That Is One Messed Up Freudian Nightmarescape, Doctor Who: Knock Knock, Reviews, 07/05/2017

The title says it all, honestly. This post is going to explore some images and concepts from different bits of philosophy. Think of it as a little experiment for how I’m going to write some historical riffing passages in Utopias. As well, it’s a good way to makes sense of what is in many ways a well-made but fairly ordinary Doctor Who story.

Doctor Who is built from nightmares, after all. And expert at inspiring them too. “Knock Knock” makes Doctor Who’s relationship with your nightmares very explicit and extremely squirmy.

Hidden Secrets in Twisting Corridors

Another good touch in this episode is how the script combines
terrifying psychologically grotesque narratives with some silly
comedy. Especially seeing Peter Capaldi's run through the classic
routine of the Doctor trying and sort of succeeding at being cool.

In Phil Sandifer’s review of this episode, he was right in many ways. The setting of the haunted house is getting a little old in Doctor Who. It’s played a major or minor role in several stories over the last decade since the release of Steven Moffat’s masterpiece “Blink.”

He’s right that it’s getting tired. You can’t really depend on the trope of the haunted house alone to deliver scares. But I do think Mike Bartlett – in his first contribution to Doctor Who – has written an episode that fits his reputation as one of the better television and theatre writers in Britain today.

“Knock Knock” seems disappointingly straightforward at first glance, but Bartlett has put some thought into just how creepy his scenario is. The haunted house is a good place to put shadows, dank corners, musty cellars, and other corners, alcoves, and cracks that disturb and unsettle a person.

But what is a haunted house? It’s most profoundly a place of secrets – repressed memories, facts, phenomena, and processes. They’re the twisting catacombs of the subconscious articulated as a building where our protagonists live, explore, and risk death trying to understand a terrible mystery.

Of course, I can’t discuss that mystery without warning you of the obvious

SPOILERS!!!

In case you couldn't tell from the section title, I'm totally going there.

“Mother? Mother! Oh God, Mother!!”

The haunted house is part of what the literary theorists call our cultural imaginary. It’s one of the mythic images that gets trotted out because of its signifiers. The haunted house is more than just its TV Tropes list, but is the image common in contemporary global culture for a story of the return of the repressed.

Our myths of a return of ghosts long thought buried take the form of haunted houses. Stephen King’s The Shining depicted the inner spirals and caverns of the haunted house as the repository of echoing energy that centuries of human evil have generated.

The catacombs of the hotel represented in one scene with a hornet’s nest. Not long on subtlety. I hate that book.

But the point here is the sheer ickiness of the Landlord’s nature. The trauma of his mother’s illness and pending death becomes a focus for his entire life, fixating on her to the point of erasing her personality. He speaks of her as his daughter, to justify his aged body.

The Landlord's bargaining in the throes of his trauma began the
process that annihilated any individual subjectivity he could have had.

As well, he communicates with her and the creatures animating her through the mansion itself. The old stone house has merged with his mother and with the creatures. All of it is one entity, which he thinks of only as mother, the duty and love on which he fixed his entire personality and life.

The Landlord needs no name because he’s given it up. He exists only for the sake of his mother, the house.

The son gives himself entirely over to his mother. He sleeps deep inside her every night, rarely leaving the grounds except to find food for her.

I’m just making the sexual nature of the Landlord’s relationship with his mother* as explicit as I can make it. I’m going full Sigmund Freud on this analysis, almost as a riff. On one hand, it’s because I’m not very well-practiced in psychoanalytic writing. On the other hand, I don’t think I need to.

* Who is also a house and who is also a gigantic swarm of alien dryad insects, just so we’ve got all this at the forefront of our minds.

Everything I write in this review, I mean in a very literal sense.
Eaten alive. Eaten and still alive.

To Be Eaten Alive

My own introduction to psychoanalytic thinking largely began with my studies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work. So I learned about it by watching its core ideas being utterly broken apart. Not broken apart, so much as shown to be inadequate.

Even though you can understand a lot about human trauma using the familial Oedipal dynamic that Freud described and popularized, Freudian imagery isn’t a universal set of human psychological laws.

