THE HORROR OF HUMANITY: SELF-DISSECTIONS BY GEORGE DANIEL LEA

As you've no doubt noticed throughout the course of this series (enormous thanks to all contributors, by the by), there is a marked tendency for writers that operate in horror (and related subjects) to express extremely intimate and intense psychological states through their work. Whether metaphorically or directly, horror provides the creator an arena for self-exploration and dissection as much as it does the reader. What arguably distinguishes horror in that regard is its lack of parameter; few other genres exercise the same innate willingness -the imperative, even- to smash through or abandon social norms, accepted codes of conduct; to exercise these self-dissections outside of proscribed parameters of morality, protocol, etiquette etc.
 
What horror provides -not uniquely, but distinctly- is a means of raking the sub-conscious, of exploring what other forms and subjects might distract from or attempt to reconcile. Horror, at its most acute and intimate, is earnest in a way that might ostensibly be considered shameful or culturally repugnant; it allows both creator and audience to explore aspects of themselves that they might otherwise shy away from, deny or sublimate. In that, horror constitutes a sincere form of therapy, even when said creators and audiences aren't aware that it is doing so.
 
The act of creation itself cannot help but be an expression of the writer's state of mind, whether consciously or otherwise, whether that is the specific intention of the writing or not. This is true in all forms and genres, but horror -alongside certain forms of science fiction- absolutely demands it; requiring the writer to delve deep into forbidden or taboo territories, to take pleasure in the expression of the grotesque, the sadistic, the mutilating and metamorphic. It is on that tension that monsters and miracles are born: liminal and mythic entities such as the werewolf and the vampire, which exercise as much fascination and express as much aspiration and desire as they do horror or revulsion.
 
Whilst even the writer themselves might express no more intention than to induce a shudder or a quiver of dread, the very fact that they create within this particular tradition, that they express a fascination with such subjects and reactions -not to mention that audiences consistently return to experience them-, demonstrates that there is something deeper at work.
 
Horror is catharsis, of a sorts. Both on a personal and much wider, political and socio-cultural level. It's no secret that horror fiction and cinema experienced a positive boom in the US towards the end of the 1960s, that arguably sustained up to the mid 1990s in which the genre elevated itself beyond the stereotypes and parameters it is traditionally denigrated under, serving as a culture-wide exploration of internal conflict. Phenomena such as the escalating Civil Rights movement, the slow death of the American Dream, Vietnam, Watergate and myriad other factors stoked a vast, cultural cauldron in which certain neuroses and conflicts boiled, which expressed themselves through the country's various media (most notably in written fiction and cinema). It was this era that saw horror crystallise not only in commercial terms, thanks to phenomena such as Stephen King, George Romero etc but also as something that people flocked to and exulted, though I imagine many didn't consciously articulate why, even to themselves.
 
Victoriana in the UK also saw a similar efflorescence: from the ready availability of “Penny Dreadful” pamphlets and novellas to epoch-making literary phenomena such as Frankenstein, Dracula, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde etc, horror fiction and media exercised a peculiar fascination for the Victorian reader; a fact that is simultaneously ironic and entirely congruent, given the state of the culture:
 
Not only was Victorian Britain a morass of superficial cultural restrictions and taboos covering a seething bed of appetite and iniquity, it also saw the slow decay of traditional meta-narratives through escalating scientific discoveries, industrial revolution, the emergence of new philosophies and political ideologies, social movements etc. Writings such as Dracula are reactions to that very phenomena; they express neuroses and fears that occur not merely on a personal but a culture-wide level. Frankenstein likewise explores the natural fears that came with the dissolution of certain traditions; the stability and certainty, the moral restrictions that derived from assumptions and proscriptions of God, divinely proscribed morality etc, but also take the analysis several realms deeper by addressing the very concept of identity; what it means to be human in times when traditional concepts of humanity are transforming around us and being altered to fit new and frightening narratives.
 
