My childhood wasn’t especially happy. My parents divorced when I was nine or ten, and my mother’s new husband was a gruff, overbearing trawlerman with a penchant for Smirnoff. It wasn’t a violent household but it was an angry one, and school wasn’t much better.


I’d spend my days avoiding bullies and my evenings doing chores and hoping everyone was in a good mood at home. I spent a lot of time outside, walking our family dog around the woods of our village. Here, alone and bored, I’d invent stories to entertain myself, many of which were inspired by earlier events.


I’d always been drawn to horror as a child. My mother loved Stephen King and James Herbert and I longed to read the stories behind their spooky covers. I’d often creep into the living room as my parents watched VHS copies of The Blob (the 1980s version) or Poltergeist. I’d crouch in silence, terrified but unable to look away, fascinated by those grainy scenes of ghosts and gore.


I used to suffer night terrors, too. One of my earliest, scariest memories is of my bedroom walls, which were painted cornflower blue. I was in bed, sweating through a fever, when a dark shape appeared from those walls. Years later, my mum said I’d been screaming about someone standing in the corner of the room.


The terrors returned years later. I heard an unearthly humming, a swelling brass note that heralded the approach of a supernatural entity. With it, came the symbol of a diamond pulsing from the darkness. I screamed myself awake to find I’d been smashing my Sega Master System to make the sound go away.


The night terrors inspired several stories, including two in my published collection, Fearful Lands. I enjoy exploring the fragile membrane between dreams and reality, and what might creep through if it split. Writing about nightmares has helped me cope with them as an adult, too.


For example, a scene from Poltergeist II has haunted me for decades. It’s near the end and the Freelings have transcended to the ghost realm. Carol-Ann loses her grip on the family and falls away, her face decomposing while she releases a long, mournful sound, not unlike that in my night terror.


I’ve since re-watched the scene and laughed at the CGI. But just this past year, I’ve dreamt of a tower and a girl with white hair and the face of an old woman. The dream fills me with dread but never wakes me up. I wonder whether writing about dreams has galvanized me against them, weakened their power over me.


Much of my writing is about threats that manifest in uncanny ways. It’s not always violence that tortures my characters, but the threat of it, of something hidden in the shadows waiting for the right moment to strike. Knowing the strike will come but not knowing when is the essence of great horror, in my opinion.


For example, what I hated most about being bullied as a child was the self-blame, the shame of not fighting back. “You’re a coward,” I’d tell myself, day after day, having the strength to fight but lacking the courage. Instead, I chose to live in fear of who was waiting for me by the harbour, the school gates, or the local café.


This is one of the reasons I never leave my characters defenseless. Even if it means death, they will fight to their last breath. They are heroes of their stories, whether strong, weak, or dead. Sometimes the only thing they can do is choose when to die, the final “fuck you” when all is lost.


Not always do the good guys win, nor should they. Our tormentors help us grow, and horror is a microcosm for cosmological balance. We seldom participate in the “eternal struggle” between light and dark, at least not to any serious degree. Horror, however, allows us to join the battle, vicariously, and live to tell the tale.

Expect Billy's name to be quite prominent in this series, my loves, as, when it comes to pioneering LGBTQ representation in horror fiction, there aren't many that compare. Randomly dive into practically any work Billy has ever been involved with, and you'll find representations of queer experience so intimate and sincere, they are quite unlike anything else on the market. One must also bear in mind, for the most part, Billy was publishing most of his work during the mid-to-late 1990s, a time when LGBTQ representation in any fiction -let alone genre- was almost unheard of. 


As a result, for many of us who were children or young adults at the time, Billy's work -amongst a rare few contemporaries most of whom we'll get to, by and by- was amongst the very first that not only explored our lived experience, it also demonstrated that it was possible to do so within genres that, whilst much beloved, are traditionally heteronormative and often extremly culturally conservative, especially when it comes to sex, relationships and gender identity. 


For my part, Billy's work was a cataclysm: like Clive Barker's before it, it ripped away scales that I didn't even know had formed across my eyes, wounded me in ways so deliriously intimate, I never realised that there could be pleasure in such mutilation. 


