A short little entry this week as I’m head-down in novel revisions. Due to my immigration nightmares and the fact my poor co-writer had to get hip surgery so he could continue functioning as a human being, we’ve been slow on finishing up The Dead Takes The A Train, a truly feral entry in the urban fantasy genre. It features a young woman named Julie, who on top of fighting demons and mouthing off to gods, is also dealing with the utter terror of turning 30 without a back-up plan.
But we’re getting there.
Right now, I’m doing a pass that Richard has lovingly titled ‘The Squishy Edit’ and he’s not wrong. Case in point:
Then the creature birthed itself from that bloom of meat with a long, pleased groan of a sigh. Its body was a spiraling lattice of gristle, fervid with grape-like red tumors, some of which erupted as it moved, expelling phlegm and a cancer of stubby embryonic hands. The grasping neoplasms multiplied in number, until the thing was frilled with them, flower-like. At its crown was what resembled a horse’s skull and that too was ravaged by malignancies: pebbly sarcoma fruiting through the joints, the eye sockets. It was the color of the light in the room, the same blighted white.
I re-read Kathleen Jennings’ dizzyingly beautiful Travelogues: vignettes from trains in motions, and it made think about my preoccupation with the monstrous. (I re-read the book with as much regularity as Finnegan’s Field by Angela Slatter. Both works are astonishing in the way they reveal more, and more, and more with ever subsequent study: details in the prose, secrets in their asides.) I write so much gore I suspect because I’m a diagnosable hypochondriac, the kind of person who frequently becomes paralyzed by anxiety spirals where I hyper-focus on studying statistics, disease presentation, patient stories, the works. I’ve reviewed pages upon pages of medical photos: comparisons between healthy organs and those wrecked by disease. The end-stages of rare cancers. Stories of dying, how best to prepare. Euthanasia options and the implications. The bureaucracy of preparing to die — because just in case it happens unexpectedly soon, I’d like to do something useful about it.
Jennings writes in a blogpost about Travelogues how much of the book (which you had to read because I cannot begin to express how stunning its observations are, the beauty that emerges from a poet intentionally deskills as a photographer to better capture the world in prose) is ‘involved processing an industrial landscape through the language of enchantment.’ And I think in a strange way this is what I do with the gore I write, the grotesquerie I slop through the page. It’s my way of processing my medical fears, of capturing the inflections that so scare me, of finding the parts that are beautiful despite their alien nature, of coming to terms with the strange reality that is being a wad of fatty tissue encysted in bone and piloting a meat-mecha that functions mostly independently of you.
Or maybe it’s because my parents made me watch John Carpenter’s The Thing before I was even nine. Who the hell knows.
Anyway. I fell asleep last night watching Dr. Cabbie, a rom-com which is about a young Indian doctor who comes to Canada only to find that he can’t get a job to save his life, and now has to drive a cab for a living. It’s really good, but it is also painful to watch as a first-generation sort-of immigrant.
So much for a short entry.
Here is a baby photo of the tortie WHO KEPT TRYING TO DIE ON ME FOR MONTHS LIKE SERIOUSLY, SHE CHEWED OUT HER OWN STITCHES THAT LITTLE MONSTER.
Such a fantastically thoughtful entry! That parallel between Jennings processing the industrial through enchantment, and you processing the medical through horror is really stunning and insightful! THANK YOU!
The fuzzy little buggers do have a real knack for stress-testing our hearts don't they? Both figuratively and literally.
They're still worth every bit, of course. *sends sympathies and empathies*