FULL BLEED: MY EYES SEE WHAT THEY WANT TO SEE
- May 19
- 8 min read
Kinda some spoilers for previous Hazeland works here, at least the first two. I’ll try to be as oblique as possible. Be forewarned.
Full disclosure: I’ve never been comfortable with horror as a descriptor for my work on Hazeland. Even before it was Hazeland and it was just a couple of short stories and then a novella called The Queen of No Tomorrows.
Firstly, the stories, particularly one called “Chunked” but the others as well, didn’t have any relation to The Queen of No Tomorrows. Which was how I got the deal to get the book published in the first place. Yes, I’m a stinker. I don’t feel bad about it at all. There’s no connection, not even a tenuous one (aside from the reference to the Blackrock Incident in Queen and the Blackrock Facility in “Chunked” and those were just names I pulled out of the ether. To be completely honest, I stole Blackrock from Blackrock Mountain in World of Warcraft, but it sounded cool and sufficiently mundane that it could have been an old scientific or military facility.)
“But wait. There’s a Lovecraftian kaiju thing in Queen. It makes a mess of things.”
To which I’d say: “Is there really? Do you know what it is? I’ve said what characters think it is and what they see. Does that explain the essential nature of the thing?”
Again. I’m a stinker.
If anything, I wrote The Queen of No Tomorrows as sort of an inversion of a lot of what I saw in lazy Lovecraftian fiction. I won’t say cosmic horror as that’s too broad a category and there’s some really great work out there in the field. There’s also some I find exhausting. Queen isn’t about the ancient world revealing itself anew in today. It’s about the tension between fiction/fakery and reality, between the appeal to authority of old-world magic and what had been happening for thousands of years apart from esoteric tradition, and have actual characters look like they’re driving things instead of it being machinations millennia in unfolding coming to bear.
And to be clear, there’s pieces of expected horror in it. There’s ritual killings. There’s old books (whoops! That’s a fake but people treat it like it’s real). There’s a thing that walks between worlds being used as a tool by sorcerors. There’s witchcraft and time inversion and consequence before action. There’s even a self-confessed witch who sure seems like she’s set on opening a gate between here and Somewhere Bad. Sure could be passed off as horror.
If you put the right tone to it, that is. See, my thought is that when people say they want a genre, or even a set of, ugh… tropes, that what they’re really saying that they want a particular tone. They might even want a particular authorial voice but they don’t want to deal with the fact that it’s the single hardest thing to convey in a review or whatever, so they just come up with lists of things they like, these sorts of flavor crystals that get sprinkled over things. This isn’t the worst thing. It just gets misunderstood all the time.
And here’s where I’ll stop on the whole subject of author and audience expectation because that’s something you could do a doctorate on. I don’t know my audience. I don’t know what they expect and am not sure if they know what to expect out of my books (other than I’m going to keep changing things up because writing the same thing over and over gets old very fast – it’s how I burned out of my WFH job but that’s another thing I won’t be talking about anytime soon.)
Horror is all about tone and emotional delivery. Usually bad vibes. Okay, almost always bad vibes, but enough good vibes or humor to offset things and keep them from being dull and thudding. Unless you’re most indie horror movies dumped onto streaming now in which case, the desperation to appear like a good movie usually sucks any sense of fun or humor out of the works and whoops, I’m bored. Horror’s about that revelation that no, the world doesn’t work like you thought it did. Chinatown is a great example of this. Jake Gittes, private investigator gets to the bottom of the case he’s on only to figure out that the solution is that Everything Is Corrupt and all he can do is stand and bear witness as the center of all that is evil does what it wants without any negative consequence to itself.
Wait. Chinatown isn’t a horror movie? Lemme check my notes. No. Definitely horror. Sorry.
Okay, that’s just one aspect of horror. One door in. All that matters is the upset, the sheer emotional upset and wrongness of things.
Or wait, maybe it’s the rightness of things, that humans are a tiny little speck of nothing on a backwater planet that will never know the touch of another intelligence (because humans are eating all the other things that could be intelligent). That humans are insignificant. It’s just better that way because we’d set the galaxy afire because, well, human. Is that rightness or wrongness? I confuse easily these days.
I… I don’t always like cosmic horror. When it’s done well, it’s great. The enormity of things, of everything and knowing that we’ll only see the slightest bit of it. That we’ll come and go (even as a species) and nothing will be left of our works because nothing else will regard them. All is dust on the wind, brother. Just like in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But the whole human as separate from this gigantic system that they’ll never understand and is likely to manifest itself as an ineffable thing that will likely eat you streak of cosmic horror is lacking. Hmm. The biggest threat is that the main character gets eaten, reduced to meat.