Like many of us who dare trespass on the sacred grounds of certain proscribed genres, Billy pays very little mind to templates, tenets or proscription: he acknowledges them, fleetingly, then shrugs and strides on through them, as though they have no more weight or substance than smoke. There is no hesitation in Billy's work; no sense of the forbidden or the taboo; everything that we lust and fear and desire and take joy in is laid bear, often in the most delectably lurid sensory detail. Everything from sex to food to the most graphic scenes of violence and mutilation are all portrayed and lingered over with painterly delight, every sensation acute in a way I've rarely come across in any author's work. When Billy describes the smell of food frying in New Orleans air, the reader smells it. When Billy describes the taste and texture of a lover's body, the reader is there, in that moment of sensual consumption. And when Billy describes pain. . .oh my. There are moments in his work that have had me actively drawing away from the page, closing the book and groaning, the descriptions of pain not some dry, documentary thing a la Lovecraft or Bram Stoker: here, pain is intimate and immediate and acute, and Billy clearly feels it important for the reader to experience it, not just read about it, but feel it. 


In his 1992 debut novella, Lost Souls, Billy effectively establishes a queer horror manifesto: whereas others might obscure or apologise for aspects of queer existence, Billy goes for the throat -and other areas of anatomy- without pause, without ambiguity and without any attempt to accommodate the tastes or moral assumptions of hs readers: 


Here, Billy makes it quite clear that there will be no softening of the edges, no “easing in” for the sake of readers suited to more conformist stuff: this is a queer book for queer readers. Whilst there's nothing actively denying straight experience here, it is primarily concerned with the experience of being a young, gay male in 1990s USA. That it conflates that experience with the necessarily alienating tropes and traditions of vampirism is a stroke of genius: as queer people in general were still very much demonised and “othered” by mainstream society, politics and culture, the vampire provides a ready and recognisable metaphor; a freight of significance that already boasts numerous parallels and concerns ready to be explored, applied and inverted. 


Here, the eponymous “Lost Souls” are the queer youth of conservative America; they are the children who have no place or purpose in their families, who are not loved and do not love in their turns, save for the extended families they cultivate (again, very much in the vein of vampires). The portrait drawn of those early 1990s queer teenagers who were just blossoming into sexual awareness and some semblance of identity is so acute for those of us who were going through similar experiences at the time (albeit, in my own case, from across the pond). Whilst there are the base political commentaries on prejudice, ignorance and familial rejection, the book primarily concerns itself with a form of dark celebration: just as we queers explode into a kind of luminous identity, a new and better incarnation of ourselves, upon our self-realisation and acceptance, so too do the protagonists of Lost Souls upon discovering their vampirism. Whereas so much fiction before it explores nothing but the Bram Stoker-proscribed monstrosity of the condition, the horror of “The Other,” Lost Souls tales an entirely different stance: 


Here, the grace, beauty and appetite of vampirism is conflated with the young, gay man discovering sex and love for the first time, in all of its darkness, danger and complexity. It does not dismiss the montrosity or attempt to apologise for it in the manner of Twilight, nor does it shy away or simply focus on other aspects of the status: just as it is unabashed in its portrayal of LGBTQ experience, it is also unabashed in its portrayal of vampirism. Whilst the raw, youthful exuberance and eroticism of the condition is emphasised to the Nth degree, so too are numerous pitfalls, problems and diseases of the condition. For example, a particular vampire -poignantly for the setting and era- as AIDs after drinking from an infected victim. Whilst the disease cannot kill him, it means that he endures in a condition of almost perpetual pain, that waxes and wanes in response to certain factors. Likewise, the vampires experience a degree of ennui, as they are practically immortal -unless they are actively killed by various traditional means- and find that they must seek out ever more thrilling and outre experience to stir themselves. This ultimately leads to lives of incredible rarity and sensual excess, but ones that burn out very quickly, leaving an existential void. 