It was one set of images that could help us make sense of some common situations. They didn’t fit all situations, and they weren’t the only images to describe what they were about. So we ran up the wrong way on that tree for a while.

“Knock Knock,” however, is about as Freudian as you can get, clearly. The Landlord is a child Oedipus whose trauma crafted a fixation on his mother to the point where even he erased his own identity in favour of his mission. When his mother became the house, he became the house’s protector, just as he was hers as a human. Landlord.

They are a pure force of becoming, and that's the centre of their horror.

Yet the force animating the House Mother isn’t Freudian at all. It’s a swarm, millions of dryad alien insects that move as one to animate the wood of the house, and feed when they’re hungry. They’re swarms that obey the concentrated power of a self-conscious subject giving them an order.

The dryads are a pure force, remaking the territories they pervade. A wall becomes a mouth. A woman becomes a creaking tree. They wipe the world of one nature and remake it in their own.

That transformation is hidden. The dryads’ reterritorialization of the house and the House Mother is the ontological mystery of “Knock Knock.” That’s the suppressed secret of the house, as to its nature.

Most hauntings are a matter of a ghost, what China Miéville literally called hauntological, in his analysis of horror. It’s the repressed evil that echoes from the past into the present. Morally speaking, it’s the call for justice. That’s the typical image of haunting, the most morally uplifting.

Or else it’s a mutated call, an evil so intense that it’s been perverted into a purely malevolent, hungry energy. That’s the sublimation of genocide and murder of Stephen King’s original Overlook hotel.

"The Rats in the Walls" was the first Lovecraft story I ever read,
and it struck me as I read more of his work how much it stood
out. It was a brilliant story, and a terror that hit me more viscerally
than the more cerebral notes of the Weird for which he's known
best. My own science-fiction work published so far explores
more of what deterritorializing horror can do.

The Dryads in the Walls

The dryads are a more Lovecraftian creature. I don’t mean this in the sense of the Weird, Miéville’s abyssal twin to the comforting humanity of ghosts. There’s another kind of nightmare in Lovecraft that he never really pursued, as he did his eruptions of the Weird, the Absolute Other.

I’m talking about the rats in the walls. It’s a nightmare of deterritorialization. The invasion of a force that consumes you by eradicating your shape – what was once solid is now a gas. What was once a personality becomes a yearning hunger with no sense of selfhood or reflection at all.

That’s what the dryads have done to the house. They’ve turned the mansion and its grounds from an ordinary, if ostentatious, dwelling, into a humming vibration of breathing hunger.

The Oedipal sickness of the Landlord and the House Mother have kept a shred of personality left in that deterritorialization. The child-mother fixation remains as a single thread of self-consciousness, of subjecthood, in what should have been the eradication of human personality in the architecture and the organisms in its rooms.

The House Mother was the only one who could hold her body’s shape after the dryads consumed her into wood. And it was because of the incredible force of the Landlord’s grotesque fixation, his parody of love and devotion, with his mother.

If you think about it long enough, this is one of the more unsettling stories Doctor Who has done in some time.
• • •
My other philosophical reviews in this season, Peter Capaldi's last.
The Pilot / The Girl With a Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice

Dying of the Past, Doctor Who: The Witch’s Familiar, Reviews, 27/09/2015

And so the rotted, grotesque horrors of the writhing undead exploded from their mass graves in an earthquake of slime and terror to drown and choke their descendants in bubbling ichor. Honestly, there are few better endings than that.

Much has been made of the seeming meaninglessness of
the titles of this story, The Magician's Apprentice and The
Witch's Familiar. Here's my take. Part One sees Clara
taking on a Doctor-ish role as she tries to track him down.
The child Davros eventually learns about mercy and
compassion from the Doctor. They're apprentices. Part
Two sees Davros and the Master carrying the show as
the Doctor and Clara draw out their malevolent natures.
They're each the familiar of a villainous witch.

It was much better than the actual last moments of the episode, where the Doctor returns to grant the child Davros a moment of mercy. It’s been done many times before, the idea that the Doctor can rewrite the past of the Daleks to make them just a little less malevolent or a little less brutally powerful. According to Phil Sandifer, this idea has recurred in Doctor Who since Genesis of the Daleks.