The personal, in this regard, isn't divorced from the ideological or cultural, but is ineluctably part of the same mechanism: Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein purportedly as the result of a nightmare, a phenomena that, in itself, is the human mind attempting to digest or express something profound and traumatic; ideas, dreads, hopes and desires that might otherwise remain sublimated, that the conscious mind perhaps lacks the language or the means to wrestle with directly. This intensely personal introspection then expands to incorporate philosophical and existential questions when put to paper; questions that readers clearly asked of themselves and still do, given the book's success at the time of publication and its enduring status.
 
It would be churlish and presumptive to assume what the writing of horror fiction performs for other creators within the genre; I don't know, not having access to their minds, their processes, the immediate experience of imagining and recording that they undergo during the act of creation. Therefore, one can only hypothesize in that regard, refering to one's own interpretations of their writings and to whatever wider context said writers might have provided.
 
But, even within the constraints of this series, many have already expressed what the creation and consumption of horrific material serves for them on a psychological level. This is itself a thorny issue, as it is a case of mind commenting on its own condition, which one might argue is something of a paradox (mind being both the phenomena under discussion and the instrument of dissection, thereby rendering analysis problematic to the point of impossible).
 
However, the act of self-autopsy, of insight that derives from the exercise, is arguably worthwhile in itself; whilst it might be near impossible to legitimately express what it serves, the attempt obliges us to consider our states and motivations, our influences and conditions:
 
Why do I seem to have a hole drilled in my skull into which hallinogenic visions flow? Why, when I close to my eyes, do I experience drug-trip visions of absurdity, atrocity and transcendental insanity? It's a perpetual point of fascination, one that I certainly have conscious intention to explore through my fiction and through the consumption of other's. I want to know where the monsters come from, and why they come to me. What is it about the infernal nursery inside my head that is peculiarly attractive for them to spawn in? And what does that express about the state of my own mind?
 
Self-obsessive? Borderline egocentric? Perhaps, but, insofar as I can discern, beyond the more expansive, culture-wide and ideological analyses, this is the only way to explore what horror serves on a psychologial level: once again, it's impossible to cast that net too wide, to speak on behalf of others. It's barely possible to hypothesize regarding one's own condition, so, not only an exercise in self-obsession, but perhaps an impotent one at that.
 
Nevertheless, it's one I feel acutely every time I sit down to write, every time my mind shifts into a particularly imaginative mode (which is often).
 
So, what do I know about my own state of mind? Precious little, in particular terms. I know that I suffer with the condition that is generally refered to as clinical depression with suicidal tendencies. I know that I often experience extremely vivid, distorted perceptions of reality that occasionally become visual and auditory hallucinations. I know that I operate in a demon-haunted world; that the demons don't derive from some external metaphysics, but from within. The Hell where they are born has levels that descend for infinity within the bounds of my skull. Nor is it an entirely unwelcoming place, one where I am a trespasser.
 
Those conditions, those nightmare and dreamscapes, are where I am most at home: they are my realms, my worlds; the only places where I don't feel like a monster in a human suit, the only states where I feel there is place and purpose for me. Part of the problem is that: the attractiveness of those conditions, the degree to which I operate in them, can be problematic, as it impinges on the waking world as much as they are informed by and reflective of it.
 
This tension, this liminal condition in which I am torn apart and stitched back together, in which I operate in multiple different frames and assumptions of reality at once, is what I most sincerely attempt to express through my work. Often not in any conscious or deliberate way; it often isn't until after the initial writing -which is fevered, obsessive, twitchy and convulsive- that I realise what the stories are about. Even then, it's often not a complete or clearly articulated interpretation.
 
