MY LIFE IN HORROR: I REFUSE TO SHUT UP AND DIE

It’s a brutal twist of the narrative knife, creating huge tension for the reader, an awful sense of impending doom, and inexorable pulling together of darkness and innocence that…

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.

I Refuse to Shut up and Die 

Always a bit of a risky proposition, this. The encore you’re not sure anyone’s really asking for. Then again, if the chap who’s written 60 essays about the idiosyncratic works that messed him up as a kid for the sheer unhinged joy of it is starting to worry about coming over self-indulgent, probably best to acknowledge that particular horse has not just bolted, but fled to another country where it lives under an assumed identity, and has raised a family of foals with little if any idea of what Daddy Did In The War.


Anyhow. This whole project has been about jumping off a cliff, honestly; learning to write nonfiction, learning to write criticism and autobiography; sitting down at the keyboard and figuring out why I felt strongly enough about, say, One Flew Over The Cookoos Nest or the Escape From Colditz board game to commit an evening and a few thousand words to talking about it. And then there was the crowdfunder, and now this crowdfunder, and at the time of writing I don’t know if it’s been successful, because, for reasons that will become clear, I’m writing this a bit ahead of publication. Did it land? Will Volume II get a mass-market release and a limited edition pressing? Who knows? So far, so good, said the falling man; the view is so beautiful, all the way down.


Still. Thanks for coming this far, all of you who have.


And let me beg your indulgence as we take one last trip down memory lane.


It’s 1997, so I must be 19 years old, and my memory is that I'm in a WHSmiths, possibly Christmas shopping on a painful budget. But it’s me and a bookshop, so the odds of my not picking up something for myself are always pretty damn low.


They plummet to zero when I see the cover.


I have no familiarity with the author. But that is one hell of a title. And is there a Barker or King cover quote? Maybe. Something sure draws me in, enough to part with some incredibly limited discretionary spending budget from my Job Seekers Allowance. Interestingly, I remember no especial fear or trepidation; the author and narrative were both unknown to me, unlike some past entries where reputations proceeded. Anyway, I was a veteran, of IT, and The Wasp Factory, and Hellraiser; how bad could it get, really?


And so I dived straight in, with nary a thought to how deep, dark and cold things were about to get.


And it starts off so slow, oddly almost low-key. Sure, our narrator is a serial killer, but he’s in jail, at the end of his career, and I remember wondering if this was going to be one of those ‘told in reverse’ type deals, where we learn about the crimes via flashback, safe in the knowledge that it all ends in a cell… and then, almost immediately, it gets really fucking weird.


Turns out, our man has taught himself how to put himself into a coma, indistinguishable from death, and he can do it so successfully that he wakes up in the prison morgue. It’s an incredible piece of writing, describing the process from the inside, backing right up to the very edge of the supernatural, before taking a hard right into Silence Of The Lambs territory, as our narrator affects a bloody, daring escape.


And then, suddenly, we’re in New Orleans, and it’s like going from monochrome to technicolour as the palate and cast expand like the opening minutes of the big bang, and I have absolutely no idea what is going on but the author has my attention and I am here for it.


And then, while our man is cruising the quarter, looking for likely victims, he encounters a fellow predator.


There’s a moment when they meet - I’ve never forgotten it - where our narrator shakes hands and, in a gesture he tells us he’s used countless times as a way of gauging someone’s potential as a submissive victim, moves his hand down to briefly encircle the other man’s wrist… only this time, the shakee does the same thing.


I am doing the moment painfully insufficient justice, here, because Poppy Z Brite is a world-class horror author, brilliant at pretty much every aspect of novel writing, from characterisation to voice to description to plot to emotion. So, please, just trust me; it’s a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment for the ages, and nothing’s even happened yet.


But I remember feeling, with a moral certainty, that shit was about to go down.


I was very much not wrong.


Before it does, though, the novel cuts away, and we meet recently-split up Lucas and Tran. Lucas becomes an instantly totemic character, for 19-year-old me; when we meet him, he’s ranting and raving on a pirate radio station, angrily condemning straight people as ‘breeders’, with a persona called Lush Rimbaud. It quickly becomes apparent that he’s furious because he’s HIV positive (and this is why he’s split from Tran), and he’s determined to articulate that fury in a world where a plague that only seems to kill gay men is treated as something between a minor inconvenience and a blessing.


Lucas is not a good person. His anger often spills into outright violence, and during his darkest, most self-pitying moment, he comes perilously close to infecting Tran with his own blood; a fantastic example of toxic romanticism that has some eerie echos with the flowering relationship between the two killers, I have literally just realised as I type this. Nonetheless, this guy really spoke to me; responding to the brutal injustices life had dealt him with a defiant spit and fury that felt honestly come by, if a little indiscriminate in expression. Not the first time I’ve felt the pull of such a figure, of course, as you’ll be well aware, if you’ve come this far.


You know, I’m really not feeling so good.


