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.

Statement on the Allegations of Racism by Chesya Burke

In the spring of 2013,  I posted a thread on my Facebook page addressing the media takedown of southern celebrity chef Paula Deen. 

The gist and intent of the thread was that the opprobrium being meted out to Paula Deen, a woman, was not commensurate with the opprobrium being meted out to white male celebrities in comparable circumstances, such as Don Imus, who had made reference to “n*ppy headed hoes” in a television interview. 

My premise was that this was due to sexism, ageism, and classism—in Deen’s case, because she was an older woman whose image was frequently mocked, derided and lampooned as representing a rural, regional, working class background that is often the butt of jokes. 

It was not in any way a defense of Paula Deen herself, nor a negation of the accusations of racism levelled at her. 

I also pointed out that, as a queer person, I was tired of hearing male rappers, and football players of any race, using words like “f*ggot” and “q*eer” as slurs, and that I would likewise genuinely welcome a pillorying of the next gay man who used the word “tr*nny.” And I said that what Paula Deen had said was both offensive and stupid, and that the Food Network was entirely right in firing her.  

At one point, Chesya Burke, whom I did not know at that time, having only recently accepted a friend request from her, joined the conversation. She was justifiably outraged at any perceived defense of Paula Deen, and said so, passionately. 

Earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down DOMA, but LGBTQ people were still not allowed to marry in all states, and could still be fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes, unlike any other minority in America.

This was still very raw and fresh in my mind at the time, and informed the later tone of my discussion with Ms. Burke. 

At that point, I wrongly engaged in a “misery comparison” argument, pitting homophobia against racism, that, in retrospect, was both unhelpful and disrespectful to the gravity of the topic, and Ms. Burke’s position itself. 

Ms. Burke asked why we were now talking about gay rights, and I replied that we were talking about it because of the hierarchy of slurs, and how some slurs resulted in severe opprobrium while others were given a pass. I posited that because of Ms. Deen’s age and gender, and celebrity culture in general, this had turned into “a feeding frenzy based on it being an extremely lazy way to feel good about fighting racism without doing anything at all.”

Ms. Burke suggested that I was defending Paula Deen, which I again denied, reiterating that, in the media, “this has stopped being about what Paula Deen may or may not have said, and is now about what Paula Deen represents in a cartoon sense,” and that “a mob mentality has taken over.”

I wrote (without abbreviations or asterisks) about the word Paula Deen was accused of using:

“Do I defend the use of the word ‘n*gger?’Not remotely. Do I agree with the people who are saying, ‘Well, black people use the word ‘n*gger,’ why can’t I? No. Quite the opposite. I disagree vehemently. As a friend of mind said, ‘I can call myself a f*ggot, and so can my gay friends. Straight people can’t.’ [The n-word] is not an across the board word."

I did not use the word to, with regard to, or about Ms. Burke, as was alleged—or indeed any other African American person—nor did I use it "at least 50 times" on the thread as was also alleged, and I used quotation marks around the word in each instance, both to indicate that I was quoting someone else, and in order to make it clear that the word was not being used or endorsed by me, and was, in fact repellent to me, and that I was using it here exclusively as it pertained to the discussion at hand regarding the hierarchy of slurs, and in denunciation of the toxicity of racist language. 

That said, I should never have spelled out the word at all—I should have used asterisks, or some other way of shielding the word in the discussion. 

I should have considered the impact my use of the word would have on Ms. Burke as a WOC, and I should never have used it more than once over the course of our interaction.  

The consistent position I had held prior to 2013 was that shielding any slur with asterisks gave cover to its offensiveness, by allowing readers to experience the slur while evading the experience of its deeply ugly impact, and thereby diluting the slur's impact and capacity for dehumanization.  

When I read Ms. Burke’s first blog post about our encounter, I was horrified by  how I  had come across to her in our interaction.

More importantly, I was abruptly aware that my position on spelling out slurs was a one of eye-watering and quite obvious white privilege, and that just because I, as a white queer person, had found a way to cope with the terrible, dehumanizing slurs used about me and others like me, still others justifiably find the ones used about them to be acidic and destructive, and indeed devastating to read in print. 