The stories comprised within my first short story collection, Strange Playgrounds, were written at various points throughout my early-to-mid twenties, as a student at university, riddled with social anxiety, lost and without any particular direction or definition, mired in the throes of a depressive episode that began in my early teens and would last until the end of the next decade. Whilst I wasn't aware of these conditions at the time -an insidious element of mental disease, in that it makes itself seem rational, absolute and default-, I certainly remember suffering their effects: random panic attacks, profound exhaustion, detachment from society and self-imposed isolation. The stories I wrote during this period inevitably express all of the frustrations and self-excoriations that come part and parcel of such a condition, which are fairly evident, reading them back now, but which didn't seem clear at all at the time of writing:
 
The title story, Strange Playgrounds, was consciously inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's The Pit and The Pendulum. The story represents an attempt to take the initial situation of the story -a man who wakes in total darkness, with no knowledge of where he is or memory of how he came to be there- and to run with that confusion rather than explaining it, as the original story does. However, during the first, tentative fumblings through that darkness, it evolved into something else; the subterranean abyss becoming a place where dreams and nightmares are given shape, where manifestations of memory and trauma walk in flesh and skin. Whilst that wasn't the intention of the story, that's what it became, as well as providing the framing device for the entire collection (the follow up, Stranger Playgrounds, bookends the collection and describes the agonising ascent of the protagonist from that abyss, into a waking world that is stranger still).
 
Whilst the stories within the collection are ostensibly unrelated, those themes recur and recur: almost every tale is one that involves dissatisfaction, frustration with one's existence, the protagonists variously confused and broken, dissatisfied with their existence in myriad unspoken ways that manifest as more immediate, rationalised expressions. They are splinters of my own psyche, vehicles for the same issues that I was facing at the time and, to a certain degree, still do. From existential despair to utter disgust and dissatisfaction with the state of politics, society, humanity, from unspoken desires and frustrated lusts to friendships souring, the collection provides a fairly intimate -and, perhaps, unpleasant- dissection of the places my mind was wandering at the time, the desolations through which it ploughed (directionless, without destination).
 
It's a strange experience, going back and reading the collection now, revisiting the states of mind that informed it: to my present day eyes, it seems so utterly obvious that the writer was in a downward spiral, a state of mind that could only end in tragedy, without some help or profound shift in their circumstances. The stories even comment upon that at various points; characters either attempting or contemplating suicides of one shape or form (including a protagonist who literally tears the world open in the depths of her despair, with the sheer, black passion of her nihilism) or being pushed into circumstances where they have no choice but to “jump” (the story The Last Sane Man involves a protagonist who finds himself trapped on a train journey which is stuck in a perpetually looping cycle, that none of the other passengers seem to notice or care about. His only option, in extremis, is to leap from the train into abyssal darkness, to fly beyond the world and all his banal assumptions of being).
 
To think that the younger man who wrote those stories was largely unaware of what they were expressing is somewhat terrifying, given that the efforts to examine what was then unspoken and undefined are so clear. It leaves me to wonder what state he might have come to or what he would be now had he not had the means or opportunity to do so.
 
Likewise, later efforts -Born in Blood: Volumes One and Two- consciously tackle subjects of mental illness and psychological states, but not in any direct or overt manner. Whereas it might have been tempting to explore those themes and subjects directly -i.e. by incorporating characters and protagonists that suffer from mental illness of various stripe-, that isn't and has never been the way my mind works or processes with such matters:
 
Rather, it tends to operate on the level of metaphor and symbolism; that is both how it learns and expresses itself, for better or ill. So, rather than specifically tackling this disease or that, creating characters that suffered with this particular malady or that, the process was far more organic, utilising the same techniques I'd naturally cultivated writing Strange Playgrounds, but with a conscious imperative to focus on the experiential: what it meant for the characters involved to experience the various traumas, atrocities and upheavals that occur within the stories.
 
