It's funny what you wind up missing during a lockdown

It's funny what you wind up missing during a lockdown. The restaurant at the top of Nordstrom, Bar Verde, has a prime view of the mall—a view that was particularly joy-sparking at Christmas, when the tree was up. Almost from the start, the staff became pals, and the restaurant became a place where I established myself as a regular. The rush of human contact was a particular stimulant after working at home alone all day in a silent house. In the winter of 2018, I re-read Peter Straub's Ghost Story there over a series of snowy evenings. In December of 2019, I did my frantic last-minute revisions on my story for Matt Bechtel's anthology, The Dystopian States of America, there. I've had countless lunches and dinners with much-loved friends and colleagues there. Like the bar in Cheers, it was a place where everyone knew my name, and my preferred table was nicknamed "Michael's booth." With the city shut down completely, especially indoor dining, and social distancing and sheltering in place, "Christmas" has never felt more like a social media construct—so, thank God for social media, even as the snow falls and the neighbourhood lights sparkle. I miss my friends fiercely, and what I wouldn't give to be sitting in Michael's booth with them tonight, dreaming of flying to Palm Springs to be with my California family on the 22nd of December, as I have every year for the past thiry, looking out at the lit Christmas tree in the mall (where I was the Santa Claus in 1985), cherishing the memories, and blessing this season as an embodiment of the people and things I love the most in the world. On the other hand, it's only a year until Christmas 2021.

The road home to Willowpoint Falls: an appreciation of Frank LaLoggia's Lady in White

It opens with an autumnal homecoming, as so many of the best ghost stories do.

Franklin Scarlatti, a bestselling Los Angeles-based horror writer, lands in an anonymous, unremarkable American airport. Hailing a taxi, he asks the driver to take him to Willowpoint Falls.  As the car sweeps through the bucolic, sourball-colored October landscape, he chats with the driver, who has recognized him. Scarlatti asks him to pull up to a desolate graveyard.

Inside the wrought-iron gates, the writer and the cabbie stand in front of two modest, weatherworn gravestones. “You knew them?” asks the driver. “Long time ago,” replies Scarlatti. Then, after a perfect pause, the driver says, “You don’t really believe all that spooky stuff you write about, do you?”

And we’re off.

As someone who writes scary stories, I’m frequently asked what my favourite horror movies are, particularly around Halloween, when the question becomes, “What’s your favourite Halloween movie?”

I have the stock answers at the ready: the original Halloween (1978) and Halloween II (1979), Trick Or Treat (1986), Trick R Treat (2007), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993.)

However, when I’m asked what I consider essential viewing on Halloween night, I always answer Lady In White, a title that instantly divides the listeners into one of two camps: the generic omnivorous horror film watcher, or the cognoscenti.

Lady In White is an esoteric gem from 1988 by Frank LaLoggia, a filmmaker born and raised in Rochester, NY. The story takes elements from a local Rochester legend about the ghost of a woman who haunts Durand-Eastman Park, searching for her daughter.

The film, an extended flashback, truly begins in 1962. Nine-year-old Frankie Scarlatti (Lukas Haas) is growing up in Willowpoint Falls in a multigenerational Italian-American family composed of his grandparents (Angelo Bertolini and the legendary Renata Vanni in a critically-acclaimed turn as Mamma Assunta) his father, Angelo (Alex Rocco), and his brother, Geno (Jason Presson.)

On Halloween night, he’s the subject of a cruel after-school prank by two of his classmates: he is locked inside his classroom’s cloakroom, and left.  Terrified and alone, he eventually falls asleep and dreams of his late mother’s funeral. Waking in tears, he encounters the ghost of a little girl, Melissa Ann Montgomery (Joelle Jacobi) and witnesses what appears to be a spectral reenactment of her murder.  Moments later, the cloakroom door bursts open. Frankie is attacked and nearly killed by an assailant he cannot recognize in the dark. While unconscious, he has a vision of the little girl, who reveals that she is looking for her mother and pleads for his help. His father, who has learned about the prank from the bullies, rescues him.

During his recovery, Frankie realizes that he is the sole survivor of a series of eleven serial attacks on children in the area between 1952 and 1962, and that Melissa, the ghost girl he encountered in the cloakroom, had been one of the victims.

Even writing this, I’m absurdly conscious of spoilers, which strikes me as a tad precious, given that the film came out in 1988 and there are already reams of reviews, articles, and essays about Lady In White available, a click away. But, like all of us who love it, I’m protective. Wikipedia alone carries a detailed synopsis, so I won’t take up your time with summaries here.

Suffice to say that the arc of the story is Frankie’s attempt to reunite Melissa with her mother. Along the way, he uncovers the horrifying secret of Melissa’s murder, suffering the critical loss of his own innocence in the process, and unconsciously laying the groundwork for his own writer’s life.

I was born in 1962, the year in which the film was set. Nine years later, in 1971, like Frankie I was a boy who dreamed of being a writer when I grew up.