I also regret my occasionally condescending tone to her in our exchanges on that thread. Over the years I have cultivated an online delivery in some of my posts and comments that has not served me well. As a wise friend recently pointed out, the one who loses their temper first is the one who loses the argument.

Reading her 2013 blog about our encounter began a six-year process of reaching out to, and seeking guidance from, POC friends and colleagues about the power of those words, and how, exactly, I, as a white person, should use them—if ever. 

In the time since that encounter, I have been humbled by, and grateful to, those many, many generous POC friends for helping me understand, and especially for their patience in helping me understand the degree to which there is a hierarchy of oppression, and that anti-LGBTQ oppression and the oppression of POC is not the same thing—and how acknowledging that fact is central to successful intersectionality and reconciliation.

I have also been grateful to writers of colour for their work, which is not only essential to our genre, but also essential to non-POC writers to understanding how to better make room for the genre to grow. 

One of the books I treasured most  during the journey was Ms. Burke’s Let’s Play White, which I cited in an unpublished interview earlier this fall as teaching me about the perils of white privilege—including my own. 

I met Ms. Burke at Readercon in 2013, some weeks after our encounter on Facebook. I apologized, and told her how much I regretted the tone our interaction had taken, and how much I admired her passion and her activism. It was a cordial encounter. 

I still do, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and insult my words caused her in 2013. 

She deserved better, both as both a WOC and as a literary colleague. 

I have loathed the concept of white supremacy and racism my whole life—not only the overt and obvious racism we see around us everywhere, but the more insidious kind of structural, ingrained racism that has elevated white people at the expense of POC,  traces of which are unavoidable in those of us of white colonial descent, whether we think it’s there or not, and whether or not we believe we have benefitted from it, or whether we're actively aware of it. 

We have all benefitted, period.

Both my social media footprint and my published nonfiction work bears out my fervent hatred of racial oppression, and indeed my loathing of the oppression and exploitation of vulnerable and marginalized groups of all kinds by the wealthy and powerful. 

Aside from everything else, this conversation has refocused me on my ongoing, very imperfect life journey to becoming the sort of ally that POC and other marginalized groups need—and deserve. 

Thank you for reading this.

Michael Rowe 

Enter, Night: Reader Review by Cody Skillen

 [When I was in Winnipeg this past December for a book signing at my favourite bookstore, McNally Robinson, in the week following the launch of Wild Fell, I was fortunate enough to meet a university student and military man named Cody Skillen, who has since become a "friend of the work" as well as a new friend. He recently took the time to jot down some of his thoughts on my first novel, Enter, Night in the form of this review. With his permission, I'm republishing it and sharing it here on Forever October.]

Enter, Night Review

by Cody Skillen

 This is perhaps the most interesting vampire book I've read in several years. The vampires do not sparkle, they do not engage in absurd romances, they do vampire things. Drinking blood and killing people has apparently gone out of style for the mythological undead, and in that way they've become quite defanged.

            
The opening chapters demonstrate the kind of tale you're in for, and lead to my personal favorite scene. There is a kind of mastery over the social and personal struggle that grabbed me immediately and infected me with the kind of  nostalgia-for-something-unexperienced that we've never quite developed a word for in English. The bus scene was the defining moment for me, the point at which I knew I was on board with what was going to happen. It latched onto my subconscious with such force that I even had a dream about it. Scary in its own right.

            
The rest of the story mostly focuses on a family adjusting to life in a small town in 70's, and really that's the major strength of it. The vampires are really less of the focus, and like good monsters primarily avoid hogging the limelight. They are definitely there, but they aren't the point, which I guess in a way is the point.

            
So what is the story about on a deeper than surface level? It feels too easy for me to say something like 'the vampires are religion'. That seems to specific for the surprisingly complex character relationships. Just as each character has a different struggle the vampires mean something different from each perspective.

            
For Jeremy for example, they could represent the stigma of mainstream culture towards homosexuals, especially Elliot. The pressures of 'what is normal' transform the cop from a past love interest into a manipulative bloodthirsty monster who destroys everyone he comes into contact with.

