She is Risen

On the last day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

An ornamental story of erotic horror and a bauble of kinky intent.

When I met Clive Barker, I remember telling him something like, “Three months before I discovered masturbation and three years before I discovered drugs, I discovered your fiction.”

He clasped my hand and said, “Thanks!!  What a wonderful series of events to be included in!”  For the record, I have never discovered drugs nor have I masturbated.  I am a zen non-entity of exquisite, tantric frustration and tension.  But we’ll get back to honest Clive and his influence on my life as a sober celibate in a moment.

Where was I?

Okay, so writing “Baby Girl” has been aptly described as an excavation project.  The problem with excavating that which you call your mind and could figuratively pass for your soul is that it’s a painful process.  Oh, it’s fun!  Don’t get me wrong.  I was sharing that last dialogue exchange with my dearest muse and she has figured that it comes from a place of pain.

Well, yeah.  Sort of.  Look, the reality is that writing of this story is actually kind of fun.  It’s a way to rearrange memories and fantasies and mix it up with a heaping yellow snow pile of wishful thinking and poetic license.  You know, it’s kind of like a Snoopy SnoCone Machine. 

Be that as it may, I have a tendency to overthink things (along with a murky, procrastinating work ethic) and this makes the process of writing this particular story really sloooooooooow.  But I have a cure!  Nooooo, it’s not to cognatively reprogram my work ethic!  Circumventing a slow work process is kind of like trying to cure a hangover.  You can’t quite get rid of the hangover, but you can do something to make it a bit more tolerable.

This is why I’m pleased to announce “Totem!” 

“Totem” is a short erotic horror story that began as a Tanqueray-glazed gleam in my eye while chewing on some lovely rosemary/sea salt/garlic bread.  I had this idea about a group of folks in the woods, armed and wary.  They know that SOMETHING (The Blair Witch perhaps?) is out there and they’re waiting for it to show itself.  Out of the woods shuffles a lone indvidual wearing a creepy canvas mask with a funky, alarming face painted on it (kind of like those paintings of Satan with a bulbous head an an animalistic expression that used to disturb me back in Catholic school).

The stranger certainly looks human, but most people watching him are expecting some bizarre, creepy behavior on the count of, um, something or other.  Imagine if some authority (or vigilante group?) decided to get to the bottom of the Blair Witch kids’ disappearance.  They know they’re up against something bizarre and scary, but not sure what to expect.  And what they get is some mute weirdo in a creepy canvas bag mask.

And then all hell breaks loose.  A group of people including two young women who were just along for the ride are watching from what they hoped was a safe distance, but there is clearly no such thing under these circumstances.  Suddenly, anyone who hasn’t immediately disappeared starts suffering what feels like the onset of a nasty migraine.  As their symptoms escalate so does the sense that random demonic possession is even nastier than it looks in those cheesy horror movies.  The twist is that it comes with a nice helping of libidinous ecstasy.

So, will all of our heroes and heroines get a nasty migraine that turns them into fierce carnal demons?  Or will the entire campsite descend into orgiastic madness that would make Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful blush?

Stay tuned.  Once I have a finished draft and an idea of how we’re going to format original content on http://www.sheisrisen.com you’ll learn the answer to these headache-inducing questions.

My plan is to have a draft finished by New Year’s Eve, but those who know me also know how I am about deadlines.

But who knows?  With enough egg in my noggin, perhaps I can ably churn out some yuletide in the form of demonic lust.

Who wants to place bets?

Oh, and to quickly explain the Clive Barker thing:  I was a huge fan of Barker back in my fresh-faced youth.  It started with a taste for early Stephen King which was inevitable if you grew up in the ’80s with parents and other elder relatives who were casual King enthusiasts.  And then somewhere along the line, I tripped over the hype surrounding Mr. Barker and his cinematic debut, HELLRAISER.  See, the thing is that Barker is not a natural born filmmaker.  He’s a writer and a painter who talked his way into the job of directing one of his own adaptations through sheer charisma and chutzpah.

The movies were one thing (flawed, creatively nasty and ambitious), but his writing was something else altogether.  Barker had a unique voice for weaving intense violence, baroque fantasy and extreme eroticism all with the same, lilting voice.  As my former English teacher (and editor of “Midnight Marquee” magazine) described it, Barker had a way of making profanity seem classy.

At a young, impressionable age, Clive Barker helped me to understand that there really are no limits or social taboos that you can’t explore with writing.  On the page, even the sky isn’t the limit.  So, while I’m not a gorehound by any means, i came to appreciate extreme fiction as a means of expressing oneself..  Of course, it’s not all about gore or violence, but when you’re reading someone who cut his teeth on horror, that comes with the territory.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve cooled off on the need to write that kind of extreme fiction.  Once I start getting to know my characters, it’s hard to force them to submit to the tortures of the damned.  “Baby Girl” has suffered just a little because of my cold feet.  Not that I need for the “Baby Girl” characters to get flayed and encased in leather like the demons of HELLRAISER, but the story actually does have an s-&-m element to it which allows me to flex my muscle when it comes to writing sexuality.  That’s all well and good, but the set-up and tentative trajectory for the sequel requires a bit more “conventional” horror story elements to be introduced even though I don’t think of “Baby Girl” as a horror story.

I’ve sort of worked my way around that by reigning in certain elements (the undead theme in the sequel is been reworked to be more about living with cancer rather than being a sentient zombie) and keeping my far out story a bit closer to earth.

With “Totem,” however, I plan to push  myself and see just how far I’m willing to go.  The younger me who worshipped Mr. Barker would hopefully approve of what I’m going to do here.

So, will I deliver a quick and dirty piece of eroticized horror?  Or will I submit to my cold feet?

I’ll let you know.