There is a scene early on, where Frankie, dressed in his department store Dracula costume, is asked to read a Halloween story he’s written to the class. His teacher, Miss La Della (Lucy Lee Flippin) shushes the bullies who sneer and catcall, but within minutes Frankie realizes he has the class eating out of his hand, suddenly realizing, perhaps for the first time, that the shy, gentle, awkward, maybe even weird boy they’ve overlooked has a talent that causes them to sit up straight and notice. It’s an aha! moment not unfamiliar to many of us who go on to write books.

Likewise, the scene in the middle of the film, when Frankie reverently withdraws his first typewriter from the cardboard box in which it has been sent. It’s his prize for selling a requisite number of greeting cards, another aha! moment that goes straight to my heart, taking me back to the Christmas of 1972, when my mother surprised me my first typewriter, a manual Smith Corona she’d used in college.

Like Stephen King’s novels IT and Stand By Me, or Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, or Dan Simmons’ novel Summer of Night, LaLoggia’s Lady In White is the story of a boy growing up in what is colloquially referred to as “a more innocent time,” and trying to navigate the world in which he finds himself.

Paradoxically, it’s also a PG-rated film that doesn’t seem like one. 

Unlike so many “family friendly” ghost stories, Lady In White is entirely free of the saccharine aftertaste that plagues so many films written for a “family” audience by writers who appear to have entirely forgotten what it was like to be a child. There is darkness in Lady In White, and it’s real and pitiless—the serial murder of children, the death of a parent, the betrayal of a child by a well-loved adult, violence, racial prejudice, and terrible family secrets.

The film is secondarily set against the backdrop of the early civil-rights era, as a ten-year old boy growing up in a predominantly white heartland might have seen it. It features a poignant, and ultimately violent, subplot involving an African American janitor being scapegoated for the attack on Frankie and the murders of the eleven children.

In an otherwise generous review in the New York Times, LaLoggia was taken to task by reviewer Caryn James for  “the heavy-handed subplot involving 60’s racism [which] loads the film with more social weight than it can handle.”

It’s a criticism of the film I have heard before, and with all due respect to Ms. James, I disagree completely, and here’s why.  

At the heart of it, Lady In White is a film about morality and justice, and the morality guiding it is Frankie’s—the morality of a well-taught nine-year-old boy driven by instinctive goodness and imagination. The same impulse that drives him to help Melissa find her mother and heal her pain is the one that allows Frankie to see the ugly racism of his peers, and the adults of his town, and call it out for what it is. The film is more than able to bear the weight of that commentary.

Interestingly enough, that “heavy-handed” period racial subplot is perhaps more relevant in 2016 than it was in 1988, when the film came out, which is something even the New York Times couldn’t have predicted.

With the thousands of now-forgotten films that have come out since 1988, Lady In White continues to tell a story containing such eternal truths that it is loved—revered, even—by millions of people all over the world, and discovered by many others with every passing year.

While writing this, I emailed my best friend, L.A.-based film director Ron Oliver who in the mid-80s wrote what he since describes as “a loud-mouthed, slam-bang, slightly satirical haunted high school movie” called Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou. He’s a savvy fellow, and a snappy dresser, and he’s gone on to very great things.

Ron and I both grew up in the 60s and 70s, both of us horror film fans. I went on to write novels, he went on to write and direct television and movies, including the now-classic kids’ horror television series Goosebumps and Are You Afraid Of The Dark. Our tastes diverge in many ways, but Ron and I both agree on Lady In White.

“When I saw Mr. LaLoggia’s beautiful Lady In White,” he wrote, “I realized that horror stories were often best told quietly, with the terror gently creeping up behind you, fangs a-bloodied. I also learned that a tale of childhood fear didn’t necessarily mean ‘childish,’ and this lesson came in handy while I was writing and directing Are You Afraid Of The Dark. Also, that the relationships and bonds between children at Frankie’s age are among the most powerful on earth.”

Twenty-eight years after first seeing Lady In White, I still can’t entirely hold back the tears in the scene near the end of the film, when Frankie reunites Melissa with her mother—herself a ghost, the titular Lady in White, whom we discover killed herself upon discovering the body of her murdered daughter.

In telling the story of a nine-year-old boy who dedicates himself to helping the ghost of a ten-year-old girl find her mother, LaLoggia renders a beautiful iteration of the instinctive friendships between girls and boys at that age, before the gender self-segregation so often imposed on them hermetically seals them off from those types of effortless, egalitarian friendships until after puberty. I’d like to think that LaLoggia’s intention was that Frankie realize that he had given Melissa a gift by restoring her mother to her—a joy Frankie himself would never know.

I hope I never lose the part of myself that responds to that scene as I do.  My tears suggest to me that even as a fifty-four-year-old man, I might still open to magic and the belief in goodness as an objective power, particularly in children like the one I was at nine—like Frankie, a nascent writer already looking at the world with a writer’s eye, seeing thing things that are literally invisible to the people around them.

