The Reality Conspiracy (70 page)

The inherent skepticism of Joe's "stories that might not be fiction" echoes Fort in other ways: Fort, after all, noted, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written." Joe may not believe his "stories that might not be fiction," but I think, in my heart of hearts, Joe does believe
DEUS-X
. The truth of the fiction might be the clearest possible description of things "realer than real."

Unlike his prior novels,
DEUS-X
extends that unique fusion of fiction and what "might not be fiction" into a harrowing perception of what Citro fears
may be
our reality. In this, Citro embraces and (to this reader's mind) transcends what H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Fort, Nigel Kneale, and John Keel were also obsessed with in their finest work: our plight as mortals doomed to only occasionally catch fleeting glimpses of what Joseph Chilton Pearce called the crack in the cosmic egg (there are indeed echoes of Pearce and Carlos Castaneda in
DEUS-X
), without ever recognizing it as anything more than mere crack, if we can even grasp it as being
that
. We cannot even joke about it ("Which came first, the crack, or the egg?"), for we will never, ever fathom the enormity of the
egg
.

Citro delineates those "cracks" with the intention to do more than simply scare us—making it abundantly clear that religion and faith only obscure any hope of understanding what lies behind and beyond the veil. If perceived as such, these cracks cumulatively open the reader to reality-stripping revelations, culminating in an apocalypse proffered in the original and true scope of the word "apocalypse." 
DEUS-X
was unique in 1994, a cross-pollination between fiction and "stories that might not be fiction" that anticipated imaginative mutations that now comprise a recognizable genre in and of itself. 

In this, Joe's debt to one of our mutually favorite genre authors, Manxman writer Nigel Kneale, is repaid and expanded upon. Joe has happily acknowledged his long-standing debts to genre masters like Arthur Machen (the little people of Citro's first two novels are overt Machen reverberations) and M.R. James (whose antiquarians and scholars usually brought the worst upon themselves by daring to take something ancient and forbidden—a book, a crown, a whistle—from its resting place, prompting "moveable haunts" to follow them). Few Americans will recognize the echoes of Nigel Kneale in Joe's work, because few Americans are familiar with Kneale's work. The influence is as clear as unnatural day-at-night in
DEUS-X
.

Nigel Kneale and his BBC creation Quatermass—particularly
Quatermass and the Pit
(originally serialized 1958-1959, adapted by Hammer Films in 1967 and released stateside as
Five Million Years to Earth
)—have spawned countless imitators and successors. It is in fact the highest praise I can offer to note that with
DEUS-X
, Joe has achieved something truly extraordinary by not just emulating Kneale, but truly embracing, embodying, and drawing inspiration from the finest of Kneale's efforts. As in Kneale's
Quatermass and the Pit
, Citro weaves a compelling and utterly terrifying tapestry of horror, science fiction, and invented Fortean events with masterful precision of intent, content, and effect.

DEUS-X
is an unsung, unrecognized masterwork in a genre that now dominates our pop culture landscape. Again, Kneale created the template, forging a truly Fortean breed of science fiction/horror in the 1950s anticipating everything from
DEUS-X
's immediate contemporary (even the titles are in harmony)
The X-Files,
to the currently fashionable video
vérité "you are there" feature film and TV series cycle launched by
The Blair Witch Project
(1999), to J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and
 
