New Visions From Old Formulas
[Note: Please excuse typos, as this went longer than I intended.]
I'm in the process of writing two novels. I've adopted this approach because I find it easier, counter intuitive as that may be. I'm very bad at sticking with one project. My brain doesn't work that way. I find I'm more productive when I have more than one project going. It affords me the opportunity to work closely on one for a few days, then give it a break, while going back to the other and feeling like I'm excited to be back in the world I'm trying to build, with the characters who populated it. It feels fresh again. I'm a believer in the idea that my subconscious mind is turning over and playing with different elements, even when my conscious mind isn't, and it can take time for those to take a form that's ready to be written down. It at least seems giving each project a break for a few days, gives my subconscious a little time to get ahead of where I left off.
I have both a vampire novel and a slasher novel in progress. They have in common that they were both, in part at least, born out of previous ideas that were shelved or altogether abandoned.
The slasher novel began with another story. That other story is something specific, trying to play with the tropes of the slasher sub genre, some of which have been there since the start, and others that have come to popularity in the last two decades. It was my own way of approaching a different idea for a Final Girl novel. Even though there has been a proverbial slew of those in the last decade, I think the idea I was working on at the time was interesting and different enough to very much be it's own thing, not just a warmed over version of any of those stories. Honestly, as I was in the process of developing that story, which for me involves writing relatively detailed character bios, I realized there was an opportunity for that novel to be a sequel, and the idea for a trilogy that's different and unusual started to take shape.
The slasher novel I'm working on now is the first story in that trilogy.
The story for this novel really grew out of a conversation I overheard one night. I'd gone to a local restaurant/bar, and it was pretty full. Rather than wait and rather than take up a whole table, I decided to sit at the bar. It's an L shaped bar, and I was a few seats from the corner. I've be lying if I said I knew whether they were there when I sat down or if they sat down after I did, but as I was waiting for my food to arrive, I caught the name of an infamous serial killer who is known to have been active in the state I live in. There was a couple sitting to my right, the man closest, and then next to him, on the corner, a woman who was with him. There was another woman, sitting round the bend of that corner, with another man. The two women were talking about this serial killer.
They started trying to establish some connection between this serial killer and the area I live. Between them they made several claims about this murderers different connections to the area, which I knew were speculative, at best. This particular individual is known to have lived and been active far north of here, and as far west of here as you can get, while still being in the state.
As the conversation progressed, it turned toward a familiar kind of competition. "My friends cousin knew him." "My coworkers aunt is 100% sure she escaped being one of his victims.." and so on. It seemed both women claimed to know or knew of someone who had a story of working with, having gone on a date with him, turned down a ride him from while hitchhiking, had some connection to this infamous murderer.
This conversation went on for what was a good thirty or forty-five minutes. I was listening to all of this as I pretended to watch a basketball game and look at my phone. Not long before I was finished with the food I'd ordered, the two couples paid their tabs and left. It was such a strange conversation. I kept mulling it over in my head. Why that conversation? It wasn't like he committed any murders here or even within an hour or two of here. Why embellish all of those details, like some twisted version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?
I'm not above admitting that I was feeling a bit self righteous about the whole thing (no shock to anyone who knows me or reads my Patreon, I'm sure), especially that they didn't seem to be at all familiar with any of the verifiable information related to the story. Then it occurred to me that I knew they were embellishing so much of what they said. I only knew because of a combination of my obsession with horror (this individual and his crimes have been used at least a partial basis for a number of on screen maniacs, as well as had a number of dramatic films and documentaries made about him), but also because I went through a period in my early twenties where I was kind of obsessed with the figure of the serial killer in American media and what is essentially modern folklore. I knew they were embellishing, because I'd read a fair amount about this individual, and his deeds, so had familiarity with the records of his movements. I may not have had some macabre desire to feel like I was in proximity to him. I didn't and don't understand the odd competition for some kind of status , but I certainly had enough of an interest to seek out and learn what I had, which is only a few degrees of difference. All of it signals an odd relationship to these heinous acts.
It also made me think of the "based on a true story" trope in horror films. Among the most famous are the opening monologue to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Robert Bloch's Psycho, which was of course adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Both were purportedly inspired by Ed Gein, whom the press tabbed The Butcher of Plainfield and The Plainfield Ghoul. In reality, Gein likely suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, if medical reports from the time are reliable, and he'd spent the majority of his life being abused by a religious zealot of a mother. The story of Ed Gein is closer to a tragedy, as much for him as for his victims, than it is to the stories of the men in the pantheon of infamous serial killers. Due to the Wisconsin court's structure at the time, Gein was first found guilty of a murder he admitted to committing, then found incompetent by reason of insanity in a separate trial. Gein died in a hospital for the criminally insane.
For Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, visits to his family in Wisconsin had come with stories about The Plainfield Ghoul. In interviews, Hooper relayed it more or less as the kind of story adults would use to scare children into behaving well. A number of the details from the Gein case made it into Chain Saw, including the masks made of human skin, and using human remains as part of his home decorating. Gein admitted during police interrogation he'd been robbing graves for the materials needed in his crafting projects, and that the corset made of human skin had been his attempt to start fashioning a skin suit to become his mother, to "crawl inside her body." Robert Bloch used the fact that Gein's delusions brought him to grave robbing for the shocking final reveal in Psycho, as well as his fixation on his mother, which then became even more entrenched in the culture when Hitchcock so masterfully executed both. Thomas Harris also borrowed from Gein's "skin suit" in creating Buffalo Bill for Silence of the Lambs.
