a request, had nothing to do with the quality of the stories you've just read. Or rather, it has everything to do with the quality of the stories you've just read, just not the way you think.

When considering the work of Gemma Files, the author of many books, including
Kissing Carrion
and
The Worm in Every Heart,
reissued here in e-book form by ChiZine Publications, any writer presuming to proffer a literary postmortem (especially after the superb Introductions by novelists Caitlín R. Kiernan and Nancy Kilpatrick) has to first ask themselves one simple question:
Why?
What on earth is there left for the likes of me to add?

It's a bit like being asked to apply for the job of the person who stands in front of a burning library that has just been hit by a comet—not just any comet, mind you, but a huge, bright, blazing micro-sun that everyone in the world saw streak down from an obsidian sky pebbled with stars, hit the building, and ignite a holocaust of fire that can be seen for miles.

“A comet just fell out of the sky and set the library on fire,” he says, a bit redundantly.

Everyone can see the library burning. Everyone saw the comet fall. No one needs to be told what they've just experienced. They felt the impact, and now they feel the heat from the fire. They don't need you to say anything, and no one really wants you to, anyway. You have nothing to add to the experience of watching the inferno.

You've read these stories. You know exactly what I mean.

A bit of autobiographical backtracking, if you don't mind.

I've known Gemma Files since the mid-1990s when I was still a nonfiction writer, making his horror debut in the third volume of Don Hutchison's seminal anthology series of Canadian horror fiction,
Northern Frights.
Toronto horror writers in those days were a spare, tight group, the redheaded stepchildren of the dominant science fiction community. Gemma had made a devastating debut in
Northern Frights 2
with her short story “A Mouthful of Pins” (a deeply unsettling title in and of itself, never mind the chilling story it portends).

I was then in my very early thirties, and Gemma must have been in her very early twenties. I have a very vivid memory of meeting her at an afternoon party at Don Hutchison's house one Sunday afternoon. We were the two youngest people in the room, so naturally we gravitated towards one another. We were drawn to each other immediately and instinctively, and I seem to recall we wound up sitting underneath a very tall table, talking horror to each other.

Gemma's beauty—it's relevant, so please bear with me—was quintessentially English. Her skin was the colour of both parts of a cameo: both flush-pink and white. Her eyes were wide-spaced, thoughtful, vastly kind, and fiercely intelligent. There was something vaguely 18th-century about it, like an illustration in a Jane Austen novel—not “fragile” or dated in any sense, but still suggestive of another era. Her voice was (and still is) husky and warm, her manner genial and unpretentious.

As we talked, I occasionally had the slightly disorienting sense of speaking through time. I mean to say, I occasionally had the slightly disorienting sense that there were multiple versions present of the woman to whom I spoke. There was the very modern, very hip Gemma Files, course—the noted Canadian film critic-turned-fiction-writer. But there were others, too—older versions, younger versions, different genders, different ages, from a variety of eras, all of them shimmering and eddying across her face as we spoke, moving beneath the skin. I'd heard the phrase “old soul” before, but I'd always found it a hackneyed, sentimental cliché.

Now I wasn't so sure. There was no sense of “multiple personalities,” but there was a sense that the woman with whom I was rapidly becoming friends had stood at the crossroads of time itself on more than one occasion, in this life or others, and that she had taken careful notes.

And so we became friends.

We saw each other socially on numerous occasions, found mutual friends, shared our writing, and witnessed the formation of a community of horror writers in a city where one had previously not existed.

In 1999, Gemma published “The Emperor's Old Bones,” a horror story so taboo-smashing and so chilling, and so beautifully written, that it won the International Horror Guild Award at the World Horror Convention in Denver, Colorado the following year. I have only been able to read “The Emperor's Old Bones” once. It's too upsetting, but it's upsetting in the same way Benjamin Percy's fiction would be upsetting a quarter of a century later—deriving its power from a brilliant writer's unflinching depiction of the unthinkable, without ceding an inch of font point to exploitation or sentimentality.

That same year, I asked her for a story for my third edited horror anthology,
Queer Fear: Gay Horror Fiction.
Gemma wrote “Bear-Shirt” for me, a violent, homoerotic tale which author and critic Greg Wharton, writing in
Strange Horizons,
described thusly: “an amazing story of transfiguration and metamorphosis. A story of love, longing, and regret, Files' tale is also about the animal instinct within, about finding the inner beast, and one's destiny.” The story became an immediate favourite worldwide, and is still one of the stories most often mentioned by readers who still occasionally write to me about that book.