Roberto Orci's
Fringe
. Citro completed
DEUS-X
just as Chris Carter was cutting his teeth (
DEUS-X
was published the year
X-Files
concluded its first season) and long before J.J. Abrams was out of his twenties, eight years before Mark Pellington's adaptation of Keel's
The Mothman Prophecies
(2002) brought John Keel's one-of-a-kind synthesis of journalism, speculative analysis, and paranoia to a new generation already perfectly attuned to it (primarily by
The X-Files
) without having recognized Keel as its premiere 1960s pioneer, populist, and prognosticator. But Joe had grown up reading Keel's writings as they saw print (as did I). Those articles and books—writing for
Flying Saucer Review, Saga
, and other magazines, and books
Jadoo
(1957),
UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, Strange Creatures from Time and Space
(both 1970),
Our Haunted Planet
(1971),
The Mothman Prophecies, The Eighth Tower
(both 1975), etc.—fused field research, hard investigation, and extraordinary speculation in new ways. Keel's evolving hypothesis linked UFOs, ghosts, Fortean events, monster sightings, and all paranormal phenomenon along the lines of Nigel Kneale's fiction; all were permutations of the
same
phenomenon.

Joe has followed in Keel's footsteps in his own way: reserving sober reporting for his books of "stories that might not be fiction," and his extrapolations from Keel for his fiction. The fact that
DEUS-X
was published the very same year as Joe's first compilation of "stories that might not be fiction,"
Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls, and Unsolved Mysteries
(1994), demonstrates how singular his path was and is. What we have here is a devotee and successor to Charles Fort and John Keel consciously working, as a novelist, in the tradition of Nigel Kneale. I can think of no other living writer who can make that claim—or who has demonstrated, in such a singular work, how perfectly the extended paths of Fort, Kneale, and Keel inherently resonate with one another, and
expand
with exponential power.

Let us further warn the timid and cautious reader, that having visited a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, and having seen or experienced "bad things" there, and having been irrevocably altered by whatever was seen or whatever occurred at the "bad place," there is no telling what might follow…

B
ear with me for a few final paragraphs, and let's follow my genre map-making just a bit further. I promise, I won't lead you too far astray. There is another aspect of genre mutation, evolution, and revelation I wish to discuss before leaving you to steep yourself in
DEUS-X
.

While Citro is known in New England as "the Ghost-Master General" and "Bard of the Bizarre" because of his folklorist work, he has never written a ghost novel, per se (he has written
one
ghost story, "The Last Fortune Cookie," in 2002, but
only
that one). Still, I hasten to note that there are aspects of
DEUS-X
that anticipated clearly where ghost fiction was headed in the 1990s, and again Joe was following and furthering Nigel Kneale's footsteps.

As I've asserted, Kneale was a unique genre cartographer.
Quatermass and the Pit
wed its science fiction conceit with what could only be called supernatural manifestations. Without Professor Quatermass's grasp of the real cause of events (psychic echoes of the Martian invasion and genetic manipulations conducted in that very spot millions of years ago), Kneale's chilling procession of (invented) historical sightings of specters, demons, and paranormal activities in and about Hobbs' End were far closer to the ghost stories of M.R. James than any science fiction of the 1950s. This is what made Kneale's
Quatermass and the Pit
such a revelation in its day, a fusion of traditional British ghost fiction with science fiction that was mind-and-genre expanding. Kneale subsequently became the BBC's go-to author for further fusions of the spectral and science fiction, and he continued to extend both genres in the 1960s. Among British television's adaptations of classic ghost stories, including those of M.R. James, Kneale forged his own distinctive originals. Kneale's
The Road
(1963) concerned the 18
^th
century investigation of a haunted stretch of road, revealing that the place is haunted by reversed echoes of a
future
event: the sounds of a 20
^th
century populace fleeing the outbreak of nuclear war. Kneale brought a similarly clarity and originality of perception to his reinterpretation of venerable "ghost story" tropes for
The Stone Tape
(originally broadcast Christmas, 1972), which anticipated our current video
vérité ghost cycle (
Paranormal Activity
, etc.) by
proposing that "hauntings" are in fact environmental
recordings
of traumatic past events being "rerun," like old videotapes. Having articulated this radical theory of what "haunts" may actually be, Kneale's protagonists then "erase" the haunt via a video-age exorcism. But this is a ghost story, and it cannot end happily: all they have done in fact is purge and peel away one century-old "haunt" to allow an older, more malign "haunt" to reveal itself, with unexpected and terrible consequences. 