Again, Billy cleverly conflates this with the experience of being a young, gay man discovering themselves in the early 1990s through the runaway Nothing, a character who is very much a proxy for Billy's own experience to a degree, but also an avatar of gay youth of the era: a creature that is almost spectral, that has no anchorage to the structures of family and society, as such spheres have always demonised and denied him for his affections and appetites. If we are to be monsters, as culturally-proscribed narrative and tradition insist, then fuck it! Let's be that, and find our own dark and bloody ways through the mire of existence. 


We are the lost children, the lost souls of society and tradition. We are the evolutionary dead-ends, the deaths of familial lines, the sybarites who are denied the meta-narratives of family, parent, child, spouse. 


So be it! Billy Martin proclaims in this manifesto; fuck it all, and fuck everything. We will explore, we will stray beyond the picket fences, the paths through the woods, and we will meet others, monsters like us, who we will make our strange, incestuous families, who will be our lovers and our guardians and our mentors. 


There is a “rock and roll” nihilism to the status of the outcast LGBTQ youth of the early 1990s here; a “live fast, die young” celebratory descent into sensualism and transgression that is presented without judgement, often celebrated in its raw and actinic beauty, even its spiritual qualities, but also not ornamented or exaggerated in terms of its ultimate trajectory: 


Whilst the vampire youths are creatures of celebratory atavism, of pleasure for the sake of pleasure without any of the concerns or parameters that bother heternormative culture or the dictates of tradition, they are also lost, directionless and without any wider purpose or poetry; a fact that leads to a state of ennui and ultimate dissolution. The moments of intimacy and sex and self-revelation are profound, but so too are the instances of self-destruction that ultimately result. Billy does not come down on any one particular “side” in this dynamic, nor does he present any overt judgement or implication one way or the other: it is easy to read this book as a manifesto of that same sensualist, 1990s youthful nihilism, the “Kurt Cobain” abandonment of a society and culture whose hypocrisies are overt, yet dares heap scorn and judgement on those seeking a little pleasure, who dare to find some intimacy and connection with one another. 


The irony of the title is that: being a vampire, a creature that is literally inhuman; that, indeed, preys on human beings in a violent and parasitic fashion, is no more a basis for being an outcast from heternormative society than being LGBTQ. If anything, it's easier to “pass” and become accepted as a vampire than the latter. The dovetailing of the two states requires little in the way of mythological or narrative justification, and serves as a delightful inversion of traditional dynamics in horror fiction: here, the “monsters” are the sympathetic parties, in all of their ambiguity, monstrosity and violence, whereas agents of conformity, conservatism and slaves to the engines of culture are almost universally presented in a negative light. 


This, in turn, serves as one of the early popular examples of the innate differences between straight and LGBTQ horror (not a universal application, but a general one): straight horror has a tendency to concern itself with the reinforcement of certain traditional norms and proscriptions or the bemoaning of their decay (a la Lovecraft), whereas horror from LGBTQ writers has a tendency to celebrate that phenomena, to explore how the interruption or subversion of tradition and assumptions of culture is no bad thing, how the monsters are so often far more identifiably human and engaging in their flaws than any protagonist or “hero” archetype. 


The historical tendency to “other” or “monster” LGBTQ people (as is happening right now in British media and politics with regards to our trans brothers and sisters) has resulted in LGBTQ readers identifying positively and strongly with characters in fiction who are themselves “othered” or “monstered,” i.e. the villains. In Lost Souls, Billy Martin presents one of the earlier popular examples of that phenomena finding expression, and one that, despite exploring the status of LGBTQ youth of an earlier era, still has enormous significance and implication today. 

​To have attempted to publish a horror story in the mid-1980s that featured LGBTQ characters at all would have been an act of career suicide for many. To achieve mainstream success with a collection of short stories that features not one but several works in which the protagonists are LGBTQ is nothing short of miraculous. 