On the other hand, you could watch Lady In White simply for the brilliantly written familial relationships: Frankie’s matriarchal Italian grandmother lovingly battling her husband over his smoking; Frankie’s tender relationship with his widower father; Frankie’s occasionally tempestuous but always loving relationship with his prankster older brother, Geno; Frankie’s moony crush on his classmate, Mary Ellen (Lisa Taylor); and perhaps most poignantly, Frankie’s father’s doomed relationship with his tormented best friend, Phil (Len Cariou.)

It’s a film for anyone with a conscious memory of an early 60s to early 70s-era childhood spent growing up in a world which, while far from perfect, still managed to limit the distractions of encroaching adulthood, allowing the flower of a child’s imagination bloom without the incursion of reality television, the 24-hour news cycle, or the Internet.

But mostly it’s a film about being loved, and being healed by love.

To me, the heart of Lady In White might be found in Frankie’s vision of Melissa while he is unconscious in pitch-blackness of the cloakroom. Pleading with him to help her find her mother, she asks him, “Don’t you know where you’d like to be going?” Frankie replies. “To my home. In my own bed.”

That yearning to go home, whatever “home” might mean, is one that never entirely leaves many of us, though it may take other forms.

At our core, many of us retain a yearning for security, stability, a yearning for a vision of home as a warm place, where friendly ghosts are at peace, where children are safe and parents love them, and where a blessed silence reigns in the darkness of our bedrooms as we drift off. For those of us who’ve had it, the memory of it can be a powerful draw. For those of us who haven’t, it can be a poignant, even cruel, chimera.

If anything, the surpassing magic of Frank LaLoggia’s Lady In White is its ability to effortlessly take us back to the liminal place and time before adulthood, with its realities and responsibilities. Indeed, to a time when the orange and black splendor of Halloween is more than enough, at least for this one special night when the barriers between the worlds of the living and the dead are at least as permeable as the barriers between adulthood and childhood.

[Originally published on The Good Men Project in October, 2016]

The children are home for Halloween

Today's post brought the author copies of the new editions of my three novels from my new publisher, Open Road Media. I couldn't be happier. 

Also, I love that the books arrived in time for Halloween. With COVID-19, we're not handing out candy and obviously not seeing friends. It'll be us, the dog (who's ten today, by the way—Happy Birthday, Beckett!—and some well-chosen horror films, and the new editions on the shelf. 

This was Beckett, on his first birthday with us—October 30th, 2012, when he turned two. I still see that "quizzical puppy" expression on his face eight years later. 

Unboxing the paperbacks

The highlight of this past week was undoubtedly getting these copies of Les Ombres de Wild Fell, the French translation of my novel Wild Fell, which arrived from Paris this past Tuesday. 

I've had my books published in hardcover and trade paperback, but I've never had one published in a mass market paperback before. Like a lot of horror writers who grew up in the 70s and 80s, paperback horror novels were a staple—for me, even a gold standard—to which I aspired. All of the horror writer I most admired (including many who later became good friends) had their books published as pocketbooks, either after a decent hardcover run, or in the book's' first and only form. 

Finally, in my 50s, I've achieved it. I may have missed the golden age of the paperback horror original as a writer, but this still feels remarkably satisfying. 

The Film Rights to OCTOBER Are Sold!

Well, it's official. The film rights to my novel October have been sold to L.A.-based indie filmmaker Dominic Haxton, as Publisher's Marketplace Deal Report announced today, in a deal quarterbacked by my agent, Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. 

I'm over the moon to finally be able to share it. I was a fan of Mr. Haxton's short films long before he approached me about making a feature film of October. I'd found his powerful short film, Tonight It's Me, about an encounter between a young trans woman, Ash, and a hustler, CJ, beautiful and remarkably moving. 

His queer horror short, Tonight It's You, on the other hand, which again featured the character of CJ, was as dark and chilling as its more optimistic predecessor was tender and revelatory. It's one of my favourite short horror films. 

In the afterword to October I mentioned a young filmmaker in California who had enquired about making a feature film of the novel, and what contemporary updates he might apply. 

That filmmaker—unnamed in the afterword—was the brilliant Mr. Haxton. 

Two years ago, he acquired a shopping deal for October, and earlier this summer, he purchased the film rights themselves, to make October as his first full-length feature. 

I couldn't feel more confident that the book is with the right filmmaker.  If you click this Tonight It's You link, I think you'll understand why. 

I can't wait to see what Mr. Haxton does with the novel when he applies his own elegant, modern horror aesthetic to the story of Mikey and Wroxy, and Adrian, and the haunted town of Auburn. 

We'll keep you posted as the process unfolds and develops. 

But for now, we're going to open some champagne. 

Cover Reveal à la Française

Here's the cover of the forthcoming mass-market edition of Les Ombres de Wild Fell, the French translation of my haunted house novel Wild Fell, which will be published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris, in October, 2020.