            
Then there is the situation with Adeline Parr and just about everyone else. It is clear that she has infested the town like a parasite abusing her position of authority for decades. There is a special type of evil in the way she self-righteously abuses the people closest to her. Yet at some point it is hinted at that she's suffered her own abuses, in a way mirroring the supernatural infection that seeks to self replicate. While she herself was married into the family she cannot accept Christina into the family. In a way she too is the embodiment of the mining industry that wastes itself away even as it grows rich, replacing value with something counterfeit, something hollow.

            
Billy Lightning's version of the vampire revolves around the cultural persecution of Aboriginals under the Canadian government, and cultural prejudice in general. Despite being a doctor he is constantly harassed by the authority figures and his personal achievements are constantly attributed to anything but his personal capabilities, with a few exceptions.

            
With Finn and Sadie the infection is of the world in general. They suffer a death of innocence and are transformed into something that is not fully living and not fully dead, not unlike the average cubicle caged desk slave of today.

            
Really the vampirism is more of a metaphor for the world itself, for all the cultural norms that press you into a narrow band of existence that is easily categorized and neatly labeled in all it's bland mediocrity. Once the disease takes root they begin to behave as the soulless parodies of people handed to them. Sure religion can serve that purpose, but so can fashion magazines and corporate culture, I think the important part is that they don't have to do that to us, but if we let them hold too much sway over us, they would all be happy to dictate our roles to us.

I really liked the story overall, but my personal taste in blood sucking undead tends a little more towards the folklore side, and there were aspects that drifted more into the vein of Hammer films. While this is perfectly fine, and it was handled well, it was a bit of a shock when the vampires burst into flame and flee from crosses. I guess that juxtaposition between expectation and execution kind of created a bit of humour for me but beyond the initial jolt of recognition flowed well with the narrative. I'm always a sucker for the ancient evil calling out to be released kind of setup and this had an excellent payoff. I'd like to think that there is still a town full of evil somewhere in northern Ontario where they're still wearing their awesome 70's attire.

            
The case file at the end was one of the more interesting aspects to me, since I was really interested in how this situation started up in the first place, and there are a couple seemingly impossible aspects. How does a vampire who appears to be a priest avoid crosses and holy water for example? How did he end up where he was? Really this is the kind of story I love, lots of isolation, fear and strange circumstances. Kind of like a compressed version of Heart of Darkness condensed and sprinkled with demons.

Overall it was well written with interesting characters, and at the same time it had some depth. Not the kind that beats you over the head with a silver platter of morality until blood comes out, just enough to leave a bruise and make you think about it. This is probably my favourite recent vampire book, and that's despite my normal aversion to vampires that combust in sunlight. (Perhaps they should switch to Gain or something)

Shirley Jackson Awards, 2013

My second novel, Wild Fell, has been announced as a finalist for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award. I have very little to say about this honour, other than the fact that I'm really thrilled, and very aware of how thoroughly outclassed I am by my competition.

The other finalists are Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Jackson Bennett, Yangze Choo, Marisha Peshl, and my fellow Canadian, Andrew Pyper—who wrote The Demonologist, a beautiful, terrifying literary horror novel that I had the great pleasure of hearing him read from in 2013.

Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House and other novels, as well as peerless short fiction, including the 20th century classic, "The Lottery," has always been something of an idol of mine, not only for her almost supernatural ability to arrange words on the page in a way that creates images that last a lifetime, but also for some of her personal journeys, to which I can relate.

Congratulations to all my fellow nominees in the Novel category, and to all the other finalists. I hope to meet many of you at Readercon in Boston, in July.

Dreaming in the Land Beyond the Forest: My Visit to Dracula's Castle

[In honour of the 10th anniversary this week of my visit to Castle Bran in Transylvania—the public face of "Castle Dracula"—I'm reposting my essay "Dreaming in the Land Beyond the Forest," which was written from notes in my journal on May 9th 2004, and which first appeared (in a slightly different form) on Advocate.com that October, then in my essay collection, Other Men's Sons. I visited the castle while on a weeklong visit to Romania to the set of Seed of Chucky, for a series of articles that appeared in Fangoria in the fall of 2004.]

I’m writing this in the courtyard of Castle Dracula.

I’ve
 waited my whole life to write those words in a nonfiction essay.

The low westering sunlight slants down through
the distant, forbidding vista of the blue-green
 mist-shrouded Carpathian Mountains, edging the 
rough cobblestones and the stone-cut mullioned
 windows of the ancient castle with blood-tinted 
late-afternoon shadows that seem oddly patient, 
though somehow hungry.