I find it very appropriate that The Magician’s Familiar two-parter has transmitted the week that I’ve started reading Phil's book of TARDIS Eruditorum essays on the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras of the show. That book collects the essays that cover the decline of Doctor Who in the early-mid 1980s.

There are many reasons why Doctor Who declined in that era, which Phil explores in depth. The reason most important for this story is that the show’s producers thought that what the popular audience wanted was the ersatz return of old monsters and continuity porn.

For the whole story of this collapse, and Phil’s quite brilliant diagnosis of the mess, you should just buy his book. The epub version is only US$5 from Smashwords.

But I thought at first that The Magician's Apprentice was starting to slip down this hole. The first episode this season was filled with a ton of continuity points and echoes to past iconography, most of which didn't really serve much purpose and cluttered the story with images and plot points that a non-superfan audience would have trouble picking up on.

Images of the long-dead William
Hartnell haunt Doctor Who today.

The first episode included sound clips and images of the Doctor's classic-series confrontations with Davros going all the way back to Tom Baker in Genesis, including Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy. The Daleks themselves included designs from the whole history of the show. William Hartnell’s image appears in the Master’s story segment that opens The Witch's Familiar. 

Even Davros' talk of creating a Dalek - Time Lord hybrid evoked the ideas of the most beautiful catastrophe of the Davies era, Evolution of the Daleks.

The dead past of Doctor Who still lives, and it bubbles up from forgotten margins and joking sequences to drag the show underground with its gravity.

The first episode worried me that, having unified the classic and current series in The Day of the Doctor anniversary special, Steven Moffat was letting his inner fanboy leak too much into the show's production. 

He's now a lifelong fan who’s held the chief producer’s role longer than anyone except Nathan-Turner. His story and philosophical ideas are already starting to repeat themselves. And if he isn’t careful, the continual insertion of nods to the past will overcome any creative impulses that can push Doctor Who to new directions.

The continuity and imagery of Doctor Who's past is part of its legacy, but its re-emergence without having been transformed to fit what progress would be in the present will only choke the show's own creativity and originality. That happened once already, in the mid-1980s. And it can happen again, so we must always be on guard in case it does.

But it looks as though Moffat already understands that his time is limited. At least judging by that ending, whose meaning is pretty clear to me.

I've also been impressed with the casual grotesque body
horror thrown around Doctor Who this season. I don't
have any profound reason for liking it. I just do.

The Hamza landmines that menace the young Davros on the battlefield warn of danger. In our mythology, they’re wards to protect you from evil. Diegetically, they’re markers of death. They haul you into a muddy, slimy ground. Burying you alive.

As Clara and the Master break back into the Dalek city, they go through tunnels whose walls are made of the living dead. Corpses that have decayed to slime, but still live. Although Skaro is a planet of creatures who are made to kill, its society and its earth are made of creatures that can never die.

The past made real, given the energy of life, rises from the muddy wastes of decimated, zombified earth, and drowns all hopeful life in its ocean of liquified flesh. That energy comes from the Doctor, a character who is essentially a living beacon of hope, progress, and optimism.

Remember what Clara says about the Doctor as she and the Master begin their trek back to the city. The Doctor survives because the first thing he does is assume he's going to live.

Davros’ scheme – overcomplicated and slightly insane in the grand tradition of Doctor Who supervillains – is to trick the Doctor into donating some of his regeneration energy (the magic of the Time Lords, as he says, the transformative nature of progress) to fuel his own regeneration and that of the Daleks.

A running theme with Davros is that he always tries to
convince the Doctor that they're basically the same,
which they aren't. While Russell T Davies' Journey's
End let Davros' challenge stand, The Witch's Familiar
shows how ultimately empty it is. Not only with its
conclusion of the Doctor's magic burying the Daleks
in an assault from their own enraged dead. But
because the moment where the Doctor sits in Davros'
chair has no significance besides a quick action
aside to pad out an episode running short on plot.

So that last moment of their conversation pits the Doctor's hope, love, and optimism* against the nihilistic nationalist rage of Davros. The result is the grotesque collision of two utterly incompatible and contradictory ways of life. 