Their claims to being "true stories" helped give both Hooper's film and Bloch's novel part of their impact with audiences. Claiming to be true didn't mean they had to have too close a relationship to the truth, but it certainly helped their success, both in their artistic intents and financially.
Probably the most infamous example of "based on a true story" is The Blair Witch Project (TBWP), which then lead me to think of the true crime genre. TBWP essentially represented itself as a kind of true crime artifact, and in the marketing. All of it was presented as if it was in service of the search for the missing students who were in the footage that is TBWP. It basically erased the line between True Crime and "based on a true story." It was a kind of narrative magic trick or if you're less charitable, a con. It all seems relatively harmless, until you get to the part of the story where the three people who were the center of the phenomenon, as well as a significant part of the creative process, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, got screwed. The people of Burkittsville, where the film is set, but very little of it was actually shot, aren't too keen on the tourism it inspired in the years following either. The fact that the marketing campaign was so successful at convincing the public the footage in TBWP was indeed the last anyone had seen of the people in it, helped drive the film to become the phenomenon it was.
These lines of thought, combined with the rise in what's being called "dark tourism" (tourism associated with travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy), the ethical questions around "true crime entertainment," have come together as the influences for the slasher novel I'm working on. I've seen a few slasher movies and read a few books that give a passing nod to the themes and ideas at the center of it, but I don't know of any that fully embrace them the way this is. I think I have something unique in this novel, and I think the trilogy I have in mind would be even more unique once it's concluded.
The vampire novel I have currently in progress has a similarly labyrinthian path to its genesis. Like the slasher novel, it started with a very different idea. I got about halfway through the first draft and realized I couldn't tell the story I was attempting to. To put it bluntly, I didn't know the world I was attempting to portray well enough, and I knew the novel couldn't have the kind of impact I was hoping for if the world didn't feel real enough, and the characters born from that world wouldn't work as a result. I was also creating a new creature/monster, and if I couldn't get the characters and the world to feel real enough, having a new creature people have never seen before would pull it all down on itself. In order to learn enough to portray that world in a realistic way, it would have meant spending a few months in reading biographies and autobiographies of some "corporate titans." My reading habits and interests are varied, but that I have really never had much interest in the biographies and autobiographies of "great men," especially the variety who fashioned themselves modern day warriors of conquest while sitting in cushy offices and traveling in private planes and vacationing on obscene yachts. It's maybe the most uninteresting subject in the world, as far as I'm concerned.
Two or three months ago, I came across a photo as I was scrolling through social media and I started thinking again that I've always wanted to write a vampire novel. I've always wanted to read a story or see a film centered on a group of women vampires, somewhat akin to the vampires in The Lost Boys. I started thinking about who those characters could be, and what I'd want in a story like it, which brought me to another long time favorite vampire film, Katherine Bigelow's Near Dark, and a more recent favorite, one of the few that's not Euro-trash and features female vampires, Neil Jordan's Byzantium. That combination brought an image to mind, of four women standing in the middle of a long straight road, in a flat landscape, silhouetted by a full moon, the sun having gone down, but still projecting some red into the sky, with a vintage sixties black Camaro SS on the shoulder. It felt like it could have been a deleted scene from Terence Malick's Badlands, if that had been about vampires. A very basic story, and a sense of tone started to form around that image, and the one that had got me thinking about all this to begin with.
In trying to understand where I wanted this story to go, I started thinking about the history of the vampire in literature and film, and snagged on the fact that the has vampire been used as an allegory for the aristocrat as predator. At that point, I realized I could use this vampire novel to deal with themes and say what it is I wanted to say in the novel I'd abandoned three months before. I struggled for a few weeks to come up with a structure that would give me the best chance of giving the reader the kind of experience I was thinking about, related to these themes and started thinking about Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as something I could pull influence from. I'm currently reading Paul Tremblay's latest novel, Horror Movie, as well as a non-fiction book about the making of The Blair Witch Project by Matt Blazi called 8 Days in the Woods. That I want to pull from Blood Meridian means I finally have the excuse I've been looking for to read it again (as awed as I am by how good it is, it's a bleak novel, for those who haven't read it), and it's next on the list.
This is, without doubt, the most ambitious project I've ever even considered. It's in the middle stages of "development," the work I do before I sit down and start writing a first draft, which means character bios mostly, but in this case also means a rough timeline, a list of locations (I'll have to sit down with a roadmap of the midwest and western US), and a list of characters who'll be filling a specific role in the novel, as well as bios for them.
I'm excited about both of these. I think the slasher novel will be something that can satisfy the fanatics for the slasher sub genre, but also bring something to the table for people who don't just plainly hate it and are general horror fans. It is going to be a slasher novel. I'm not trying to recreate the wheel, but I am trying to inject it with ideas and themes I've never seen in a slasher on film or in print. I have to thank Stephen Graham Jones for making me think differently about how much substance a slasher novel can carry, if done well.
I'm also excited about the vampire novel, for many reasons. I've never seen or read a vampire story, told in the way I have in mind. The way that I've come up with to approach it, in basic structure, has room to make it feel epic in scope, and intimate at the same time. I'm also really looking forward to writing the central character too. I think I've come up with a way to use this structure to portray her in a way that will be unique, and will give the themes heft without veering into being didactic. It will be violent and bleak novel, overall, but I think I can also inject some pretty dark humor into it as well.
I have confidence in the ideas behind both of these books. The question is, do I have the talent and/or skill to make them as good as I think they can be. The only way to find an answer is to write them, and find out.