In the same way that many authors pine for a hardcover edition of their novel, I've always pined for a mass-market paperback edition of one of mine. I grew up on mass-market horror paperbacks. 

We all read them at school, traded them, collected them, hoarded then, and loved them to shreds. I still have some of my best-beloved ones from the late-70s and 80s. 

The late, legendary Michael McDowell, who wrote some of the best original horror fiction of the era, always said he was proud of being a paperback novelist—a writer whose books were published only in mass-market paperback. 

I always admired him for that, as well as for his tremendous storytelling gifts. 

Bragelonne published a beautiful trade paperback of the novel in 2016, with a glorious translation by Benoît Domis. 

I've never been able to read my work to myself in English without hearing my own voice, and finding things I would have loved to have done differently. It's a weird neurosis, but I own it. What I found, reading the book in French, was that it was like reading a novel by someone other than myself. I enjoyed that sensation. I likewise had a much clearer sense of the book when I didn't attach that authorial self-consciousness to the process.

I hope French readers of the new mass-market paperback edition enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. There's an enormous amount of pleasure in imagining someone picking up the novel at an airport somewhere in the French-speaking world, maybe for a long flight, and imagining them spending those hours in the air, being transported, in their minds,  to Canada, to a remote, windswept island in Georgian Bay, and an old dark house presided over by a very particular, very possessive, quite terrifying châtelaine.

Bonne chance, mes potes. 

Meet My New Publisher, Open Road Media

I'm delighted to be able to share some exciting news, as well as some new book covers

Early in 2020 we were approached by Open Road Media about acquiring the publication rights for my fiction backlist, the novels Enter, Night, Wild Fell, and October. These novels, originally published by ChiZine Publications, have consistently remained in print since 2011 when Enter, Night was first published. 

A French edition of Wild Fell was published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris in 2016.

Open Road Media is America's premier global backlist publisher. Their roster includes legends such as Joan Didion, William Styron, Alice Walker, Dee Brown, Pat Conroy, Paul Monette, Joyce Carol Oates, Gloria Steinem, Octavia Butler, John Jakes, Pearl S. Buck, Walker Percy, and Sherman Alexie. 

Closer to home, I'm honoured to have my books appear alongside some of my favourite speculative fiction authors, including Graham Masterton, Robert McCammon, Thomas Tryon, Poppy Z. Brite, Elizabeth Hand—and of course, the elder gods: Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Ann Radcliffe, among many, many others. 

Best of all, the partnership with Open Road Media assures that my three novels will remain in print for the foreseeable future—certainly as e-books, but also as print-on-demand paperbacks and hardcovers further on down the line. 

The e-books are up for pre-order on Amazon. They will be released in October 2020.

Watch Out, World—She's Eighteen and She's Going To Change Everything

My beloved goddaughter Kate turned eighteen today and I'm all at sea.

Of course I'm thrilled and proud beyond measure that this glorious young woman, at the threshold of adulthood, has indeed crossed that threshold and stepped confidently into the sunlight of that new stage of life. 

She's part of that powerful generation of young people whom I have no doubt will save, and change forever, the world they've inherited. It needs saving, and it needs changing most of all. This is a generation for whom issues of the environment, of racial equality and empowerment, and issues of LGBTQ equality and empowerment, are not "goals," but actual starting points. 

Things that my generation strove to actualize, they grew up already aware of. If they didn't necessarily take them for granted, they knew right from wrong, and they know the importance of righting wrongs. This gives them tremendous power and I have no doubt in my mind that they'll wield that power in the most responsible way, and that they're going to change everything that needs to be changed. 

And yet, here I am, at 2:00 a.m. on her birthday morning, replaying memories over and over in my mind, among them the most cherished memories of my life. 

I'm gently haunted in particular by the memory of how her tiny hand fit into mine when she was very small and we walked together—in parks, along roads, through the woods up north. We walked together  a great deal. The hand grew, and the girl grew, but that particular memory is one I hold close. 

I loathe clichés, both as a writer and as a human being, but the question Where did all these years go? seems an inevitable one tonight. Where did they go? 

Well, to living, of of course. That's where years go. 

Memories are patchwork, and when you've made enough of them, you begin to stitch them together. Sometimes you don't realize how luxurious a quilt you've made until nights like tonight arrive. And when they come, what a Kate-quilt I have. The patches aren't ordered in a chronological or sequential way. Instead, they come into their design based on vividness and colour. 

Here's just one patch, for instance: Kate's tenderness and her gentleness—towards dogs, towards other children, towards beloved adults, including her two godfathers. Brian and I have a framed photo on the mantelpiece of Kate, at two or three, brushing our late yellow Labrador Harper's paws with a pink doll brush while Harper, entirely in her thrall, watches, fascinated. 