Anyway.


And then there’s Tran, whose situation is less immediately mortal, but no less gut-wrenching; as we meet him, he’s in the process of becoming homeless, thrown out by his parents after they discover that he’s gay. A major part of the brutality comes from the matter-of-fact way Tran absorbs this; he’s always known if they found out, he’d be kicked to the kerb, and his stoicism in the face of the loss and ostracism is honestly kind of heartbreaking.


And then, I learn, with a dreadful sinking feeling, that Tran not only knows the NO-based killer but intends to throw himself at his mercy, imagining he might be able to stay with him, at least for a while.


It’s a brutal twist of the narrative knife, creating huge tension for the reader, an awful sense of impending doom, and inexorable pulling together of darkness and innocence that…


Oh.


Oh, yes, I see.


Sorry. I knew this was getting a bit risky. I’ve stayed too long. Pushed it too hard. Thanks for coming this far, but I’m going to have to leave it there. Sorry. I know it’s a bit abrupt, but I suspect it’ll be for the best.


It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for…

Now then, where were we? Oh yes: Innocence and darkness.


It's a strange thing to say of any character in this book -indeed, of any in Billy Martin/Poppy Z. Brite's work-, but insofar as innocence exists in this world, it exists in Tran.


And that doesn't mean, by the by, that the child is sinless, certainly not from the perspective of the aggressively heteronormative culture in which he operates: He, like so many of us, is a child -and victim- of his forebear's misunderstanding; one of the many lonely, disconnected queer children of the early 1990s, seeking out acceptance, affection and fraternity wherever he can find it.


Like all of Exquisite Corpse's cast, he is a hedonist; a sensual creature of sex and aesthetic beauty, of casual narcotic consumption and stray relationships. To the average straight, cisgender reader of the era, Tran's motif of innocence might well have proven baffling.


But to those of us that bleed and weep rainbows, it's heartbreaking in its earnestness.


Tran is the very icon of children many of us older queers know and that we once were; the hedonistic congregation of orphans, the outcast and exiled from our family hearths by dints of our natures, forced to seek and carve community from our fellow strays; the lovers, exes and siblings we find for ourselves in neon limbo. His innocence isn't founded in some Christianic virginity or prescribed ignorance; for a young man of his age, he's already a cynic by many standards, having known and lost love many times, having experienced losses and traumas -not to mention pleasures and revelations- that many of his straight brothers and sisters will likely never know.


His innocence, just like the darkness that ultimately consumes it, is explicitly, achingly queer. His appetites, his free and easy sensuality, aren't antithetical to it, but essential.


And exquisite.


In the wake of the long, collective trauma left on the LGBTQ psyche by the AIDs epidemic (and our abandonment to it by societies and systems that were only too happy to have rid of us by any means), queer communities adopted angelic motifs in much of our panoply and symbolism (much to the chagrin of our traditional enemies).


Tran manifests that symbolism in so many ways: a child of the late 1980s, only just blossomed into adulthood in the 1990s, he's old enough to feel the lingering, morbid resonance of the disease, to be afraid of it, yet to have just avoided the plague-like pestilence that beset his forebears in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.


In that, Tran is us; the queer readers who share a similar birthday, who were also children of the 1980s and 1990s, for whom the disease and its effects are both hideous reality and morbid myth. He is our blitheness and disconnection, our troubled positioning within our family units, our demonisation by the popular media and cynical, scapegoating political forces.


And what happens to him is thus so, so much more than just another murder in a horror novel: It is the witless, unthinking consumption and desecration of something beautiful, something emblematic of tomorrow's beauty; the innocence and state of grace that might be possible in the years to come.


That Tran is so atrociously undone -ostensibly- by members of his own tribe is perhaps the most trenchant misanthropy: here are men old enough to have suffered everything Tran was spared, to have been outcast, demonised, diseased, beaten, abused, who, in the case of Dennis Nilsen-inspired Andrew Compton, is a victim of the AIDs epidemic himself.


But that, as a result of their natures, are blind to Tran's innocence. Or, to put it more accurately, perceive that innocence as a wolf might the weakness of the lamb.


In their own cruel, peculiar, twisted ways, the atrocities they wreak upon Tran -from their betrayal of him to the cuts, bites and incisions that ultimately unravel him- are acts of reverence; acknowledgments of that essential innocence that straight culture cannot perceive. They would not have selected him to be so intimately their victim were that not the case. But, rather than love and adore him, as any half-way sane queer soul would, their affections are expressed in the manner of cats having cornered some rare and exotic bird:


They are such twisted, diseased, execrable examples of the human animal, the only way they can express their appreciation is through sadism and cannibal consumption. To them, the moment is one of supreme love and religious observance; transcendent in its sensual intensity, infernal in consequence.


That Martin/Brite invites us to share not only Tran's despair and pain; the black murder of his innocence, but also the demonic ecstasies of his killers is the contradictory soul of this book made explicit: Throughout, but nowhere moreso than in this heart-breaking crescendo, Martin/Brite revels in the sensual intensity of both, drawing no distinction between the excesses to be found in sex or murder.