The fact that an author who was not a gay man had so effortlessly accessed a gay male sexual psyche and not just accessed it, but
owned
it, surprised many readers. In 2015, we're fifteen years past the social and literary climate of the time into which
Queer Fear
was born and, given the number of queer writers writing queer speculative fiction today, it's almost inconceivable to believe how hard it was in those days to find writers willing to commit to queer horror fiction, let alone award-winning ones like Gemma Files. And yet, suddenly, there was “Bear-Shirt.”

The most logical saw to trot out is, “A writer writes, and a great writer can write anything.”

True, if a bit shopworn. In Gemma Files' case, though, I'm not sure if that quite covers it. Yes, she's a great writer, no question at all about that. Reading “Bear-Shirt” for the first time, however, I was struck by two things: its authenticity, and a sudden memory of that afternoon under the table when I momentarily felt the presence of multiple Gemmas, all of them gazing shrewdly and thoughtfully at me through those clear, coffee-coloured eyes.

And, God almighty, the writing.

Take a random line from one of the two books—say, from “The Land Beyond the Forest,” one of my all-time favourite vampire stories:
“The moon went out like a lamp. And when Carola found she could see again, nothing
remained but the blue-black road, the horizon, and a mouthful of salt.”

It's the sort of sensual, apparently effortless bit of writing that sets readers a-tingle and makes other writers sit up straight and read it twice or more in an attempt to understand the witchcraft employed in the service of writing a line like that.

Except it's not witchcraft at all—it's a once-in-a-lifetime literary gift that is bestowed on precious few, proportionately. Gemma has written about witches, she's written about angels, she's written about vampires and neo-Nazis and mermaids and any number of other monsters, human and otherwise. She writes fearlessly and she writes with insight and compassion.

Like all serious writers, Gemma Files is a moralist. A moralist is not necessarily a judge, but moralists can look unflinchingly into the darkest corners of the human heart—even their own heart—and call what they see there by its name, stare it down, and then render it on the printed page. She's written across time, she's written in different centuries. Like a medium, she has allowed countless voices to speak through her, giving them life.

Gemma Files is every lazy writer's nightmare, because the quality of her prodigious output is so consistently stellar. She is the embodied nightmare of every misogynist male speculative fiction writer who's felt compelled to unburden himself of his bigoted conviction that women have no place in “the boy's club” of hardcore horror fiction, justifying their embarrassing fear of women who write world-class horror better than they could ever dream of writing it. And she's the answer to every young writer's dream of where talent, craft, courage, and sweat can take them.

I remember sending Gemma a version of my Introduction to my fourth anthology,
Queer Fear 2.
In that version, I thought I'd be clever and write the Introduction as a horror story in itself. I was beginning to get the itch to begin writing long form horror myself (an itch that wouldn't be scratched till three years later) and I thought I'd flex that muscle a little bit with the introductory essay to the anthology.

It was . . . dreadful. Truly execrable. I'd like to say I shudder at the memory, but I don't—I giggle a bit, really. The piece was an exercise in unarmed hubris. But I sent it to Gemma anyway. She emailed me back almost immediately. As I recall, she said something like,
Well, I can see what you're trying to do, but it's not really working, is it?
She was right, and I shelved it immediately and got back and did my job as the creator of the anthology, just like she has always done hers, as a writer of peerless stories. Just as she has done it in these two reissued collections,
Kissing Carrion
and
The Worm in Every Heart.

One last thing? I've had an extraordinary working life. As a journalist, I've been privileged to interview some of the
plus grands des grands personnages
of horror fiction and film. As an anthology editor, I've been privileged to publish them. And as a novelist, I've been privileged to call them my friends.

And still, I remain in awe of Gemma Files' ability to spin her particular skein of moonlight, hell, and redemption. It was an honour to write this Afterword, however ridiculous. You can all see that
she
was the comet that struck the library—indeed, the horror genre—and set it aflame; you don't need the likes of me to point that out.

If there's been an upside to this ludicrous, joyous undertaking, it's that I didn't write an Introduction, or a Foreword. I'd hate to think that I'd kept anyone from Gemma's stories—those vast, terrible riches—with my own barely adequate celebration of them, and of her.

MICHAEL ROWE

The Farmhouse, Toronto

2015