Whilst Clive Barker -another name that is going to feature prominently in this series- rarely writes directly about the experience of gay men (and never in a manner that conforms to any cultural proscription), when he does, he always has the effect of elevating the conversation: 


Rather than preoccupying himself with the dictates and parameters of accepted political discourse -that, by his own admission, he finds crude and unsatisfying-, Barker dares to stray beyond the ideological parameters set for us by heternormative, cisgender culture and tradition. The result is an earnestness and style of  conversation on the nature of being LGBTQ that even many directly involved in those areas may not immediately recognise or understand: 


In The Hills, The Cities is arguably one of the most iconic-and certainly the earliest- examples of that very phenomena: 


A rumination on LGBTQ culture and our status as individuals in relation to tradition, history and proscribed society, the story features a two-pronged opening that may well be the introductions to two distinct -and, ostensibly, irreconcilable- narratives: Whereas one concerns itself with the peculiar traditions of the eponymous "cities" -obscure Yugoslavian cultures that observe very strange customs indeed-, the other is an almost domestic drama, describing the travails of two gay men as they explore the hills in search of culture, poetry and romance. 


For many straight horror readers who came to Barker by way of King or his cinematic work in the form of Hellraiser, this may well have been their first experience of gay characters, certainly as protagonists, and certainly in a manner that treats them as complex and ambiguous human beings rather than archetypes. 


Both characters -Mick and Judd- embody certain qualities of British gay sub-cultures of the 1980s; one older, more paternal, worldly wise and academic, the other younger, more romantic and idealistic. 


From the off, it's clear that these two and the dynamics between them are the works of a gay man; one who understands the "types" they embody and the cultures they refer to. It's also clear that Barker is unabashed in presenting his audience with imagery intended to shock; whilst scenes of male homosexuality may be commonplace in horror now, they were next to unheard of at the time, especially presented in the graphic intimacy with which they are here: 


Barker does not conceal or apologise for the images or appetites on display. If anything, he revels in them, and in the effect he surely must have anticipated they would have on his readers. 


Speaking as an LGBTQ youth only just blossoming into his sexuality, finding two gay guys as the protagonists of a horror story blew my mind and imagination wide open; here was evidence that it could be done, that horror stories could include and be about us beyond stereotypes and proscribed roles as either morally didactic victims or monsters. It also provided demonstration to me that we could be represented in the fullness of our sexuality, as creatures consumed by their desires in the manner of our straight counterparts. 


Placing these two men in a setting and culture where they are alien and which is actively hostile to them is also no mistake; Barker seeks to emphasise their "outsider" status, as trespassers on sacred soil, but also to glorify it in a way more traditional horror fiction would not: In certain respects, they become the witnesses to the horror that tradition and conformity have wrought; they see the massacre and madness respectively of two entire civilisations, a hauntological nightmare wrought by narratives that neither can truly fulfil or embody. 


Their "outsider" status is as much metaphor as literal fact; by dint of their homosexuality, they are denied the place and narrative purpose that their straight counterparts enjoy, and so come to the gates of the eponymous cities in a strange state of innocence, even purity. Their status as operatives outside the proscriptions and narratives of tradition, far from reducing them to victims -as it would in a more conventional horror story-, makes them pilgrims, even shanans; travellers in the unknown, seekers after the mysterious, and uniquely placed to observe and comment upon the insanities that are part and parcel of the phenomena we label "society." 


These are themes that Barker would later expound upon in weightier work such as Sacrament (keep a weather eye out later in the series for that particular gospel), but that here occur in putative, less specific form. 


Whilst the images of the composite "giants" formed from the eponymous "cities" -Popolac and Podujevo- and the violence they wreak on one another might be viscerally and aesthetically stirring (visions the like of which one might expect to find in a dark fable or fairy tale), it is what they represent in contrast to the story's queer protagonists that is the source of a far deeper -and more profound- horror: 


The collective madness, the subsequent violence and directionless rampage of the surviving "giant," is the madness of civilisation itself. Whilst Barker has roundly denounced and eschewed proscribed politics in his later work (opting instead for the more fruitful and potent realm of metaphysics), here, he draws metaphors that cannot help but be notably political in application: 


Barker's presentation of "society" and its traditions is one of collective, received insanity, of inevitable violence and calamity. There is an outsider's nihilism here that only one born -or cast- beyond that particular fishbowl can appreciate. 