* It’s no wonder the New Democrats pepper the ad slots on the Canadian catchup streams with their election ads. 

When Clara is sealed in the Dalek, she can only communicate on Dalek terms – every emotion is expressed as "Exterminate!" and every action unfolds through a prism of rage. When the energy of transformative progress and optimism hits such a creature, of course the whole system would destroy itself. 

When "I will live!" is the same concept as "I will kill!" then an infusion of such energy will inevitably destroy itself. The Witch's Familiar explores that fundamental philosophical opposition of Doctor and Dalek from a new, grotesque, Lovecraftian perspective.

The past – and the dead – are never really dead. Memory of trauma, violence, and death can drown you if you let it have the energy. Only when driven by compassion and optimism can life become genuine progress.

Why I Am Such an Excellent Writer, Composing, 15/07/2014

Having done some promotional duties for one of my fellow artists yesterday, I thought it best to promote my own upcoming projects as well. As my difficult hunt continues for such an apparently simple thing as a day job with a reliable income stream, I at least have a writing career that, while it doesn’t yet produce a lot of cash, at least reminds me that I have something valuable to contribute. 

One of my personal favourite under-
employed philosophical writers, the
title of this post is a play on his
ironically egotistical chapter headings
from Ecce Homo.

Not everyone who is underemployed has this kind of fallback for their sense of self-worth. For almost two years, I’ve had the qualifications and the references for a good start to the career that I chose, and that I was continually told that I could make a great life from. Those qualifications were the result of seven years of hard work: one year and change for my MA, eight months of preliminary research, and four years of my doctorate. Realistically, I’ve spent the last two years trying to get that career started and coming up empty in terms of steady employment. Like a lot of academics in my generation, despite my best efforts and the assurances of people who have actually worked with me that what I do is valuable to the discipline, the university sector simply does not want me.

Now, like a lot of former academics, I face the difficult task of convincing employers in the private sector that my years of experience as a writer, researcher, and teacher (and in my case, as a contractual editor, a customer service phone jockey, and having helped run one of Canada’s largest university newspapers for two years) is relevant to their faster-paced working environment. Also, that I am sincerely devoted to my career change, and will not rush back to academia the minute a poverty-waged four-month teaching post opens up. There is the additional problem that I will not know precisely what my new career is until I land my first job. I'm qualified to work as an editor (which I'm doing freelance now, but is not a reliably sustainable income) and as a researcher (which is the bulk of my current applications). 

Even so, the most creative part of my career(s) is beginning to take off. For one thing, my novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, is slated for release later this month. I’m beginning from an independent publisher, but BlankSpace take their work seriously, and they take their ambitions seriously as well. They’ll be pleased to know that, as I’ve discussed Under the Trees, Eaten with members of Toronto’s literary community, they’ve heard of the label, and it’s all good things. If the work I publish with them ultimately opens a pathway to future success with larger labels, I’ll always have BlankSpace to thank.

In fiction, my favourite inspirations are
writers whose ideas I can take in
directions they never would have gone
themselves. Lovecraft writing a female
protagonist and a comprehensible
alien? Never.

Going through the proofs this weekend was the first time that I’ve revisited my own manuscript in a while, and it felt like I was reading it with fresh eyes. I wove enough thematic complexity into the work to please anyone who generally enjoys anything science-fiction. The heritage of H. P. Lovecraft is clear in the basic premise and the nature of the central extraterrestrials in the story. 

At the same time, Under the Trees, Eaten grows beyond its primary inspiration in many ways. For one, I cannot sensibly equate the radically Other with the utterly unknowable as Lovecraft does.* The mysterious creatures of my novella are indeed terrifyingly different than humans, more terrifying and casually violent in ways we would find abhorrent. But they move with a calm rationality, and their reason, though radically different than that of humanity, is still a reason and can still be understood. This is a fundamental aspect of my research in environmental philosophy: that humanity must lose its hubris that its own reason is the only reason that can exist. Lovecraft, in his xenophobia, was all too guilty of this small-mindedness.

* And as many of my least favourite traditions of European philosophy over the last hundred or so years have done as well, but that’s another story.

