by Gemma Files
And then there’s “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” my IHG Award-winning monster-piece, which everybody I know was rather amazed I didn’t build my first collection around: Yes, it got its start with J.G. Ballard’s and Steven Spielberg’s versions of Empire of the Sun, respectively, and no, I’ve never pretended otherwise. But I will take a moment here to thoroughly debunk the idea that I reference Peter Greenaway’s name because I was thinking of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and her—mystic longevity achieved through ritual cannibalism’s been around a hell of a lot longer than that, as a concept. Ask the Chinese.
Q: But don’t you think it’s a little dicey, appropriating other people’s cultural voices the way you do in pieces like these?
A: I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, probably because putting this book together meant digging fairly deep through the extremely obsessive, highly influential alchemist’s refuse-pile I like to call my subconscious—more so even than last time, when I cobbled Kissing Carrion into publically acceptable shape. That’s because while Kissing Carrion’s theme was “simple” dark, urban creep and slime of a sort all too distressingly easy to extrapolate from my own experiences, The Worm in Every Heart’s leaning is firmly towards the fantastic rather than the realistic, and the exotic rather than the familiar; the detritus of a thousand hours misspent skimming non-fiction for inspirational nuggets, those few shaky grains of research which form the grit from which I’ve spun this particular string of black, bloody pearls.
But the fact that Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York is my favorite film should tell you something, in context—I like my history the way I like my melodrama, big and bloody, with lots of tabloid spice to shore up the painstakingly accurate detail. And that means that by blithely discarding or ignoring whatever didn’t support my various theses, along the way, I’ve no doubt opened myself up to a thousand charges of demeaning or insulting all those I’m not and never will be, “stealing” their various voices to support my nasty tales: Gay Torontonian magicians of Hong Kong descent, Warsaw Ghetto uprising survivors, mythological Indian demons, aging British “speculative fiction” writers with an occasional bent towards black magick, etc.
To all the people who may see themselves in my characters, therefore, I apologize in advance for seeming to claim/exploit your pain or plunder a part of your heritage. Granted, I am white as a sack of sheets and Canadian as a sack of maple leaves (for all I was born in England), but world conquest has never been my aim, not even on a pen-to-page level. I just get these things in my head, all shiny and swollen and blood-encrusted: Gold and scarlet, with prayers to gods both forgotten and un- singing teasingly through my veins, leaving shadows on my CAT-scans and blank spots on my x-rays. Which is why, for the sake of my health—not to mention the health of those around me—they really do just have to come out, eventually; better here than through the barrel of an Uzi, I guess.
Still, though. How can I possibly justify the constant juxtaposition of human and inhuman horror, of using real tragedies—revolutions, massacres, the Holocaust itself—to throw various mythical daemons into relief? Am I piggybacking my prose on the suffering of others, and isn’t there something profane about that—something blasphemous, even in this very secular world we live in?
I remember interviewing documentarian Errol Morris about his film Mr. Death: The Ride and Fall of Fred A. Lechter, JNR., back when I was still a film critic. It’s an amazing portrait of a man who went from being a self-taught electric chair redesigner (he wanted to make execution a more humane process) to a Holocaust-denying pariah in just a few, hideously easy steps. His stubborn deification of “scientific” detachment sent him to Auschwitz, where he took a hammer to its walls and stuffed bits of masonry he chipped off into his socks so he could smuggle them back to the States and test them, hoping to debunk the validity of the “six million killed” figure.
Morris said that what he found particularly offensive and naive about Leuchter’s actions was that if you drew a map of human misery, Auschwitz would be dead centre. And I can still see myself nodding sagely—but even then, I didn’t really believe it. Because we close these events off like pockets, and I understand why we do, but to some extent this habit just perpetuates our overall human bent towards justifying genocide: We say “the worst has already happened,” and overlook something equally horrible happening right in front of us. On the one hand, it’s great to be able to put pain into perspective—to say “well at least this isn’t as bad as X.” But when we use that exact method to dismiss other people’s pain, we’re back in the same old same old, the red rut we’ve been plowing since Sumer, when every other man in a conquered city routinely had his flayed skin hung from the walls.