Whilst foisted beyond the parameters of that structure and systems by dint of their homosexuality, Barker takes pains not to present simplistic or stereotypical representations: 


Whilst Judd -the more accomodationist of the two, who actively bemoans the state of queer culture in which he is forced to operate-, ultimately finds himself destroyed by the monsters he somehow seeks to emulate, the younger and more idealistic -the romantic boy who is very much a proxy for Barker himself- is transformed by his exposure to it, regarding it with a pilgrim's passion, blindly following in its wake at the story's conclusion, finding himself caught up in it, becoming one with it. 


And yet, there is a sense of ambiguous and gallows irony at the story's conclusion, despite the fairy-tale, mythic wonder of the great giants, the genocidal scenes of violence: Mick's pursuit of the lunatic giant is ultimately impotent. He is a young gay man who has been denied the meta-narratives that society actively proscribes -and imposes upon- his straight counterparts, and so impotently and self-destructively chases after something that is, by nature, insane, violent and destructive: the very emobidment of tradition and history that would see him murdered and consumed, that now wanders without hope, direction or a possibility of tomorrow, destroying everything in its path. 




The conclusion of the story is deliberately ambiguous, but also an excoriating condemnation of the abiding desire in all of us that define as LGBTQ to be part of systems we know are sick and cruel and violent. Barker celebrates the romantic naivety of his proxy whilst also sadly commenting upon the self-destructive dissolution he courts in wanting to be part of the monster we call "society." 


In that, he effortlessly delineates the juxtaposition in which we all find ourselves; the Gordian Knot we often drive ourselves to near-insanity attempting to unpick. 

As I talked about in my last article, my whole life, one of my primary coping mechanism has been storytelling and the horror genre. So much so, I found myself creating fiction in the horror genre as a form of therapy and escape whenever I was faced with a difficult situation or traumatic event. Without these creative outlets as escapes, I’m pretty positive I would not be here today because horror was a coping mechanism with my abuse as a child. Where most kids grow up scared of the imaginary monsters hidden in the dark, I grew up with two real life monsters in the form of my very abusive parents who had addiction issues, as well as mental illness.

It seems to me, that horror and storytelling had so much more positive qualities to offer compared to other genres. Horror is more than a genre, it’s part of our emotional make up tied to our primal fight or flight response that is wired into our brains. It’s part of us. Like everything else in the world it has its benefits.

From my experience, horror offers much more benefits. I think there are so many other lessons that we can learn from the genre. I know I learned many. From the importance of teamwork, family, coping skills, problem solving skills, courage, responsibility, having hope, never giving up and so much more. Though I don’t think people really ever recognized it until recently. I’ve been thinking about this idea lately. Especially since I decided to write this series. I will be honest with you. I’ve had the concept for this series for almost 20 years. I had wanted to write it as a book. I had the fear of being judged about my past, telling myself I’m not important who would want to read a book about what I went through and my opinion on horror. I also told myself I would be judged by if I let people see that side of me. After all, there had been many times that I’ve tried to be honest with people, tried to keep them from abusing me or taking advantage of my kind, broken heart. It never went well. I could go on with other examples, but the simple point is I went no where with such a wonderful idea because of fear. Fast forward to recently. My PTSD, depression, anxiety and other disabilities have worsened to the point that I’ve been given a diagnosis of agoraphobia. I’m afraid all the time of everything. So my therapist and close friends recommended I try writing the articles as a way to confront my past and most importantly my fears.
​
Which brings me to the point of this month’s article. I think one of the most important benefits of  storytelling and the horror genre is that it helps us to take a deeper look at fear.

One of the most common question a writer in the horror genre gets asked is “why do you write horror?” When I hear this question, I often think about the whole concept of being afraid of the dark. Fear is one of our primal emotions.

One of the most common stories we hear in society and see in horror is that children are afraid of the dark.

