The Worm in Every Heart (34 page)

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 changed 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.

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