Oh wait, that’s body horror, right? Horror. Bodies. I mean, yuck. Who has time for all the fuss and bother. All the flatulence and orgasms and the face that the body makes you make. Rei du Tutto had it right. But sure, imagining the transformations or mere dissections in body horror coming to touch your precious corpus are terrifying. Unless, of course, the transformation is the point and the goal and the desire. All depends on where you’re standing.
I feel like I’m wandering some. Let me know if I’m boring you.
I guess a lot of my problem (scare quotes) as a horror writer and reader and viewer is I’m looking at all this as literature of the imagination. Have you shown me something new or something old in such a new way that it may as well be new? Ultimately, horror, like science fiction or high fantasy or dieselpunk or any of the wrappers you can put on something, those aesthetic markers, are cool and all, but don’t matter.
Well, they kinda do. They can direct in terms of setting and, most importantly, tone, which again is what a lot of people are reading for. Again, this isn’t a knock on these or any other genre. The only problem I have with it is when they become the only thing that a person reads or views and don’t want to look beyond. Or get upset when every check box isn’t ticked by them at the end of a book and then they take that to Goodreads.
Oops. I’m talking about audience again. I said I’d stop. Stopping.
So, yeah, horror. I’m still not sure my work fits there. I’m not leaving you with that note at the end that makes you feel isolated and surrounded by a vast uncaring universe (which is okay because this is just fiction, right? If it was real, that’d be horribly depressing and…) I haven’t put the characters through hell and revealed at the end of things that it’s Whoops, All Hell Forever! There’s a place for this sort of thing, sure. But it’s harder to pull off meaningfully than you’d think. But people keep reaching for it like edgelords thinking “This will really get ‘em!” It just doesn’t do much for me, movies or books.
Okay, sure. The end of Blood Meridian still gets me. As did The Outer Dark. But the whole “the monster is waiting inside the boyfriend she thought she’d saved and oh no (mess with gender presentation as you see fit)” ending is… I dunno. Usually laugh inducing. It’s unearned. And spending the length of a book with someone and there’s no lesson learned, no insight gained, no growth or even examination and it’s just well off the cliff with you because that’s demanded… No. Now the brush with the unexplained and having it be a resonant note which you feel like will ring with the character for the rest of their lives, waking them from deep sleep or keeping them from sleeping? Yeah, that’s the good stuff.
Like, let’s say Night of the Living Dead, the OG. That’s great. And that ending is about as downer as it gets, then goes right into gut punch territory. Amazing. Wonderful. Endlessly rewatchable.
Then there’s the remake of Day of the Dead, which is a solid action thriller with some really horrible stuff and some great set pieces, basically tries to pull off the same ending (suggested, implied, not executed because they don’t have the guts to do it.) It fails miserably. I’ll also note that it’s not part of the original screenplay for the film. Yes, I’ve read a good chunk of the screenplay of a remake of a movie because I was curious. It was pure edgelord material. Dispiriting, really.
What was fumbling for a horror ending because horror can’t have any positive notes (note that I don’t believe it, but the creators clearly did) just became a dreary slog.
If the end result of all these stories is “the character gets run through a woodchipper the end” well, that’s dull. If the ending of these stories is “our sole survivor gets through the night and laughs her head off because maybe she’s lost it or maybe she’s learned what it is to be actually alive or pure triumph” then yeah, gimme more of that. Gimme a life beyond the end of the movie or the last page. Don’t run through all of it, of course, but let me see that it’s gonna happen.
If the ending is “The elder gods claim another victim and we are another day closer to the Stars Being Right” then… okay, whichevs. I got my fill of that when I was thirteen.
Show me something fantastic instead. Which is what I try to do. Some of that stuff, sure, slots right alongside horror and upset. But I’m not centered on it, which I’m sure will be a disappointment to some. Maybe they’re not repeat backers.
If you’re a masochist and want to read more along these lines, more things where I do the awful thing of something like a writer’s statement explaining the tricks, which is terrible because all I’m really trying to do is to let the reader have an experience. I can shape and try to direct the experience, but everyone’s going to be a little different about what they get out of things. Getting upset about that isn’t a great idea. Anyways, in these pieces, I talk a bit about what I was thinking about with Hazeland and genre and category.
And how genre isn’t real.
Note these aren’t proscriptions. I’m not fool enough to tell anyone what they should or should not write. I’ll talk all day about what works for me and what doesn’t.
And, commercial note, we’re at just past $1700 on the My Gifts Are Hungry kickstarter. Week and a half left. I could use every backer I can find. Give the page a read and maybe you’ll want to jump into the car and take a spin down some very weird streets.
Until next time.