As a child, we believe the dark conceals some hidden danger or monster lurking, waiting to strike. On a psychological level, the dark triggers a response of what danger could happen in the dark deep of our brain, possibly linked to our fight or flight response. It’s considered a universal fear.

The fear of the dark is a very common thing for children and adults. As children, it’s part of our development as human beings. A right of passage so to speak. Learning to confront our fear of the dark helps us grow as children. It helps us to graduate on to confronting other fears in our lives. Confronting ones fear is a very important skill we must learn to develop and help our brain regulate.

Creating in the horror genre or partaking in the genre as a fan,
is very much like the process of being afraid of the dark. In a sense, it’s an outlet to allow us a safe outlet to not only confront our fears but to take some ownership over them, much like we do as children when facing the dark or the “monster under the bed.” Writing these horrible things is, in a way, can be a therapeutic tool allowing you to face something you would have difficulty doing otherwise. Creating stories in the horror genre can be an outlet for you to confront your deepest darkest fear, helping you to free yourself of it. If there’s something eating at your soul, holding you back due to fear. Try watching or reading a good piece of horror fiction. Or better yet create one yourself.

Until next time my friends!

Sincerely,

Eugene Johnson
​

Links / More info 
​Facebook:
Eugene Johnson 

Tales Of The Lost Volume Anthology series Facebook page

Amazon Author page:
Eugene Johnson 

Edited by Bram Stoker Award Winner Eugene Johnson and Steve Dillon 


We lose many things during our time in this universe. From the moment we are born we start losing time, and loss becomes a part of our life from the beginning. We lose friends (both imaginary and real), loved ones, pets, and family. We gain stuff and lose stuff, from our socks to our money. We can lose our hope, sanity, passions, our mind, and perhaps even our soul! In the end when death finds us, we end up losing everything... Don't we?


Loss is part of who we are. We can't escape it. We learn from it, grow from it, and so much more. Some of the greatest stories ever forged come from loss. Within this book is some of those stories.


Featuring stories and poetry by an amazing lineup including: 
Tim Waggoner * Lisa Morton * Neil Gaiman * Joe Hill * Heather Graham *  Christopher Golden * Tim Lebbon *  Christina Sng * Vince Liaguno * John Palisano * Kaaron Warren * Chris Mason * Greg Chapman * Tracy Cross * Stephanie W. Wytovich * Alexis Kirkpatrick * Ben Monroe * Lucy A. Snyder and Matthew R. Davis.


Edited by Bram Stoker Award Winner Eugene Johnson and Shirley Jackson award nominated author Steve Dillon. Coming in 2020 from Plaid Dragon Publishing in association with Things in The Well. With cover art by the brilliant Francois Vaillancourt, and interior art by the amazing Luke Spooner. 


Money raised by the anthology will go to benefit the Save the Children Coronavirus response. ​

The UK Ghost Story Festival runs for the second team over the weekend of 26th-28th November in Derby, across the QUAD and Museum of Making venues. With 28 events taking place across three days, and a wide range of panels, readings, workshops, talks, interviews and more, this weekend is a must-attend for fans of the ghost story.

Among the headline speakers for the event are Anita Frank (The Lost Ones), Peter Laws (The Frighteners). Caroline Lea (The Glass Woman), Neil Spring (The Haunted Shore) and an MR James performance from Don’t Go Into the Cellar Theatre, tailor-made for fans of supernatural fiction. There will be workshops exploring topics like developing a twist, creating ghosts, how to make your writing flow and many more, offering insight and inspiration for writers in the form.

The event kicks off at 12:00pm on Friday 26th November and draws to a close around 3pm on Sunday 28th November, and there are tickets available for individual events as well as weekend passes – offering your choice of activity – for £60. With many event already proving popular, and some already sold out, we suggest early booking to ensure your place!

Alex Davis, Literature Officer for QUAD and co-ordinator of the event, said: ‘I’m delighted to be back for another Ghost Story Festival after last year’s hiatus, and we’ve got an exciting line-up of activities whether you’re a writer or reader in the genre. It’ll be the perfect event for the cold winter night coming our way!’

