American Monsters

by Sezin Koehler

  AFTERWORD:

  TEN YEARS LATER

  It has been a decade since I first began work on this novel, and eight years since I finished writing it in Los Angeles, California, known to me as Hell On Earth. In the interim, I carried a bound copy of the manuscript from Los Angeles to Berkeley, then Geneva, Switzerland, France, Spain, Turkey and now Prague, where finally I brushed off the dust.

  At first I hesitated to change anything. The story came from such specific and raw places of pain from my American experience, namely my experiences as a “raver” and witnessing my good friend Wendy Soltero’s violent and untimely death. While I am pretty sure that this novel would have been the same had Wendy not died in my presence, I also tend to think there might have been more hope and positivity if I hadn’t been so terribly traumatized.

  When I read the book now, I am shocked by the Quentin Tarantino-esque level of violence that almost has no place in anything but a Stephen King novel or the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I look back and wonder how I could have been so angry. At times as I went through it during the final editing process, the brutal grotesqueness of my visions even made me laugh. I would like to think that means I’ve moved beyond, well, something of the pain, or, something else profound: That I could find humor in things I once took so seriously. Then again, I don’t know. I’m really not sure. Part of me still understands where this kind of rage has a place, another part thinks it’s absurd to hold so much hatred inside. In the moments when I finally began writing this story all those years ago, it was indeed therapeutic in a way nothing else could have been.

  And actually, this book is still unfinished. Each of the chapters and stories was meant to include quotes from the relevant theories that sparked the violent inspiration. Quotes from Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Stephen King, Margaret Mead, Joyce Carol Oates, Julia Kristeva, and countless others who can be found listed in the appendices. Wendy’s death took place just as I was beginning to write and it became too ambitious a project with everything else that was on my plate. Testifying in court, the immediate symptoms of acute post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, flashbacks, bouts of crying that would last for days, and on top of it all an impending university graduation. It would have been fantastic to have included those juicy tidbits, I am a great compiler in that sense. But now, as I ready for publishing, I realize it must have been for a reason. Do you know how expensive it is to get the rights to reprint even a two-line quote? Trust me, it’s a lot. This story would have cost a fortune, and in the end I don’t think the quotes are all that necessary. I suppose it’s enough for you to know that each story is rooted in and inspired by some academic theory relevant to women and horror.

  This book wasn’t really about all of that. It was about speaking back to the violence I saw all around me in America, the violence that has overwhelmed the core of my being even now. Albeit my speaking back to violence tended to reproduce that same violence I was protesting, but hey, I was only nineteen. Give me a break.

  The one thing that continues to strike me about this novel, and all the life and book research that went into it, is how I still see these same themes within so many facets of modern life: the news, magazines, films, music and behavior. And no, I’m not looking for it, it always smacks me upside the head and screams, “LOOK!” Fear of women and violence against them still permeates American society and the world at large. Subtle, blatant, it’s there in how the media talks about female politicians, it’s in the new genres of horror that have emerged, it’s in over-sexualized music videos featuring children masquerading as adults, and so on. The American monsters in my novel are everywhere. And America, sadly, continues to breed them. In its war on terror, its judicial system, its racism, at home and abroad. In its films and its daily lives. This is a big reason in why I ultimately left the States and haven’t lived there since. America’s monsters became too much for me. What a great release to finish and close these chapters of my life, move forward.

  And so, Dear Reader, I will bid you adieu. Until next time, that is.

  February 2, 2010

  Prague, Czech Republic

  P.S. The list of my written and visual inspirations follows, should that interest you.

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