Here's another: her athletic fearlessness—skimming over the waves up at the lake behind her father's boat, wet blonde hair flying behind her, laughing into the sun against the hard blue August sky, the embodiment of Ontario summer.

Still other patches: Kate giving a talk about LGBTQ rights to her class in, what, grade eight? Grade nine? My immense and overwhelming pride in her upon hearing that it had been well received by her classmates and the teacher, thinking Of course it was well received—she's brilliant and she has a social conscience and she's not even sixteen yet. 

And others still: Kate taking up long-distance canoeing with a vengeance, joining the line of a family tradition that spans several generations—a very Canadian tradition at that. Kate running. Kate swimming. Kate skiing. Kate baking, Kate reading, Kate exploring the possibilities of her own life in discussions with Uncle Brian—her other godfather—about careers and politics. 

Reading to Kate before bedtime on the nights I babysat; her eyelids fluttering and growing heavy in the moments before the book was put away and light was turned off. 

Kate painting a canoe paddle at camp as a gift for Brian and I five years ago, as a gift for our anniversary, blazoned with the legend "Thirty Years Of Love." 

The memories fall like snowflakes, all of a pattern but each one exquisitely unique. 

And yet, even as I run my mind along the soft surface of this quilt of patchwork memories, all I can think of is how many others there are, and that even if I listed those others, I'd only be conscious of how many I'd missed. 

Kate's parents are two of the people I love the most in the world, full stop. 

They gave us an incredible gift many, many years ago:  they made Brian and I members of their family. With no children of our own, we were invited to participate in the miracle of Kate and her brother Michael, my namesake, literally from birth. We were invited to love and be loved by those two children (neither of whom are children as of this writing) and to watch them grow in to the forces of nature they now are. 

Our lives have been shaped and enriched by that love. We are who we are today in part because of it. 

On this, the early morning of Tuesday, July 14th, 2020, my goddaughter, who is probably asleep, is legally an adult. That is a phrase that will naturally mean more to her than it does to me at this point. That's as it should be—I remember the feeling very well from my own eighteenth birthday: a sense that nothing had changed from the day before, but, also, that everything had changed.

But what's really changed is this: a brave, brilliant, fearless young woman is about to boldly stride into her own life and into the world.  She'll be taking everything she has been, and everything she is now, with her.  

The possibilities are literally limitless. 

I've wracked my brain for hours trying to sort out my feelings, because this is all so intoxicatingly bittersweet. 

Don't get me wrong—it's absolutely sweet. But time carries weight, and to deny that weight is to deny how we experience memory itself. And still, even with an ocean of pre-fab birthday platitudes at my disposal for moments like this, I can't even imagine what to say to her besides Happy Birthday. 

Or else, I could say this: I could thank her for the glorious mosaic of the years spent watching her reach this moment.  I could tell her that she's extraordinary, and that I believe she'll live an important life, and that I believe that she, and women like her, will change the world. I could tell her that I'm prouder of her than she could even dream, and that she has been a source of inspiration since the first moment I held her in my arms, and that she is even more of one today. 

I could tell her how much I wish I could be with her today, and how bitterly I resent the degree to which COVID-19 has made travel impossible, denying us the chance to celebrate this milestone with her in person. 

And I could tell her that one of the reasons I can afford to dream of the greatness she'll achieve, and the love and joy she'll find in the years to come, is that I can still feel that tiny, perfect warm hand in mine. 

I can feel it tonight, as I write this.  I'll feel it tomorrow. I'll feel it forever. 

Riding the Peace Train

The thing about the interiority imposed by self-quarantine, particularly for a freelancer, is the loss (or at least the reduction) in daily markers. I used to joke that weekends for a freelance writer just meant a day when FedEx didn't deliver. The concept of a "weekend" exists only in relation to our intersection with the lives of "normal" people. Saturday and Sunday were two days to work on a deadline when we knew an editor wasn't going to be calling and wondering why whatever we were working on wasn't on their desk yet.

Before the self-quarantine, I used my husband's getting to, and coming home from, the office as a marker of not only time, but of days of the week.

Much like the timbre of light in the sky or "morning sounds" vs. "evening sounds," or Beckett's feeding and walking schedule, his movements through the tunnels of air that make up our days ad night have always been a reliable way to keep track of time. But of course, for the foreseeable future, I'm going to have use an alarm clock and an agenda like everyone else.

Now that he's working at home too, it's like having two freelancers under the roof instead of just one. I'm not sure what I think of that, not that it matters. It just is what it is.

I just went downstairs and made an offhand remark about how I couldn't believe it was Friday again already. He informed me that it was, in fact, Saturday.

So, I apologize to the editor I emailed earlier about a pending deadline in an attempt to get everything tidied up before "the weekend"—which was clearly already here. Sorry darling, my bad. Entirely.

In the past few days I've been revisiting the music I've loved.