1940’s Germany was a “civilized” nation, an organized nation, and thus they set a standard which ideologically-justified murderers all over the world continue to kill up to. Stalin’s gulags, China’s Cultural Revolution, Rwanda, the Balkans, Pol Pot’s killing fields—tribal hatreds crossed with cold-blood political scapegoating, plus modern technological methodry. Does the very innate brutality of Bosnian rape camps make them somehow less evil than herding children quickly and efficiently into gas chambers? These fine gradations can’t help but be barely meaningful: Evil, like shit, don’t come in degrees, and recognizing it on sight when other people do it will never inoculate you against your own inherent tendency toward demonizing whatever—or whoever—you happen to disapprove of.
That’s the best lesson I ever learned, way back in City Alternative School’s interdisciplinary Holocaust course—the plain fact that my pain doesn’t trump your pain, no matter what: Never will, and never should. That nothing in history should ever be declared so sacred it can’t be examined, even creatively, poetically, fantastically.
So: Will history really teach us nothing? Ask Sting, man. Ask yourself. I’ve got no answers—or maybe I do, and these are them.
Say, that’s kind of . . . scary.
Q: So which of these experiences actually come closest to your own?
A: “By The Mark” (previously unpublished) and “The Kindly Ones” (previously unpublished.) One’s a not-exactly-love letter to the area of Toronto I spent my tween years in, as well as the people I spent them with—the ones who might best remember me as that girl who strangled a fellow student for saying her drawing of a whale looked like a tadpole, or threatened (in medically-accurate detail) to give someone else who was teasing her a lobotomy with a geometry compass. Or just “that fucking weirdo.” The other is a thinly-veiled slander against my maternal grandmother, and I like to think it pretty much speaks for itself. Which is why I’m not going to discuss it in any sort of detail . . . here, or anywhere else.
That being said, no one ever molested me—not even the creepy boyfriend of my mother’s housemate who originally told me that “you started licking me” story (uck!)—and my mother’s still alive. I lie for a living, folks. Hope you enjoy the result.
Q: Still with the sex, though, I notice.
A: (Smiles) Yes. That’s right.
Those who’ve read the Kissing Carrion Q&A will, I hope, recall my rather snide breakdown of the 1990s’ “erotic horror” era—but you know, I’m just as happy to have been thus asskicked into cultivating my ability to write frankly about people putting their parts into other people’s parts, because (horrors!) the plain fact is, I enjoy it. Not all the time, mind you, and not with every story; I’m still amazed that Showtime’s erotic horror anthology TV series ended up optioning some of the stories they did, since some of them—like “Fly-By-Night” (first published in The Vampire’s Crypt #8, ed. Margaret L. Carter) and “The Guided Tour”(first published in The Vampire’s Crypt #9, ed. Margaret L. Carter), for example—not only had no sex in them to begin with, but didn’t exactly benefit from having sex shoehorned into them.
‘Course, with “The Guided Tour,” it was pretty much a “they changed everything but the title, and then they chan
ged the title” scenario from the get-go. Years later, I still receive occasional mail from fans of the Hunger episode “Wrath Of God” who’ve looked up my story, only to be very surprised; better take it up with Hunger executive producers the Scott brothers and/or episode director Russell Mulcahy for further details on that one, ladies and gents. And “Fly-By-Night” was basically rewritten both on set and in the editing suite, as is often the wont with TV—they got considerably more than they bargained for during the filming of one particular sequence, so they used it. And having seen the result, I’ve got to admit that I might well have made the same call myself.
I was far happier with the adaptation of “Bottle Of Smoke”(first published in Demon Sex, Masquerade Books, ed. Amarantha Knight), but then again, why wouldn’t I be? I wrote the thing. I do, however, remember being incredibly amused by how much of my scriptwriting duties essentially boiled down to taking out all the hot Lesbian action which had caused this piece to be optioned in the first place: Apparently, my little genie-in-a-bottle as ultimate masturbational aid parable (I once described it to one friend as “Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky meets Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, but all in one house, and there’s a whole lot of girl-on-girl”) was too explicit for The Hunger, baby! That’s gotta be some sort of achievement.
