Kindliness: Reflecting on Writing Horror

I wrote another horror story today. Strange. I read plenty of weird, macabre, and suspenseful fiction these days and have always enjoyed scary movies, especially those that are tongue-in-cheek funny. Writing, though, comes with its own baggage. Generally I am very perturbed and uncomfortable writing these stories. Violence increasingly turns my stomach whether it is fictionalized or real. I still enjoy my frights, but prefer them to be suspenseful and quick rather than the increasingly popular drawn out torture-style violence. (Cultural anthropologists are examining more and more the relationship between torture-style violence in entertainment and the reality of torture in global politics, finding some illuminating tension therein.)

The parts in these stories that I write most rapidly are the violent parts. In a way, I can envision them most clearly and that plays its part, but I think what is really at play is the clarity of that vision frightens me and I want it out of me. This is particularly true with the torture scene I have written in my weird fiction-style detective story. Most of the torture is twice removed, first because a character is telling the story to the protagonist/narrator, and secondly because it occurs behind a heavy wooden door and is mostly auditory. When the image is clear, it comes all at once to the character and weighs on him for the rest of the telling. Vincenzi--the protagonist--even muses later that Murlough wanted to tell the story to get it out, to get it away from him. In a way, my writing of horror fiction feels very akin to that: Getting away from it.

Not only that, but my stories can be so readily cited to a medley of memories, acquaintances and friends, present conditions, and new challenges. This present one was inspired pretty directly by Joyce Carol Oates' reading of a Eudora Welty story which takes place from the perspective of a murderer of a black man involved in the Civil Rights Movement, being moved by the story, going to my apartment bathroom, and noticing the shower curtain was pulled to the side. I almost immediately had an opener:

She would leave the shower curtain to the side, not spread out to cover it all. Every time I might go in for one thing or another I would tidy it over, maybe rinse a little out of the tub. Just practice a little kindliness by not mentioning it. That's how I look at it: A kindliness.

You see, cleanliness has played a weird and powerful role in moving in. I want to make the place welcoming for my roommates and guests, especially since I have been here longer, and so cleanliness is a means to make space for them. I don't want it to be perfect and I am not pathological about it, but I was struck by the potential to be so.

I drew very much from a former roommate who drove me up the wall. She condescended regularly and made even my room a very small place to live. Ultimately I found escape in the library and an unused common room. I sort of set up a camp away from my place where I knew she would have to go out of her way to complain, an issue I couldn't really handle if I were to complete the papers on which I was working.

Again, I am struck by the oddness of writing the story. The protagonist is, to me anyway, a clear hybridization of this former roommate and myself. The narrator is an uncomfortable and passive-aggressive synthesis of this characterological conflict with a subdued pathology about her. Really, though, believable characters--especially villains--must be heavily founded on specific people. It is the flat, bland character that destroys the functioning of a story and the color of sound writing.

Simultaneously I am very hesitant and distinctly anxious about sharing this story. My current situation is panning out very well and the violence has nothing to do with my own situation. Rather, it is a magnification, a frightening examination of the realities of sharing space with someone; especially when the attempt to share space results in the failure of real cooperative cohabitation. In a way, it is all about potential energy. I recall physics class in high school where we discussed potential energy, like a boulder at the top of the hill having the potential energy to roll down the hill and build up momentum. The narrator in this story recognizes that potential energy and acts on, descending in this tidy, maddened way down the hill and into action.

If you recognize my commitment to non-violence and want to read the story, let me know. I am happy to share it, but the notion of posting it is anxiety-producing. I think about this process openly because I am on ground I have only ever seen from above and now I am on it, navigating it with my own feet and hands and eyes and ears. I can't say that writing macabre fiction is especially satisfying except in that it is patently unsettling and I generally hold that being unsettled is positive. Being unsettled, one sees the world in its shakiness, in its uncertainty, and its various conflicting potentials.