My theatre work continues as well. You Were My Friend, which will play at the Pearl Company Theatre in Hamilton this November, features many of the same feminist approaches as Under the Trees, Eaten. One of Lovecraft’s greatest weaknesses as a writer, after all, was his inability to craft a woman. My novella’s very spine and backbone is its protagonist, Marilyn. Her story searching for the truth about the death of her mother and the mental breakdown of her father is the central driving force of the story.

You Were My Friend is similarly rooted in the complexity of women’s lives and families. It has a cast of two, both women. The story begins when one of them, Vicki, is cast out of her mother’s home before she even has the chance to finish high school to fend for herself, all because of her relationship with a man in his mid-20s (who disappears from her life at this very moment of crisis). It is the story of a young woman who is thrown, quite literally, to the wolves because her actions don’t conform to a puritanical sexual morality. 

No matter how many job applications I may send out, their fate is ultimately out of my control. This was true when I was looking for university work, and it’s true now that I’m transitioning into research and editing work in the wider private sector. But if there is one place where I’m not adrift, it’s the words that come from my fingers on these keyboards. 

That’s why, no matter how difficult or demoralizing my work in this economy might become, I keep working, in my spare time, on this blog, the philosophical publishing projects that it often tracks, this novella (and the other ideas for fiction works), and this play (and other theatrical ideas as well). It is the one area of my productive life where I can maintain some measure of control. I wish more people adrift in our economy could have a similar anchor.

Science-Fictional World Building, Composing, 12/06/2014

Under the Trees, Eaten developed from a simple point. The head of BlankSpace Publications asked me if I had any ideas for a sci-fi story the size of a novella, and I came up with one by the end of the day. I had been reading some philosophy that made a very creative ontological use of H. P. Lovecraft, and having long been a fan of his stories, I wanted to create something that would overcome some of the limitations of the Lovecraft milieu. 

So I developed a concept for aliens that made them strange to humans, but not horrifyingly destructive, and a storyline that included a major role for the evil and pain that humans inflict on each other. And I developed a protagonist narrator who was not only a woman (non-existent for the Lovecraft corpus), but who could adapt well enough to her circumstances with just enough genre-awareness that, while she still stumbled a bit, could emerge victorious. 

The conflicts she facts go beyond just the characters in the book to include actual threats to her narrative voice within the book herself. Her father, occasionally speaking from three years before the story’s main events, buts into her narrative with his more conventionally Lovecraftian style, essentially trying to steal his own daughter’s narrative. Beyond that, the aliens themselves are a meta-diegetic force in the story who also, at least for a moment, overwrite Marilyn’s power to narrate her own life and existence. 

Between my own work as author and Jeffrey’s suggestions as editor and chief, we have a tight and wonderful novella to inflict on the public later this month. While I’ll be promoting it at as many bookstores around the GTA as I can over the summer and fall, Jeffrey is preparing for an internet-based blitz. It includes a blog at BlankSpace that regularly publishes short, creepy excerpts from the novella’s text as brief previews.

It also includes a meta-fictional element that I’ve been preparing this week, The Seul-Coeur Logs. This is a blog that will publish ancillary material to the central event that gets Under the Trees, Eaten’s plot moving, the plane crash over the isolated, alien-influenced town of Seul-Coeur, Quebec that killed Marilyn’s mother in 1997. The posts themselves will be written as if they were from the files about the plane crash that Marilyn’s father Paul collected from then until his death (this isn’t a spoiler; he’s dead at the book’s first sentence). It’ll include extended versions of his own increasingly unhinged rantings, pseudo-scientific explanations of the physics behind the alien habitat, and interviews with air transport security officials, which might include a character I’ve thought of including in a possible sequel to the story.

And of course, this blog will be following the story as well, and explaining, spoiler-free, some of the ideas behind each new update on The Seul-Coeur Logs. All these websites – BlankSpace Publications, Adam Riggio Writes, and The Seul-Coeur Logs – along with the book itself, will take part in building the world of Under the Trees, Eaten. The motives of writing Under the Trees, Eaten included my own concerns about science-fiction storytelling, and the characters themselves shape their narratives in ways that suggest they are familiar with the notion that they don’t live in the real world, but in a science-fiction narrative. Understanding the meta-narrative elements of the novella will help a reader see how I put it together, and seeing the cogs and wheels that assemble the whole is part of the fun.