In 2010, when I was writing my first novel, Enter, Night, which is set in 1972, I submersed myself in everything of the era I could find—I read the magazines, I smelled the scents (yes, I found bottles of 70s-era perfumes on Ebay, both to evoke memories of the time and to add to the my inner mental map of the character of Christina Parr, the female protagonist) and I listened to the music.

I loaded up my iPod with everything from pop and folk to the metal of the time. Some of it was an enjoyable revisiting of my earliest musical discoveries. Some of it was pure work—I won't need to listen to Deep Purple's Machine Head again until I decide to tackle a sequel to Enter, Night. But at the end of the day, it was about immersion in an an era in the service of the writing of my first novel. And when it was over and the book was written, I just put it away and went back to my real life, and my real life's tastes.

This past week, I've been felt drawn to some of that old music again. It started with a re-listen of some Joan Baez. I've always loved the gritty earnestness of her voice, particularly in songs like "Diamonds and Rust."

From there, I gravitated to Janis Ian's Between The Lines, still probably my favourite album of all time.  The phrase "soundtrack of my life" is a woefully overused one, but in this case I have to cop to it. I can place myself emotionally in every song of that album. It's the easiest route to memories of heartbreak, of feelings of inadequacy, of yearning for love, of being convinced that love was something for other people, for "girls with clear-skinned smiles, who married once and then retired," as well as for "normal" kids, among whose number I could often not find a place for myself.

Two days ago, it was Carole King and her Tapestry album, which features her version of her song "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman." Like most people with a pulse, I am devoted to the Aretha Franklin version, which I consider the pinnacle recording of this song. But at my school in Switzerland in 1974, all the American girls who were my friends had this album, and it's as evocative of that time in my life as the scent of their Love's Fresh Lemon cologne.

Last night, I lit a fire in the fireplace, made a pot of mint tea, and indulged myself in a watercolour wash of Judy Collins' pellucid voice, a voice that still seems like a miracle half a decade later.

Today—Saturday, not Friday—has been all about Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam.

In 1970, my American grandparents bought transistor radios for my brother and I, with cases in two different shades of grey to make them easy to distinguish. My parents were obsessed with the idea that my brother and I would fight over things. When we fought, it was very rarely over an object, and I don't ever recall the radios being an issue.

His was a darker grey, mine was a light graphite, and we never swapped.

How well I remember the nights of falling asleep listening to the miracle issuing from the tiny leather-encased box on my pillow. I was seven, and I believed all the music I was listening to was being recorded live down at the local radio station. (The discovery that the songs were all on records was both thrilling and devastating—I was thrilled that they were available in shops, but devastated to realize that rock stars weren't all visiting downtown Ottawa for the evening.)

"Wild World" haunted me. Even at seven, I recognized that someone was very, very sad to be saying goodbye. The first few times I listened to the song, I wept a bit at the thought of the loss. Upon later listenings, I was both attracted and repelled by the idea of a "wild world" where "a lot of nice things turn bad out there." But, ever the optimist, I focussed on the fact that love was driving this sad goodbye, and if someone could love the girl in question to hope she "has a lot of nice clothes to wear" and "makes a lot of nice friends out there," then it was probably all going to work out for the best in the long run, and always being remembered as "a child, girl" clearly wasn't a bad thing, particularly from my point of view as an actual child.

Later, in 1974, when Dad was at the U.N. and we were living in Geneva, I met Nancy, the American girl who was hired by my parents as a babysitter. I wrote about Nancy in the Huffington Post (you can click the blue link and read the essay "For My Sister On Her Birthday) in 2016, as well as in some of my non-fiction books.

From a chance cancellation by our usual babysitter came possibly the earliest defining relationship of my life. Plainly speaking, I adopted her as a big sister, and she adopted me back.  Forty-six years later, the only adjustment to that relationship has been a deep patina of shared experiences and shared love that has only grown in the four and a half decades since that fateful night.

We spoke this afternoon about how each of us were handling the self-imposed quarantine on opposite sides of the continent. As the conversation went on I was reminded again, as I so often have been over the years, how permeable the veil of time is when two people have our history.

When I listen to "Tea for the Tillerman" as I did this afternoon—an album Nancy owned, and one to which she introduced me—that's her for me. Music, like scent, is a time machine. It's a temporal barrier-breaker. I close my eyes and I'm sitting on he bedroom floor with my eyes closed, listening to the music flow over me, igniting my imagination like a fuse, feeling loved, feeling safe, and feeling connected.

And all the while, the music was writing itself into my history.

Nancy could play the guitar, and eventually she learned "Father and Son." We sang it together. Being Nancy—a young woman of incomparable patience, and possessed of a wry sense of humour—she allowed me to sing the third-verse background parts of both the father and the son, though by rights I should have only been allowed to sing one or the other.

This week, as an adult revisiting that personal soundtrack, I find that this music still has the power to map my life. My life today. It feels almost miraculous  It doesn't make me feel younger to revisit it, to connect the various threads that bind this music to the memories of my life, but it certainly makes me feel present in my life now. Present, and grateful.