Not bad, if I may 
say so myself. I like it. A little over-the-top, a
 little purple, but then again, horror fiction is one
 literary genre where a touch of the grape isn’t just forgivable, it’s actually encouraged.

The thing is, it
 happened. I was there. It’s nonfiction.

I wrote the above
 paragraphs on May 9, 2004, in Bran village, in 
Transylvania. They are paraphrased from some notes in my 
journal, written specifically for this essay, which 
would be crafted many months later.

My literary
 intention in writing them was to see if I could take the
 elements around me—the village, the courtyard of Castle Bran, the mountains, the sunset—and merge the 
journalist’s eye for detail with the horror
 writer’s inner eye for color and atmosphere 
through the power of imagination.

The facts are
 technically accurate: The sun was setting, the Carpathians
 were blue-green, the land is largely forgotten, and the soil 
of Transylvania has seen more bloodshed than most in
 Europe.

I was in search of answers—all of them 
journalistic and pertaining to the film I was there to
 cover for the magazine that had flown me halfway across the
 world.  None of the questions were about vampires. Whether
 the shadows seemed “hungry” or not is a 
matter of artistic vision, and since I wrote it, I am 
the ultimate authority.

That’s the magic of the
 writing craft, and one of the gifts of 
imagination—to bring a waking dream to life on
 the page.

If I say they
 were hungry, then they were hungry.

In the popular 
imagination, Castle Bran has become the de facto
 “Castle Dracula,” one of the seats of
 power of the 15th-century Wallachian prince, Vlad the
 Impaler, whose historical identity was the
 genesis of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, 
published in 1897. I first read it in 1971, when I was
 9 years old.

My mother started
 me on this twilit road with the grisly “bedtime
 stories” of the Brothers Grimm, replete with ogres
 and demons and ancient wind-blasted castles where 
witches dwelt. I graduated to British fantasy writers
 like Alan Garner, then to English ghost stories of the M.R. 
James school, and American horror comics. Laced 
throughout were the Christopher Lee Dracula films I
 adored, among the best of the Hammer Films oeuvre. I
 read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at our
 villa outside of Geneva when my father was posted to the 
United Nations there in the mid ’70s, learning 
early what I would later rediscover upon rereading 
Dracula in Transylvania in 2004—that 
there is portentous power in experiencing a writer’s
 work by reading it in the milieu in which it was set.

Nonfiction and
 essays have largely comprised my professional
 writer’s life to date, but I have managed to
 make horror fiction my avocation, not only with my own
horror fiction but with the Queer Fear anthology
 series, the first collections of horror stories to
 have gay protagonists and themes as a matter of
 course. I’m a proud member of both PEN and The
 Horror Writers Association.

Being a queer
 horror writer is a lot like coming out a second time. 
Readers, editors, and friends see you one of two ways: They
 either regard you as a spooky fellow whose 
predilection for things that undulate by moonlight is 
an amusing, endearing jape, or they see a massive
 incongruity between what they think of as your
 “serious” literary work—articles, 
essays, reviews, collections—and this weird shit you seem 
to love. I occasionally feel the pressure to disavow 
my horror work as literarily unserious, as though I
 couldn’t possibly be thought of as a serious
 writer if I didn’t.

Writing is either good writing, or it is
 bad writing. I don’t acknowledge the barriers 
of genre, and neither do the writers I most admire.

Horror, like desire, is a
 visceral emotion. Anything that makes a reader 
“feel” those emotions that society would
 rather leave behind closed doors is bound to make these 
prim worthies uncomfortable.

Back in May 2004
 I was on assignment in Bucharest for Fangoria, the
 American horror film magazine of record, for which I
 have been writing for nearly 20 years. My editor, Tony
Timpone, has become a great friend and confidant over the
 years, and since 1987 he has sent more fun my way than
 any journalist has the right to expect. I was covering
 the filming of Seed of Chucky, written and
 directed by out director Don Mancini and starring two
 gay icons, Jennifer Tilly and John Waters. A group of us
 from the production had chartered a minivan and
 departed from the Bucharest Marriott, an oasis of 
Eastern European luxury that bordered on 
vulgarity, to make the occasionally bumpy day trip 
“deep into the heart of Transylvania,” 
as Roman Polanski wrote in the screenplay of
 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers.