IowaLit 3: Using Stereotypes to Overthrow Stereotypes, Composing, 18/02/2014

Continued from previous. Canadiana is one of those words that every Canadian understands when they hear it, and can actually give a pretty reasonable definition if you ask them. St. Augustine would encounter no problems here. Such literature would be a paradigm for how Eric Bennett describes the University of Iowa model, as Canadiana short stories and books would be composed almost entirely of vivid evocations of a time and place, usually an isolated, rural place, and a time before the intense connectivity of modern technology. I’m reminded of Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye, in part about the difficult task the protagonist has of tracking down a former childhood friend. Set today, this sequence would usually last no more than a moment of searching on the internet for a Facebook page. 

Part of what I actually enjoy about Atwood's
fiction is how much, in her later work, she fought
those awful stereotypes of Canadian literature
that she catalogued so well.

The point is that Canadiana has virtually no positive connotations, at least to a contemporary audience. It’s dull, boring, and about a country that doesn’t really exist anymore, the all-white anglo-British wasteland carved out of wilderness where nothing changes and nothing even really thrives.* Atwood didn’t call her book of literary theory encyclopedically describing and defining Canadiana Survival for nothing.

* So not only is Canadiana boring, but it’s implicitly racist too, often overwriting and invalidating the presence of francophone Canadians, as well as the existence of indigenous peoples and non-British immigrants. The Canadiana model whitewashes this land.

But the form of Canadiana is the linguistic evocation of the place with such vividness that each individual description becomes a singularity, each story and novel a unique point on this continuum of desolation. The literature of Canadiana is the apex of what the Iowan approach demands of creative expression. And the exhausted emptiness of Canadiana today demonstrates the emptiness of the Iowan approach to literature.

Yet we don’t live in a world that has seen new literature completely robbed of philosophical and political ambition. For one thing, even the typical Iowan model produces political relevance: the ability to craft a literary singularity that defies all reduction to an ideological position politicizes the apolitical itself. Paul Engle the cultural Cold Warrior achieved all he wanted in this regard. The question is whether there is a way forward from the model, and Bennett’s central critique (aside from the usual questions of whether any politically radical notion or action can survive CIA sponsorship) is that the Iowa style has stagnated. Institutionalizing creative writing within a university degree system that requires a continual influx of majors tailors an education in writing to the less-talented participants. The techniques that are most often taught are the easiest to master, and the more talented who could handle ambitious approaches are left to fend for themselves. 

It would have been strange enough
for a Lovecraft story to have a female
protagonist at all, let alone one as
strange and powerful as Jo.

I crafted my own approach to overcoming a stagnating field of fiction in my own novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, which has been called a twisted revitalization of Canadiana, ironically enough. The story is, in part, an engagement with one symptom of literary stagnation, the reliance on genre tropes. Current alternative literature is seeing a boom in works dealing with the ideas and iconography of H. P. Lovecraft. I’m not an innovator in using iconography plainly inspired by Lovecraft for my own original work. The comic series Fatale is probably the best example of this trend that I can think of because it uses Lovecraft’s imagery in relation to a style of character that would never have fit in Lovecraft’s world, a femme fatale with psychic powers of the sort found in more futuristic science-fiction genres. 

The first extension of Lovecraft’s genre after his death was by August Derleth. Although popular at the time, Derleth’s stories are recognized as rather retrograde. While Lovecraft created the legendary iconography of Cthulhu, Derleth synthesized all these elements into a unified, internally consistent mythology. Essentially, Derleth completed the Lovecraftian mythos, turning it from a set of related images into a canon. Most people now understand this to be a terrible thing to do, because it means there could only be one style of Lovecraftian stories, those which were consistent with the details of the mythology. Thankfully, writers have since learned how to overcome this terrible act of creative limitation. We ignore it.