In an moment as uncertain as the one in which we find ourselves right now, that's pure gold.

If these songs were a dream, I'd want to linger a bit longer before waking up.

Good morning, April

Spring is as close as the Early Snow Glories bordering the front walk. It's coming, whatever else is going on in the world. Like a coquette, it demands to be fêted and admired. I'm happy to oblige.

The View From Inside

And here we are, on the first perfect day of spring, and we're inside, looking out. It's a glorious afternoon. The flowers in the graveyard where I walk Beckett every day are making shy debuts.  The air is soft, for the first time in months. The earth is waking up slowly, stretching, and even smiling in the newly-yellow sunlight.

Last year at this time, I would have been outdoors all day—walking the dog of course, but also maybe shopping, or meeting friends for dinner after a day of writing, or going to the gym, or walking through the University of Toronto campus, which is always rich with memories for me at this time of year. Or wandering around downtown, marvelling at how much healthier and happier everyone looks in spring. Or any number of other things that I previously took for granted.

Freedom of movement, freedom of interaction, freedom of association. Freedom to hug someone, or to kiss their cheek. Freedom to let children pet Beckett in the park while I exchange pleasantries about the weather with their mothers and fathers, as neighbours do.

This past March, I published a short story in a groundbreaking anthology edited by Matt Bechtel called The Dystopian States of America. Some of the finest horror writers in the business set themselves to the task of sketching fiction about life under the current regime in the United States, or its aftermath. It's not an optimistic collection by any reckoning, but neither was it intended to be prophetic, and yet here we are, trying to remain indoors while a virus that appears to defy science is literally ravaging the world.

What we are asked to do is stay at home and restrict contact with others. It's not much.

Those of us who have the privilege and the luxury of being able to do that have, to my mind, even more of a moral obligation to do so. Inexplicably, some of us find this an impossibility. Even as I look out this window, I see children playing in the schoolyard across the street. I see groups of people sauntering past on the sidewalk as though it was the spring of 2005, not the spring of 2020, and I wonder what in God's name it's going to take for people to take this seriously.

I think of my many young friends in the restaurant industry who were barely making do before, and who now have no income to speak of. I think of the teachers who are learning new ways to teach, pretty much making it up as they go along. I think of the doctors and nurses who literally put their lives on the line every time they go to work, trying to save people who may or may not have laughed off the urgings of politicians and medical professionals to stay home.

I'm fortunate to have my husband at home with me now. His work has proved to be surprisingly mobile, and it has allowed him to turn his home office into command central. Ironically, we're spending more time together of late than we ever have in the 35 years we've been married. The fact that we each have home offices means we're not on top of each other, and are in no danger of killing each other. I like to hear his voice behind his office door, and I love the sound of his muffled laughter. After three and a half decades, my heart still flutters when I hear it.

When I was a child, people said I was "too sensitive," which was turned into the ultimate derision when adults used just the right tone of voice. It meant I felt things too deeply, or took things too personally, or too seriously, and that I was too "emotional." It was all code for "feminine"—the worst, most lethal insult that could be thrown at a boy in the late-60s and 70s.

It's taken more than half a century, and some excellent therapy, to realize that being "overly sensitive" (what does "overly" mean, anyway?) isn't my problem, it's my strength. It  allows me to feel the empathy required to write what I write, and to love as I do.

But yeah, there's a cost, particularly during these days of the new plague. Like many of us, I feel all of this. And I'm frightened, as most of us are, even as I'm genuinely optimistic.

I'm taking care of the people around me. I'm reading books I'd put off reading, and watching some excellent television. I'm working on a new book of my own, and finalizing the details of a potential film adaptation of one of my novels from a brilliant indie director in Los Angeles, of whose work I have been a fan for years.

I'm writing cards and letters by hand, and reaching out to friends with whom I've been out of touch. I'm focussing on love, forgiveness, and kindness, because our thoughts become our character more than ever in a dark time.

The other day someone reached out to me from Rosedale United Church, a church I attend less frequently now than I'd like, but for whom I have great affection and solid, joyful memories of winters of volunteering at a homeless shelter. Other friends have called or written, and I find myself sending and receiving more DMs than usual on Facebook. One of my beloved sisters-of-the-heart sent flowers the other day, with likely the most incomplete sense of how much joy and colour they brought me.

Social media—so often a nightmare world populated by vindictiveness and the wanton destruction of lives—has become a lifeline: a virtual phone-tree. It reminds us that we're not alone.

I don't watch the news anymore, because I already know the situation and it's like wallowing, naked and wet, in a bathtub full of broken glass. If something happens, pro or con, I'll hear about it. I don't have any profound, philosophical insights to share about life under COVID-19 self-quarantine, so I'm just going along as best I can, trying to help out whenever I can.

And staying home.

But it I have one takeaway, it's this familiar one: love and kindness are never wasted. Also, that you never know how blessed you are, or how much you take for granted, until it is taken away from you, either by force or circumstance.