My fellow 
travelers were superb company. As difficult as it was to get
 into the “vampire mind-set” with the
 van’s radio playing Blondie’s “Heart
of Glass” and other great hits of decades past while
 we swapped film, travel, and boyfriend anecdotes, we
 did see genuine Transylvanian peasants with goiters,
 driving oxcarts; and gypsies and wild dogs 
everywhere—just like the movies—through the 
windows.

As we left 
metropolitan Bucharest, the land became flatter and more 
sparse, until we began to climb into the mountains. Great
 fields of dark earth gave way to soaring rock and 
black-green pine forests. The air grew cold and clear.
 Here and there we drove through villages where 
humble-looking wooden houses were interspersed with stern, 
rigorous municipal architecture. In the distance every
 now and then, we would catch a glimpse of a monastery
 or a sinister-looking castle jutting out from a
 mountain ledge sometimes—delightfully—shrouded
 in mist.

Given the loathing many Romanians feel for 
the co-opting and casting of their national hero Vlad 
the Impaler as a vampire horror staple, we kept the
 delight largely to ourselves.

Everywhere
 wandered the ubiquitous Romanian street dogs, mute victims
 of Ceausescu’s savage uprooting and forced
 diaspora of their owners.

When the late dictator
 appropriated the homes of ordinary Romanian citizens in
 order to use the land to construct what would later be
 acknowledged as grotesque monuments to his 
megalomania, families were forced to settle in
 government-owned city apartments that forbade pets.


Abandoned, the dogs are Romania’s
 “other” orphans. They interbreed and wander
freely along the treacherous roads by the tens of
 thousands. The ones that survive form a concurrent 
Romanian population to the human one. During my stay in
 Bucharest, a good day was seeing only one dead dog along the 
side of the road as I was chauffeured to the studio. A 
bad day would be nearly unthinkable to the average 
modern North American city dweller, especially a dog
 owner.

Midway thorough
 the journey our driver stopped the van and sauntered over 
to a group of gypsies standing in front of a store to ask
 them directions to Castle Bran. The gypsies suddenly
 became agitated, and an exchange of rapid-fire
Romanian exploded between them and our driver.

As we
 watched, our driver raised his hands and waved them 
away. The gypsies lurched after him, keening and 
wailing and crossing themselves. He jumped into the
driver’s seat of the van and slammed the door, 
locking it. Inserting the key into the ignition, he
 put the van into reverse, gunned the engine, and
 swerved away from the gypsies, who were by now spitting on 
the ground and glaring sullenly at our departure.

“What were
 they saying?” queried one of my traveling companions, 
turning her head and looking back. The whole spectacle
had been quite dramatic, and we were all by now
 aroused from our travel-induced torpor and quite taken
 with the entire passionate exchange.

“They are
 wanting money,” said our driver, manifesting the
 urban Romanian’s contempt for
 gypsies. “I have not given money. Gypsies 
angry.”

Nonsense, I said 
to myself with a private smile. They were saying,
“For the love of God, stay away from the 
castle!”

After an hour or 
so we parked, turned off the radio, and stepped out into 
the cold wind to stretch our legs. We stood on the edge of a
 desolate stretch of highway. The fields were dead and
 yellow, life not yet returned to them after the savage 
winter, and the Carpathian Mountains in the 
distance seemed cruel and implacable, though no less
 majestic for their cruelty.

I listened to the
 wind, closed my eyes, and tried to dream of Dracula.

For a moment, the
 world as I knew it vanished. I heard Jonathan
 Harker’s calèche clattering along the
 Borgo Pass through spectral blue fire on
 Walpurgisnacht, and the distant baying of wolves.

Then the dream 
vanished as quickly as it had come, reality closing over 
the dark obsidian stone of fantasy as surely as the surface
of a bright green lake.

And yet, later, the moment
 occurred again, this time after our arrival at the
 castle. With a sense of reverent pilgrimage, I split 
off from the group and went to explore the rugged, gloomy 
castle on my own.