Q: Yeah, I guess. And now?
A: Remember how I said I was working on a first novel? Well, make that “novels.” And like a lot of other writers contemplating making this very important step, I’m bringing the ‘verse I’ve painstakingly cobbled together throughout all these stories along with me, in one way or another: Two of the novels take off from “The Narrow World,” in one way or another. Characters from “The Emperor’s Old Bones” have shown up here and there. There’s also a backing structure on which I may hang several new stories, to create a Scheherazade/Tanith Lee-esque secret history of the world—and the city of Toronto—as a burgeoning misery vector. Those who know me will understand what I’m hinting around by making these statements, but hopefully even those who don’t will find at least one or two of them intriguing. That’s the plan.
It occurs to me, however, that I should probably warn those who liked Kissing Carrion more than they liked The Worm in Every Heart that several of these projects will turn one way or the other, contain elements of one slant or the other, etc. Because between the two of them, like I said when we first began this little hoe-down, they pretty much encapsulate not only the last fifteen years of my working life, but everything I’ve ever been . . . and continue to be . . . interested in. These two collections are me, straight up and twisted: All my tropes, all my patterns, the full evilly-tinted spectrum of my many, many, many obsessions.
Ah, obsession. I’ve been thinking a lot about that factor lately too, especially as it pertains to my writing: This engine of passionate interest which continually drives me to grab what moves me and cannibalize it for spare parts, then build something new from its bones. And when it spills over into paying work, that’s admirable, but when it spills over into anything else—fan fiction, for example, the usually-denigrated flipside of that self-same spring—it’s not; self-indulgent at best, borderline-illegal at worst.
People often congratulate me on being able to channel my interests in “useful” pursuits, an idea I’ve been somewhat shamefacedly perpetuating myself, as though all the more directly-influenced writing I’ve already done vis a vis these subjects were a slightly dirty not-exactly-secret. As though even when all I do with it is simply post it in my blog, it’s the virtual equivalent of what the cat keeps doing to me every time I incautiously lie down and try to get some sleep: Jump up, thrust his hindquarters in my face and squeal imperiously, like “Hey, look! It’s my ass! What do you mean you don’t want to see my ass? It’s MY ASS!”
And maybe that’s true. Maybe at this point in my life, continuing to enthuse over various movies or what have you like some haphazard cultural garburator and writing about the result is like exposing myself in public, an eccentricity that’s bound to get me negative/tabloid attention. Maybe it’s annoying to my peers and fans in the same way that I tend to find the forays of other writers whose stuff I’ve admired at one point or another into areas I have absolutely no interest in annoying: Pop music fandom = crack! Yaoi/anime = crack! Poppy Z. Brite writing about cooking or Sam Raimi making movies about baseball or Stephen King going back to those damn Gunslinger books = crack! What kind of crack have y’all been smoking, that you’re not content to simply stick with the stuff which attracted my attention to you in the first place?
But: Everybody’s crack is crack, equally—all-consuming, inaccessible, impossible to totally understand from an outsider’s perspective. There’s no crack that anyone can really argue you into accepting as “non-crack.” Me being the queen of Fandoms Of One, I already know this far better than anybody else; all we can do is look in, disconnect, then surf on. So if you can’t understand why the next thing you see from me may or may not be motivated by wanting to turn my strident interest in the Five Points section of 1860’s New York into something which won’t have Martin Scorsese’s fingerprints all over it, though it will have all the gross supernatural stuff you’ve come to expect from me tooling around its edges, then feel free to do, and do—I won’t hold it agin’ ya. It’s MY crack, see? It’s MY ASS! Look, or don’t—like it, or don’t; don’t matter to me, shouldn’t matter to you. And all that jazz.
But if you are along for the rest of the ride no matter what the destination might turn out to be, or even if you’ve only gone along with me thus far, then bless you. You are what keeps me sane, and I mean that very sincerely.
So: Goodnight and thank you, whoever. Enjoy the book(s.) And I’ll see you again . . .
. . . as soon as I possibly can.
The Night the Comet Hit the Library:
An Afterword to Kissing Carrion and The Worm In Every Heart.
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 itse
lf, 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.