For more information, or to book tickets, visit https://www.derbyquad.co.uk/UKGSF2021 or call QUAD Box Office on 01332 290606. For any queries, email Alex Davis at alexd@derbyquad.co.uk or come find us on Twitter at @UKGSFestival

Welcome, my loves, to another Halloween at the Ginger Nuts of Horror  and another in our -nearly- annual series of seasonal horror articles! 


With our positioning as LGBTQ people here in the UK becoming increasingly fraught of late, with various attempts to erode our status, divide us, make us enemies of one another (looking squarely at the right-wing hate organisation, the LGBA, here. Looking and glaring and demanding that they fuck off from my garden, quite frankly), it's more important than ever that our concerns and conditions are examined via the media we consume. Horror might not be the most immediately obvious genre or vehicle in that regard, yet there's no denying that LGBTQ ddemographics in horror fandom are huge and significant. Whilst traditionally a far more exclusive and conservative genre, it has always been one in which LGBTQ people -and those cast outside the fishbowl of proscribed society- have always found a degree of identification. Even in the midst of its own conservatism, it often metaphorically or symbolically identifies and explores concerns that are particularly significant to us, especially given the tendency for us to be “monstered” by news media, religious organisations and culturally conservative bodies. That there are now significant sub-genres and voices within horror (not to mention fantasy and science fiction) who themselves identify as LGBTQ and who bring those concerns to the forefront in their writings is evidence of a burgeoning -and hopefully irreversible- paradigm shift away from the exclusions of tradition and into a more expansive, fruitful condition. 


Before we progress with the introductory subject, please be aware that these are all matters of personal taste and have been selected based on my own knowledge and experience of what is out there. If there is a piece of pertinent media you'd like me to discuss further or deeper at a later date, do not hesitate to get in touch and flag it up. 


So, to kick things off, we have a callback to the independent video game scene of 2013; a relatively modest title that -initially- dropped without enormous fanfare or significant discussion onto Steam, but which -largely thanks to the “let's player” community on YouTube- snowballed out of all containment in the weeks and months that followed: 


The strangely quiet, subtle and evocative work that is Gone Home. 


It's strange to consider that, for an era that feels so recent, our heels have barely cooled from it, the video game environment and culture of 2013 was a very different place to what it is now: independent video gaming was beginning to swell, thanks to platforms such as Steam and others, allowing for smaller studios and independent creators to promulgate their work. This, in turn, facilitated a significant shift in the nature of video games -even debates on what constitutes a video “game”- and the voices that the medium traditionally allowed for. Suddenly, we had the likes of Gone Home, a game that actively tricks its audience into believing it's a supernatural horror title by borrowing tricks and techniques from the last twenty years of titles, but that then gradually sloughs off those assumptions, inverting them in some instances, to become a far more domestic, hopeful and positive cultural commentary. 


To put it in context: LGBTQ representation in video games at that point was still phenomenally rare, barring one or two niche instances that were often played for laughs or fetishised to the Nth degree. Here, arguably for the first time ever in the medium, we have a story that explores the phenomena of “coming out,” set in the USA of the mid 1990s, in which doing so was far more fraught and ambiguous. 


Furthermore, it dares to do so with reference to a teenage girl, adding another layer to its representation by incorporating a focal subject that is still arguably underrepresented in media in general. 


In terms of presentation and format, the game is minimalist from the outset: providing very little in the way of instruction or backstory, it hurls the player behind the eyes of a young woman (21 year old Katie Greenbriar) who returns to her family home after some time away overseas. The home itself is classically gothic, deliberately evoking cinematic and literary associations that range from The Amityville Horror to The Shining. Gameplay consists of little more than guiding Katie around a home that seems strangely empty, almost abandoned, and interacting with certain items that evoke sentimental or distressing associations. In this, the game deliberately conjures the ethos of horror video games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Silent Hill and numerous others. In terms of tone and atmosphere, it leads the player to believe that there is some impending doom afoot, a revelation concerning Katie and/or her family that will result in a descent into -seemingly supernatural- horror.