This became problematic when I began recalling the broken states of mind I'd come to recognise by that point: the profound depressive periods, the social anxieties, the panic attacks. The problem with conjuring such states of mind and attempting to emulate them for the sake of fuelling fiction is that: they have a nasty tendency to swell and become states of mind again. Whilst I wanted Born in Blood to be every bit as earnest and legitimate as Strange Playgrounds, it became apparent during the course of writing that the necessary recollections were also having negative effects. As a result, the project required consistent breaks if I was to maintain whatever degrees of stability I'd managed to accrue in the interim and not slip back down into that old darkness.
 
The result is a work that is highly abstract, often in conflict with itself, occasionally so extreme in its despair it borders on self-parody (at least to my eyes). Here, there are stories that express such utter dereliction at the state of being and oneself that characters actively attempt to break one or both, turning their conflicts and frustrations outwards upon the world, hoping to shatter or tear it open, not that there will be anything better on the other side; only something different, removed
from who and where they are.
 
That imperative is intimately familiar to me; it's one I fight every day: an urge to simply run, hop bus or ship or airplane and lose myself somewhere remote, somewhere far, away from the world I know and the condition it necessitates.
 
Again, at the time of writing, this was not a conscious factor or expression, but merely something that was obviously preoccupying my thoughts, that expressed itself here, in various states and forms throughout the collection. From characters that physically take flight, running from the states of ennui or abuse that facilitate their psychological conditions, to those that engage in suicide or more abstract efforts to escape what they assume underpins their misery, they generally discover states that only serve to compound such concerns or provide new arenas for more distinct abjection. Unlike Strange Playgrounds, which does have a distinct Utopian strain of hopefulness throughout, Born in Blood doesn't; it suggests that, even with an escape into some abstract state of metaphysics, even what sufferers assume to be the ultimate escape through self-destruction, may not provide release; may even compound what they're attempting to escape.
 
In that regard, the stories of Born in Blood may potentially represent what I ultimately dread in the same way that those collected within Strange Playgrounds represent hope: the former that reality is as my peculiarly distorted state of mind so often insists it is; a hopeless, rotting, mundane state with no potential for wider exploration or transcendence, the latter that such is a profound delusion: that creation itself might be ripped open or undone like a reflection in a still pond, with sufficient inspiration.
 
That simultaneous hope and despair -which are two sides of the same coin- is the fundamental dynamic of all of my fiction, the baseline concern that I hope to impart and explore. Within that framework lies infinite wildernesses, states of being, peoples, characters, creatures beyond number, all of whom serve as mainfestations of certain ideas, aspects, concepts; vehicles for wider consideration.
 
In Born in Blood, characters pray so earnestly for an end. Consciousness being, existence itself, is a kind of torment, being trapped within their own skulls, at the mercy of every dawning day, too much for them to take. And so they take to either mundane or esoteric means to alter that. Whilst the stories are universally fantastical, many exploring a wider metaphysics coalesced around the collection's fundamental despair and nihilism, they also reflect my own inalienable desire to do likewise; to use dissatisfaction as a scalpel, as a blade, to slit creation open and have it bleed miracles, even dark ones. Anything other than endure another series of grey and listless days with their parade of banal atrocities, petty conflicts, navel-gazing arguments, confusions and misunderstandings.
 
My fiction has allowed me to realise so much in that regard; how I relate not only to the rest of humanity, culture, society et al, but also to existence itself, to my own state of consciousness. Whilst those revelations might not always be pleasant -far from it, in many instances-, I certainly wouldn't be without them, as, through that process, I take steps towards the abstract equivalent of the same sheddings and metamorphoses that my characters experience. Whilst I might dream and fantasise of experiencing them physically (that point at which nightmare and waking overlap and dissolve into one another a kind of lunatic paradise for me), I recognise their worth in the arena of mind, the state of abstraction which is where we live, our principle sphere of operation, beyond any delusion of an absolute, ostensible “reality” we might entertain.
 
Without that, I have terrible intimations of what and where I might be; a situation I hope to fend off through any means, even if it requires an Alice in Wonderland collapse into the Hellscapes of my inner-worlds.

• Covering image by Grace Maria Houseman.