Momentarily, blissfully free from tourists, I sat on a rough-hewn wooden bench in the
 courtyard and looked up. I closed my eyes and again
 summoned my waking dream of “the land beyond the
forest,” the Transylvania of myth and legend 
that I’ve carried in my head and heart since I
 was a very young boy.

“5
May.—I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had
 been fully awake I must have noticed the approach to
 such a remarkable place,” wrote Jonathan Harker
 in his journal, describing his arrival at Castle Dracula.
“In the gloom, the courtyard looked of considerable 
size, and as several dark ways led from it under the
 great round arches it perhaps seemed bigger than it 
really is.”

The sudden
 arrival of a clutch of hearty beaming white-legged German
 tourists in black socks and sandals wielding cameras snapped
 me out of my reverie. I opened my journal, made a few 
notes, then gathered up my things and went to join my 
friends.

Ultimately, it
 didn’t matter to me that Bran village had
 become something of a mitteleuropa “Dracula 
Disneyland” with peasants and gypsies hawking 
bread and cheese and everything Dracula-related to
tourists who were there to celebrate Stoker’s vampire
 count who never was.

Or that after 
visiting the tomb of Vlad the Impaler on the monastery 
island of Snagov a few days later, the “silver
 crucifix” I'd bought to commemorate the occasion
 began to glow in the dark—and not because of the 
presence of anything unholy.

No, what mattered 
is that, as I gazed across the fields at whose edge the
 brackish marsh water lapped the muddy shores of Snagov 
Island, I was able to remember the island’s
gruesome history, and its legends. Over the centuries 
it had been put to a series of grisly
 purposes—prisons, torture chambers, the site of 
monstrous impalements, many supervised by the
 inhabitant of that elaborate Byzantine crypt beyond the line 
of trees at my back.

I was able to
 close my eyes and see a storm coming in over the water, lightning flickering at the center of boiling, tenebrous 
clouds in a sky gone black and violent. Behind me, in
 my waking dream, loomed the rain-lashed medieval 
monastery that allegedly contained the last earthly 
remains of a fiend who many believed was immortal.

I found that even 
after I opened my eyes and blinked in the sunlight,
 Snagov Island was nowhere I would want the dark to catch me.

Plural identities, plural realities.

Imagination.

For a writer, they’re powerful tools. For a horror writer, they’re the air we breathe.

Before leaving
 Castle Bran that May afternoon, I ran my fingers 
lightly along the stone walls in tribute to the boy I was in
1971. I committed them to memory—again, not
 without a pilgrim’s veneration.

I won’t
 forget the feeling of that rough surface of Dracula’s
 castle beneath my fingers as the sun went down, or my
 rediscovery of the secret doorway in my mind that had
 swung inward with the soft click of memory.

I knew well the
 ancient thing that waited for me inside.

After all, I was
 nourished on blood.

Collinwood: My First Haunted House

Haunted houses are very much on my mind this evening as I pack for the World Horror Convention 2013 in New Orleans, a city I've wanted to visit since the first time I read Anne Rice's brilliant novel The Witching Hour, to which I lost an entire weekend in 1990.

Rice is an author whose gifts I have cherished since Interview With The Vampire first came out, but the book that made the list of my all-time favourite supernatural novels (and the list of my all-time favourite historical novels as well) was—is—The Witching Hour, which Rice set in her then-home on First Street. The notion of setting a story in one's own home had not occurred to me in 1990, and it struck me as a particular bit of witchcraft, for lack of a better word. And the book was (and remains) completely and utterly gorgeous.

Consider this description, from the first part of the novel:

"The doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans. And the old house really did have white fluted columns on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek Revival style they called it—a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District, its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were made in a rose pattern and much festooned with vines—purple wisteria, the yellow Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink."

Inside, "[he] smelled that smell again of a New Orleans house in the summer, heat and old wood."

By the time Rice describes the inside, everything from the shadowed coolness to the scent of camphor and genteel rot had imprinted itself on my imagination, and the process of reading the novel had moved beyond the experience of reading it and well into the experience of living it. There are ghosts aplenty in The Witching Hour, as well as witches, of course, and more. But twenty-three years after first reading the novel, what has stayed with me more than anything else is the First Street mansion itself.