It's a Luciferian relationship this book drawers with its readers, queer or otherwise, inviting us to share the souls of the most tainted human beings imaginable; to revel in their strange appetites, the undoing of innocence and the cannibal consumption of beauty. To understand them as we understand
ourselves, in our darkest and most nihilistic moments.


In that, the book is an excoriating condemnation of the politics and cultural circumstances that provide both the breeding and hunting grounds for this strange, sadistic species: Tran, along with every victim of Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne, are as much victims of the societies to which they were born as they are the killers themselves.


And nowhere is that made more explicit than in the book's closing chapters, in which Martin/Brite actively recreates an actual scenario that occurred during the height of Jeffrey Dahmer's killing spree amongst the gay community of Milwaukee throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s:


Having barely escaped Jay's sadistic clutches, Tran stumbles naked, drugged and bleeding down the street, only to be met by two police officers, who actively hand Tran back into his tormentor's custody with little in the way of convincing, and proceed to beat the only man who might've saved him senseless.


This is not only a thinly veiled reference to a very similar situation that occurred with Dahmer's -underage- victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, but also a metaphor for our status as queer children in cultures either indifferent to our brutalisation or actively engaged in cultivating it.


For all of Martin/Brite's gleeful descent into the abyss of Byrne and Compton's sadism, there is a righteous fury kindling in every sentence and syllable of this book, that readers definitely don't have to be queer to understand, but that speaks to us directly, drawing echoes with our lived experience so acutely, it is often as traumatic and painful an experience as it is arousing and sensual.


Yet, the better part of that fury isn't for the serial killers themselves: monstrous as they are, Brite/Martin finds the humanity, even the vulnerability, in these most inhumane of individuals. They are merely symptoms of wider societal sickness; as much products of circumstances beyond their control as any of us (indeed, Andrew Compton in particular evinces deep descents into internal abysses, where he loses himself in existential considerations as to his nature and alien appetites).


The author's fury finds expression in Tran's former lover, the writer and AIDs victim, Lucas Ransom. If there is an author insert in the book, a character who manifests the raw anger and abandonment of older generations of queer men in the early 1990s, it's Lucas. Whilst technically Tran's ex, Lucas hails from a prior generation of gay men, one whose hedonistic legacy is well-drawn and detailed in the book, and for which he has paid far too high a price. Considering himself amongst the walking dead; a creature as in despair of his existence as, perversely, Byrne and Compton are as in love with their's, Lucas is a creature of violent passions; the outcast child in all of us railing at the injustice of society and creation as a whole. He has little but contempt for the culture that has reduced him to his current circumstances and, indeed, condemns him for what he is, loves and suffers. Unlike Tran, who is our innocence, Lucas is the Romantic opposite; a walking avatar of bleaker queer experience, that cannot help but destroy what it loves more than anything in the world. The desolation of Lucas Ransom, his impotent, violent fury at the world, is something any queer reader will relate to. Unlike Tran, he's also a manifestation of that -to heteronormative culture- most troubling of queer characters; the one who conforms to no particular prescription or stereotype. Unlike angel-boy Tran, who is identifiable from a glance, Lucas is rugged, masculine and physically imposing; the kind of gay man that straight women have a marked tendency to fall for and, in extreme cases, be offended by his manifest disinterest.


He is the self-defined splinter in the flank of prescriptive culture; he refuses the places and slots society grudgingly allows for us, seeking to -often traumatically- carve out his own from its necrotic flesh. In this, he is inevitably punished; if there is a character in the book whose desolation has no rock bottom, who exemplifies the depths of disgrace culture will submit us to if we allow it, it's Lucas. By the end of the narrative, he is one of the last men standing, but only -as Andrew Compton almost supernaturally sniffs out- because he doesn't want to be; because he has nothing left but suffering, despair and a loveless death waiting for him.


Lucas is our suicidal ideation and self-destructive rage, our broken, jagged spirits and the danger that is born from our near-constant cultural abuse. It's little wonder that he seeks balm in the arms of Tran,


whose innocence is his contrasting opposite; the sobre Yin to his furious Yang.


That their story together; the lost love that still flickers, despite circumstances conspiring to smother it, ends in the bleakest tragedy, is Martin/Brite's commentary on and condemnation of the disgrace that tradition and conservative culture would submit us all to, if it had license, and a stark reminder that the fight is far from over.


That such a book even exists, that a writer such as Billy Martin/Poppy Z. Brite has license, as a gay trans man, to write about our collective experience in such an intimate, flagrant and sincere manner, was a revelation to me, and continues to be so. Like Barker before him, Martin/Brite blew apart my preconceptions of what is possible in fiction, and inspired me to write with a sincerity that cannot help but make the reader share our passions, no matter what form they take.


GDL

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