When this is over, and it will be over, that will be my new life mantra.

Be kind to each other. We'll get through this together, one way or another.

Vampire Camp

Originally published in Quill & Quire, October, 2011


In the fall of 1972, the Holy Grail for my friends and me was a Saturday afternoon bike ride to the Kilborn Shoppers confectionary in our Ottawa neighbourhood of Alta Vista. On the spiral magazine rack by the window were the horror comic books and paperback horror novels, some of which I still own, lovingly tucked away in boxes the way other people might save sports ribbons or Wolf Cub badges. We’d pay our 20 cents, bicycle home, and barricade ourselves in our rooms and thrill to the perpetual Halloween that awaited us between those garish covers, especially the vampire comics like The Tomb of Dracula or Vampire Tales. 

In my late forties, I’ve been amazed and delighted by the number of writers  working in and out of the horror genre that share these particular cultural touchpoints. Last year I interviewed Benjamin Percy, a brilliant literary writer regarded by many critics as a young prince of American letters. Percy is a good 10 years younger than me, but still – like feral children speaking a private language – it took no time at all to discover that he was a classic horror nerd, with many of the same points of reference. The horror genre is the ultimate democracy.

            
As a writer, though, making the leap to horror (in my case from literary non-fiction and essays) hasn’t been without some amusing bumps along the way.

            
Try telling your friends or literary colleagues that you’re writing a vampire novel and watch their reactions – from the gleeful (“Ooooh, I love Twilight!”) to the snobbish (“Really? Why on earth?) to the mercantile (“Vampires are so hot right now! Is it going to be a series?”).

            
Then try explaining that you’re not writing about “sexy” vampires, that what you’re working on isn’t a “vampire romance,” but a good old-fashioned undead horror show set in a small northern Ontario mining town, with vampires that have the requisite old-school preoccupations – an aversion to crucifixes, a taste for shape-shifting. The kind that don’t “glitter” in the sunlight, but might explode into fire and stinking ash and smoke. The kind that sleep in coffins and caves, not penthouse apartments. The kind that don’t attend high school and hang with beautiful, sensitive, lonely outcasts, but who might happily eat one of them for dinner, and not in a nice way, either. And no, it can’t be a series, because the body count is too high.

            
Bless them, they usually don’t get it, but that’s okay. That’s the price of writing a vampire novel in the age of Stephenie Meyer, Inc.

            
My vampires are the Hammer Films vampires: Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, towering in the shadows at the top of the long stone staircase in Horror of Dracula, or Robert Tayman as Count Mitterhouse in Vampire Circus, terrorizing the Serbian village of Stattel. Or even Robert Quarry as Count Yorga, Vampire, sashaying through the corridors of his Los Angeles mansion in his waist-length cape like an undead Liberace in the company of his garishly made-up brides.

            
They’re the shockingly articulate, aristocratic vampires of Marvel Comics’ The Tomb of Dracula and Vampire Tales. They’re the Victorian vampires of Bram Stoker’s eponymous Dracula, the novel I read when I was 11 and never mistook for a “dark romance.” They’re Mr. Barlow, and the American vampires of Salem’s Lot.

            
I was a comic book kid back before they were called “graphic novels,” back when they were still considered something that would rot your brain, but even my ex-schoolteacher mother was impressed with the writing. 

            
So yeah, I’m old. 

            
But that’s okay, because writing my vampire novel, Enter, Night, was a bit like travelling back in time to a pre-Botox era, one where properly undead things slept during the day and rose up from their graves at night and sucked the life from your veins and didn’t try to become your bf4EvR 

            
Over the course of the writing, I listened to the music of the era, re-read the comics and the novels (some execrable) with the eyes of a professional writer, some holding up remarkably well) and re-watched a raft of 1970s horror films on DVD. I trolled eBay for vintage fragrances that might evoke scent memory, and vintage magazines that my parents might have had lying around the house in 1972. And I pored over boxes of pictures and school yearbooks. 

As a student at the rugged St. John’s Cathedral Boy’s School in Selkirk, Manitoba, I’d paddled approximately 2,200 miles through the wildernesses of northern Ontario and western Canada. The pure gothic beauty of Canadian badlands had imprinted itself on my teenage mind. That gorgeous isolation came surging back in the creation of the fictional mining town of Parr’s Landing and the people in it. By setting the novel in Canada —by finding our very own Transylvania in the forests and cliffs around Lake Superior and shading it with what could be considered gothic and grotesque in our history as Canadians. I brought the vampires of my 1970s childhood home.  

            
Best of all, I got to revisit the place where it will always be a cold October Saturday afternoon in 1972, and I’m flying through a cloud of windborne autumn leaves on the wings of a Schwinn banana bike and my own imagination. Not a bad place to have begun the journey of my own writer’s life so many years ago, as it turns out.  

            
All gold, no “glitter.” No offense, Edward. You’re scary too.