I will very likely take a stroll past the house while I'm in New Orleans in the same way I visited Hemingway's house in Key West in the 1980s (sweet-talking my way into a private tour at dawn, culminating an invitation to come behind the ropes to touch Hemingway's typewriter) but I suspect it'll be anticlimactic, because I've already been inside that haunted house, in my imagination, courtesy of Mrs. Rice's prodigious literary gifts.

The house on First Street may be my favourite haunted house, but it wasn't my first. And you never forget your first.

My first haunted house was Collinwood, the 40-room mansion from Dark Shadows, the American gothic television series starring Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, the morose New England vampire who became an improbable teen idol, festooning the covers of Tiger Beat and 16 along the way. The series ran between 1966-1971, spawning two full-length motion pictures, a series of paperback novels, a 1990s series reboot, and culminating in the Tim Burton film version starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas. My thoughts on Mr. Depp as Mr. Collins belong elsewhere than this blog post, so we'll set them aside for now. 

Unlike my American contemporaries, I didn't come to this love via the television series, which I hadn't seen in April, 1972 when I first discovered the Dark Shadows comic book series from Gold Key.

I was ten, and that issue, complete with the cover image of a young woman being chased through Hell (never called that in the story, interestingly enough) by the dark suited man with the silver wolf's head cane was the most lurid, exciting, creepy thing I'd ever seen. I'd already been primed for a gothic imagination through the Brothers Grimm and the darker fairy tales to which I was as naturally drawn as other children are to bright colours and sunshine.

Barnabas was also my first vampire, but even as a later writer of vampire fiction, that wasn't the most important thing for me. No, it was the house itself, Collinwood, all 40 shadow-filled rooms full of magic and horror and every manner of ghosts. That, and the imaginative possibilities presented by the stories themselves.

"Hellfire" tells the story of a young Collins cousin, Constance, who survives a near-attack by Barnabas, who realizes he can't drink the blood of a member of his own family. It's never explained why, exactly, but ultimately it doesn't matter. There are bigger threats on the horizon, including a mysterious, hypnotic "hellfire" that appears suddenly in the house—a cold fire that doesn't consume, but eventually lures Constance Collins into "the Dark Pit," from which Barnabas must rescue her. The  hellfire appears because of the presence of evil. Not only is Collinwood a locus of evil, but Barnabas's presence itself is apparently evil enough to summon the hellfire.

I began to consume every issue of Dark Shadows I could lay my hands on. My friend Gordie Brown was a Dark Shadows fanatic, I discovered, and he had all the back issues. As I said, I still hadn't seen the series, but I was in love with the stories already. I knew the characters' names, I knew the locale, Maine, which seemed to me a magical, wondrous place of nothing but cliffs and mansions, rocky shores, vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, diarists and letter-writers—and this later preoccupation had already become mine, as I had begun keeping a journal of sorts at nine.

A few years later, we were living in Geneva, Switzerland in a gloomy old villa up on a hill on the outskirts of a country town. My beloved American babysitter, Nancy, a seventeen year old girl of seemingly impossible sophistication and glamour, gave me my first gothic romance novel, bringing my love affair with Collinwood to the next level with the great gift of Barnabas Collins and the Gypsy Witch. I barely remember the storyline, but I remember being riveted to the corner of the couch, bathed in words and colours and images, in a novelist's way that no mere comic book, however glorious, could ever have bestowed.

I was to learn in later life that "Marilyn Ross" (whose gothic novels I consumed by the gross, as my teenage years unfolded, at least 30 of the provided by my glamorous benefactor, Nancy) was actually a Canadian writer in the Maritimes, whose name was...Dan Ross. I wish that I had known then that boys could write gothic romances, and that Canadians could, too. But I was already in thrall to Marilyn Ross's books, not only the Dark Shadows series, but others, with names like Satan's Island and Phantom of the 13th Floor. But the Dark Shadows series was my favourite.

In a nearby town, my parents indulgently bought me an antique bamboo walking stick, after extracting a promise that I wouldn't hit my brother with it or poke anyone's eye out. In the early hours of the evening, I would walk the empty country roads under the moon pretending to be Barnabas, or pine in my room pretending to be one of the interchangeable series of governesses and gentlewomen in distress who seemed to wash up at the door of Collinwood as regularly as the tide.