The sheer emptiness of the game at this point compounds that assumption to the Nth degree; the house is eerily quiet, yet full of echoes and associations. As Katie wanders, she finds clues as to what has happened during her absence, some of which are personal to her -items that conjure personal associations or trigger specific memories-, others of which relate to her family (we learn, for example, that in classic Stephen King fashion, her Father is an aspiring writer, whilst her Mother is a wildlife conservationist). 


Of key interest in this regard is her 17 year old sister, Samantha, whose status and position within the household has been fraught since their impromptu move to the area. Struggling at school and socially, expressing behaviours that their parents consider problematic, the story takes a decided lurch when it becomes apparent that this is not a tale of revenants from the past or ghosts or hereditary curses or anything of the sort:


Whilst there are instances and moments that might initially appear to be “ghostly” or supernatural in nature, the game undercuts them beautifully, changing timbre, tone and even language as both Katie and the player simultaneously realise what has been happening in her absence: 


Her sister, Samantha, it transpires, has been slowly realising her own homosexuality, thanks to her association with an older girl named Yolande. Through her diaries and journals, it becomes apparent that she is experiencing a self-realisation that is as terrifying as it is exultant, finding the sense of anchorage and identity that has been denied her for so long, and clawing her way out of the tension and strife that has bedevilled her recent life. 


Amidst all of this, the game implies suggestions of extraneous tensions: set in 1995, it explores attitudes and positions that aren't as enlightened or LGBTQ-friendly as they are in the post-2000s. Even the ostensibly cosmopolitan and sophisticated parents -each imaginative, creative and intelligent people in their own rights- respond with parental caution and a degree of negativity to their daughter's burgeoning identity and the relationship she is cultivating. Katie, experiencing all of this second-hand and in the aftermath of whatever confrontation resulted, becomes increasingly desperate as she seeks out clues as to what could've happened, where her family is now. Here, the game plays an extremely clever trick by subtly transposing the extraneous fear of something horrific or supernatural into concern for Samantha, the family and Katie herself. It is a brilliant example of sleight of hand; everything about the game up to this point -the grammar, the framing, the tone- borrows heavily from indie-horror games of yore, leading the player to make certain assumptions about what it is and how it will ultimately transpire. 


Assumptions that the game expertly undercuts and shreds to confetti in its closing chapters. 


Whilst it has become semi-legendary in the annals of video game history, at the time, people were genuinely shocked and surprised by its content and what it turned out to be. Certain “let's player's” videos on the game are extremely emotional and appreciative, as the game cleverly evokes certain expectations and feeds into them throughout only to invert them at the point of realisation. The resultant denial of expectation results in an experience not unlike the uncanny; a sense as of being delirious deceived, tricked by one's own experience and assumptions. Furthermore, the connections drawn between the player, Katie and characters we don't even meet or see firsthand, are so sincere, so intimate, we can't help but become emotionally invested in the situation. As a result, we share Katie's pain at the well-meaning misunderstandings of their parents, we share Samantha's distress and concern as they attempt to stifle what is blossoming and brilliant in her soul. And, most importantly, we share in both sister's exultation when it all ultimately comes right. 


The game paints an uncannily accurate portrait of “coming out” as a young lesbian in the mid 1990s in rural USA, along with all of the confusions and concerns that are part and parcel. Ultimately, whilst it has certain grim and unnerving implications -there is a faint suggestion that the Father figure may have been abused at some point in his life, which informs his own issues with his daughter's relationship-, it is ultimately a celebratory work that places all emphasis on the fulfilment and happiness of the daughters in their various states and pursuits. Samantha in particular is exulted in her ultimate decision to leave the family home and pursue a relationship with Yolande, despite her parent's difficulties, and Katie -being more worldly wise but also the player proxy- expresses nothing but happiness and support for her sibling, and resolves to help her parents cope with the situation and heal their own psychological scars when they return home. 


A horror game that isn't a horror game; a masquerade that echoes its own subject's efforts to closet and obfuscate themselves for the sake of societal and familial approval, and one that has helped more than one LGBTQ person out there find themselves.