Tag: weird fiction

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Queer Weird Fiction: Joe Orton’s Head To Toe, a camp surrealist fantasia

British writer Joe Orton is famous for his blackly comic plays and and for the tragic manner of his death: being bludgeoned to death by his lover with a hammer. He is less well-known for his fiction. He published one novel, Head to Toe, a brilliant piece of Weird Fiction that languishes in obscurity. I say it’s brilliant, but your mileage may vary. The novel is set on the body of a giant being (referred to as an afreet) and concerns the wild adventures experienced by an ordinary schlub who wanders up on the creature’s body, finding that entire societies live there. The humor is Swiftean farce, but the underlying mood is one of Kafkaesque anomie. The text is marred by some archiac misogyny and the plot is episodic. It still manages to be haunting, full of dream logic. In a way, it’s like an adult, very camp and very queer Alice in Wonderland kind of phantasmorgia.

Head to Toe

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Why Dark Fiction?

 

I actually don’t think I write horror, as in flesh-eating zombies or vampires or splatter punk. I tend towards dark fantasy or ‘weird’ fiction. But there is a definite darkness in what I write. And the forthcoming collection (not to mention the eBook series, Variations) has at least one piece that could be considered straightforward horror.  Someone always asks me why I write what I write. Why so dark, so pessimistic?

Part of me wants to use the ‘channelling voices’ excuse: that the characters  just sort of use me as a vessel to tell their stories. And I think every writer has a moment when they feel that: Where did that come from? But if I am channelling voices, why are they such sad, and at times, disturbed voices?

Exorcist_steps

A large part of me being drawn to dark fiction is, of course, I grew up on horror. I macerated in it.  I live in DC, where the movie The Exorcist took place, and the true story that inspired it happened in just-across-the-border Mount Rainer. It was a young rite of passage to visit the terrifyingly rickety Exorcist steps in Georgetown. Stephen King burst on the scene in my childhood. I remember, vividly, those lurid covers from the 70s. Cryptozoology was serious business. I used to devour books documenting the existence of Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Jersey Devil, and nearby Maryland’s own ominous Goatman. I even had an aunt who told me her creepily prophetic dreams. Summers we went to Atlantic City where, at the time, there was still a freakshow that featured a fearsome Ape Girl who would escape and bum rush the audience.

Or maybe it’s something more. I learned pretty young that the world is a terrible place, full of disease, torture and worse. I think I write dark fiction and about dark subjects because its cathartic, and helps me work through the fear and anger I have. The ‘voice’ I am channelling is my own subconscious. I contend, in my own fiction, the real world horrors my characters face are often worse than any supernatural demon.