More importantly, I began to crystallize a dream of someday writing books like these: moonlight book, all gaslight and stars and long, empty corridors full of shadows. I wrote what is now called "fan fiction" as a school project for English class: a "novel" of about five pages called Barnabas, Quentin, and the Silver Bat. As I recall, it was a good idea in theory, except for the slavishly aped Marilyn Ross-style writing, and characters that someone else had dreamed up, and the fact that it was five pages long. Today, no one would ever accuse me of underwriting, or minimalism, so perhaps I just hit my Jay McInerney period before hitting puberty.

But let me tell you, there was something to be said for writing it in an upstairs bedroom in a 150+ year-old Swiss villa near the shores of the same lake upon which was perched the Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley had first dreamed of Frankenstein; something to be said for having one's own personal Collinwood, at twelve, in which to dream of becoming a writer.

A lot to be said, actually.

In the same vein, I read Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot in that house during a storm of Frankenstein-level intensity. I cherished the moment when the lightning flashed so brightly that the verandah furniture cast shadows on the wall across from me that seemed almost alive. The borders of children's minds are permeable. This is why they learn languages so easily, and retain them for life. Gothic imagery is it's own language, and those of us who write in the genre often learn it early, and it stays with us long after childhood. Indeed, it's a language we likely never completely forget.

As an adult, I've always cherished old houses.

Our house in Milton, Ontario, where we lived for six years, was over 100 years old. By the time we lived there, I was already a working magazine writer, though I was beginning to dabble in fiction, too. A vampire anthology I edited with Thomas S. Roche, Brothers of the Night, contains my story "The Dead of Winter," which was my experiment with what Anne Rice had so spellbindingly accomplished in The Witching Hour: using one's own house as a setting for a story. I believe it was haunted, too. An incident occurred in that house which provided the seed for my novel Wild Fell, a ghost story of sorts, which is coming out this November from ChiZine Publications.

Our present house in Toronto, on a shady, tree-lined street not far from downtown, is likewise well over a century old, part brick, part clapboard. I write in a gabled study  at the top of the house with a weathervane on the peaked roof. In the introduction to Queer Fear, I wrote of our house that, in summer, you can smell time sleeping in the cool, dim rooms: the smell of old wood, the chill of the odd, unexpected draft, the ghost of woodsmoke from the fireplace.

I've written both Enter, Night and Wild Fell here.

Writing Enter, Night, I was acutely aware of the degree to which Parr House, the mansion of the monstrous matriarch of the town of Parr's Landing, was an homage to Collinwood. This was also noted by my great friend, the novelist and distinguished Hollywood biographer William J. Mann. Bill was, like me, a child of Dark Shadows. At the same time, Parr House also incorporated vistas and memory-views of Villa la Muraz, the house outside Geneva where I lost myself in Marilyn Ross's world. And even though Enter, Night is about vampires, it's also about old houses and what they represent, and what they represented to me.

Among my friends I count some of the finest writers of dark fantasy fiction in print today. The source of other writers' inspiration is for them to share, or at least for another blog post. But I will say that one thing we all have in common is the degree to which where we're from informs the writing we do now—where we're from, and what we took from it. It's like that story of the blind men and the elephant. They all touched different parts of the same animal, but each envisioned a radically different beast based on the part of it they touched. That's at least part of the experience of writing life.

I'm now packed and ready to go. The car is coming for me at a very civilized hour, an hour that will have allowed me a decent breakfast, my essential coffee, and a romp with Beckett in the graveyard near the house.

I've already been warned about the weather in New Orleans—40 degrees Celsius (sorry, Americans, you're on your own, I've forgotten how to do the calculations.) I was in Delhi once, many years ago, and the temperature was something like 43 degrees Celsius, which made me feel microwaved. That said, I've been warned by my friend, writer-director Ron Oliver (who has a fun blog of his own, worth checking out) not to complain on Facebook about the weather every half-hour. Both of us agree, there's nothing more intrinsically Canadian, or maybe Ontarian, than talking about discussing the weather.

That said, if I don't return on Monday, or ever blog again, rest assured I've either gone Angel Heart, or downed in the humidity on Bourbon Street, pumped full of gumbo and liquor.

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