by Gemma Files
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.
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.