Citing only three of Kneale's creations—
Quatermass and the Pit, The Road
, and
The Stone Tape
—one can clearly see how Kneale expanded the realm, range, and resonance of M.R. James's brand of supernatural fiction into the 20th century. Kneale explored and reinvented the metaphysics and physics of "the bad place" in
The Road
and
The Stone Tape
; with
The Woman in Black
in its 1983 (Susan Hill original novel) and 1989 (Nigel Kneale's adaptation for Granada TV) incarnations, we have a new wrinkle, and a new interpretation of M.R. James's "moveable haunt." The haunting begins with a singular traumatic event in a singular locale (and oh, what a locale), but it thereafter becomes a sort of contagion. Visiting the haunted location will "infect" the visitor who not only sees the ghost, but lingers long enough for
her
to see the viewer, and the haunt will then follow the seer/haunted to another place, to inflict its vengeance upon the seer's children. 

By the 1990s, in Japan, this was brought to a whole new level by the novel
Ringu / Ring
by
KMji
Suzuki (1991) and by Takashi Shimizu's
j(
/
Juon
(literally,
"Curse Grudge")
/
The Grudge
Japanese TV and movie series (1998-2009, to date). In
Ringu
, Suzuki expands upon Kneale's use of technology (video) as the haunting agent: a single videocassette spreads a "haunt" from its source to anyone viewing the video cassette. As in
The Woman in Black
,
seeing alone
becomes all it takes to become infected/haunted. Takashi Shimizu's Film School of Tokyo teacher Kiyoshi Kurosawa fed this new 21
^st
century viral strain of "hauntings," manifest via the internet-accessible viral "haunting" of
Þï
/
Kairo / Pulse
(2001). Note, however, that Kurosawa's meditations kissed the screen years after
DEUS-X
: Joe had already envisioned the internet as a virtual doorway to the netherworld.

In terms of ghost literature and cinema, I'd argue that Kurosawa's student handily outflanked his mentor. In its deceptively simplistic manner, Shimizu's
The Grudge
, in all its incarnations, took the viral-haunting-as-apocalypse further. The titular contagious haunting of the "grudge"—its locus the dwelling in which a horrific domestic tragedy occurred—spread via
any
contact with
anyone
who had visited that dwelling. Thus, the "grudge" essentially "infects" and spreads its infection, like a disease, far from the boundaries of its home base. The victims have no idea what is happening to them, or why, because they've done nothing to bring destruction upon themselves: it arrives, unbidden, and many die (terribly) having not even the vaguest notion why what is happening to them is happening. They visited no haunted place; they transgressed against no supernatural force; they saw nothing to initiate the supernatural manifestations that plague them; there is no rational reason for their suffering. This conflation of ghosts/hauntings with the slow-spread epidemic nature of diseases is the current pathology, if you will, of the contemporary ghost story: now, one need not even do
anything
to become "haunted," and in turn become a "haunt" once you are dead, further spreading the contagion. That's where we are now, with ghosts and hauntings and curses and contagions—and it's pretty scary stuff.

But Joseph A. Citro had already taken it much, much further, back in 1994—and that's the import and impact of Joe's entry in this apocalyptic strain of "haunts," wherein the "haunts" may manifest locally, but (to paraphrase the venerable activist handbook) act globally. One need do nothing to become a target; one need not go anywhere special to encounter a haunt. A walk in the very woods one has walked all one's life is all it takes—the haunt, the doorway, the pathogen will come to you. Oh, whistle, and it'll come to you—or don't whistle. It no longer matters. Come, it will, and come, it does. Can you see it? Can it see
you
?

DEUS-X
is not a ghost story. But it's important we understand why it is part of a changing spectral landscape, and as such, a major landmark in that landscape.

Let us conclude by noting that there are, in and about us, "bad places." If you visit a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, you may see "bad things."