So Under the Trees, Eaten introduced a realistic contemporary female character (with just a hint of implicit genre-awareness à la Buffy) into a Lovecraftian horror story featuring a smattering of Canadiana tropes and my own gleefully pessimistic approach to human drama. It’s the simple story of a woman coming to grips with her parents’ deaths in the context of a Lovecraftian contract with otherworldly aliens, through scenes describing imagery and events with the meticulous and evocative detail of the Iowa style according to Bennett's account. Pulp meets feminism meets literary singularity. To be continued . . . 

Memories that Haunt and Linger, Composing, 30/07/2013

Of everything that My Son My Son What Have Ye Done suggests, one aspect on which I want to concentrate is how it depicts mental illness as a kind of haunting. Herzog never meant to depict what he called “clinical insanity,” giving an accurate picture of what medically goes wrong in a case of violently deranged mental illness. He wanted to create a kind of lyric poem of violent mental illness.

This post is the first in over three weeks about my fiction writing. For the moment, most of my projects in fiction are either with editors, under review, or still so nascent that I don’t have much to say. But Herzog’s film made me think about some of the themes in my novella that have become more obvious to me after I’ve gone back over the manuscript.

When it comes to my writing, I’m a meticulous planner. In terms of plot and character, all the points are very specifically assembled. And my novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, is the most tightly planned of them all. I wrote it in five months, the shortest time it has ever taken me to assemble a project of this size and detail. In its initial conception, and throughout writing, I had several key ideas in mind. First was its nature as a genre collision, or more accurately a genre explosion. This is another idea that I sourced from Phil Sandifer, that genre fiction best progresses not by executing genres, but by mashing them into each other and seeing what new narrative shapes emerge. His analysis of Rose, the first episode of the revived Doctor Who series, illustrates this technique in excruciating and fascinating detail.

Imagery related to ants is also very important for Under the
Trees, Eaten. But this post isn't about ants.

Under the Trees, Eaten does this with the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. I was reading Lovecraft again for a philosophical essay I was working on in late Fall when the man who is now my editor contacted me to see if I had any novella-sized ideas. I read his email in the morning, and by the time I wrote back that afternoon, I had the entire book sketched out. It collides the structure and setting of a typical story in the style of Lovecraft with a middle-class intelligent female protagonist often created by Joss Whedon or Russell T. Davies. A Rose Tyler who lives in Boston, never met the Doctor, and became a property manager. She instead meets the mysterious man who takes her to a town that should not exist.

My central focus in designing the novella’s narrative and writing it in detail was the genre collision. The Lovecraft aesthetic is about our ordinary world being invaded and pressured by the totally alien, epic monstrosities that overwhelm the human. The story of Under the Trees, Eaten shows how the violence of this alien invasion is no match for the destructive force of humanity’s petty cruelties. Cthulhu’s power is abstract and empty compared to the visceral terror of domestic abuse or rape. 

Yet when I went back over my manuscript, another idea jumped out at me, which I hadn’t noticed before. I take this as a good sign, that a piece of writing contains so many interpretive possibilities that even its writer doesn’t see all of them at once. Under the Trees, Eaten also examines how we are haunted by our past: regrets, missed opportunities, personal tragedies, loss. The character whose actions are the catalyst for the main plot, the protagonist’s father, is haunted by the death of his wife to the point of mental instability. The protagonist herself is haunted by the death of her mother, and then the derangement and death of her father. This isn’t a spoiler: the first sentence of the first chapter describes her father’s funeral. This haunting transforms the world into a hostile place, filled with dangerous and destabilizing spaces. The protagonist’s legs collapse out from under her as she faints on entering her father’s apartment for the first time in years, which is paralleled at later, genuinely spoiler-constitutive, events. 

The traumas of her past weigh her down and halt her movement. And the arc of the novella is her regaining power over her past. Most stories about overcoming trauma I find quite unrealistic, because they tend to speak a language of getting rid of the past, leaving the tortuous parts of your history behind you. But one can’t leave the past behind this way. Your past isn’t like an article of clothing, but like a part of your body. Your past, your memory, makes you who you are. Her traumas are still heavy, and they are still with her, but she deals with those traumas in the way that I think most people do, or at least attempt to do, in real life. 

She grows strong enough to carry them.