Kissing Carrion

PEOPLE ASK ME all the time, but the truth is, I don’t know why I write dark fiction. The best reply I’ve ever been able to muster is that it’s all I have to say, or all I have to say that’s worth saying. It’s the way I see and, sooner or later, all clouds become demons in my view. Once upon a time, I kept it all to myself, tangled up inside my soul like loops of thorns and razor wire and blind, squirming things. The images, which always came without my having to call for them, were mine and they were mine alone. And then, at some point, I began to put them down on paper.

I was a slow starter.

I took ages to break down the high, white barriers that I’d erected, or that others had taken the liberty of erecting for me. Years to work through the layers of inhibition, the solidifying strata of guilt arising from my own visions.

And in the beginning, there was a terrible, electric thrill in the simple speaking of the unspeakable. Something more immediate than sex, because it was more than flesh could ever be. Something more honest than confession, because it would never compromise itself in apology. Something as alive as alive can ever be, because it never tried to look away from death. But as the years came and went, and the stories and novels piled up about me, I began to realize that some of that thrill had begun to diminish. Or, rather, that first hot rush of words and raw, dizzying imagery had been spent and something else was growing in its place, something with virtues all its own, sure, but something that lacked the undeniable urgency I’d felt back at the start. A sort of psychic scar tissue, perhaps, and all the endless conceits of art, filtering what had once escaped me unfiltered, pure and untainted by second-guessing games.

Which brings me, finally, in my own rambling, self-absorbed way, to the matter at hand, which isn’t my writing at all, but the writing of Gemma Files, collected here in this volume entitled Kissing Carrion. I don’t write many introductions, because, truthfully, I don’t read very much contemporary dark fiction. Most of it bores me silly. So, when I was asked to introduce this book, I almost said no, because I almost always say no (the particular questions are immaterial.) After all, I’d never even read anything by Gemma Files, though I did recognize her name from Dark Terrors 6, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, and Queer Fear, because I’d also had stories printed in those books. I rarely get around to reading the anthologies that I’m published in, though sometimes I do take time to browse through their tables of contents, noting the names of the other authors. Oh, and I also recalled that Gemma Files had won an International Horror Guild award for best short fiction.

Moreover, there’s always the imminent danger of misinterpreting the author in an attempt to flatter. I can think of few things more embarrassing, and more annoying to the author being flatteringly misunderstood. Of course, some would say that all interpretations of a given work are valid, in some sense, and therefore such a danger is actually a paper tiger. But those people are fools.

Anyway, I agreed to have a look at the manuscript, but didn’t commit to writing the introduction. At the time, I was in the middle of a move from Birmingham to Atlanta and trying to deal with all the chaos that invariably attends a move, and also trying to meet a number of deadlines. One morning early in January, the manuscript for Kissing Carrion arrived at my door and a few days later I read the first piece, from which the collection takes its title. I was at once surprised, because the story didn’t bore me silly and because I liked it even though it was written in first person (a practice that annoys me no end and which I’ve spent years condemning) and so, the next day, I read “Keepsake,” and then “Rose-Sick,” and, finally, “Blood Makes Noise.” Two of these were also written in first person, and, worse yet, one—“Rose-Sick”— was written in second-person, which, if you ask me, is as deadly a sin as any to which an author can ever aspire. Even so, I began to feel that old familiar charge again. The electric-bright sizzle in a very dark place. The fleeting spark in an Antarctic night. White fire from abyssal blackness, like the gleaming, ancient creature aboard the doomed submarine from “Blood Makes Noise;” something whispering in the gloom, whispering with a voice that made me want to listen.

This happens so infrequently that I stopped expecting it a long time back. Very few living authors can find that particular chord in me and still fewer can ever strike it more than once or twice. Fewer still write dark fiction. Kathe Koja. Thomas Ligotti. Ramsey Campbell. Peter Straub. Perhaps one or two others. It’s a short list. But, first- and second-person narratives aside, I discovered that Gemma Files was doing it, again and again and again. Whatever doubts I might still have had about doing the introduction were dismissed by the next story, “Skeleton Bitch,” which left me breathless and wanting more and angry that I hadn’t written it myself. That’s the highest compliment any author can ever pay another, I think, that envy, that wish that you could make another’s words your own.

And I kept reading.

And I kept finding that electric sizzle, those white-out sparks, the fire and whispering fossil voices.

Having done so, I will say this, by way of introduction:

Boldly, brazenly, Gemma Files pushes her hands deep into the red and seeping unconscious plac

es and finds the bits of treasure worth pulling back out into the light. The damned things, forbidden, forgotten, unwanted, feared and loathed, and “Here,” these stories say to us. “Look what I found. But look quick, before it’s gone again.”

Unlike the “splatterpunks” of the eighties and early nineties, and unlike the current self-proclaimed authors of “extreme horror,” who were and are rarely more than tiresome and never more than idiot jesters of excess and gore and exploitation, Gemma Files seems to grasp the weight and consequence, the inherent severity, of her fictive transgressions. And so her stories do not disintegrate, do not dissolve into accidental comedies of the grotesque. They do not degrade her characters, who are what characters must be, inhabitants of an imagination we’re being allowed to share, however indirectly, inhabitants gifted with souls and hearts, strength and failure, hope and hopelessness. Horrible things befall them, time and again, but never merely for our amusement.

This is no Roman circus, no peepshow.

I think Gemma Files has grasped the fine and crucial line between pornography and a true literature of the extreme. At least, I hope that she has. Something is keeping her voice hung just high enough above the pit that we can hear it clearly without tumbling in and drowning. In the end, if we are wise enough to pay attention, we find she’s made us look away from the pit, up, towards the stars overhead and probably out of reach.

At her best, in pieces like “Skeleton Bitch,” “Keepsake,” “Skin City” and “Mouthful of Pins,” Gemma Files transcends mere storytelling and her prose approaches the poetic, a prose poetry of terror and awe, ruin and pain and horror and constant sorrow. Here are words placed just so, precisely employed in an artistic economy that few writers ever bother to learn.

Here is passion, which must be more sacred to an author than her own life, and here is mystery, which must always obscure the path before us.

It’s not about a good, clean scare, a dark theatre you can leave behind after the credits roll, a carnival ride or a Halloween spookhouse. There are plenty of writers of dark fiction who aim for nothing more than such playful, ephemeral frights, and readers beyond counting who want nothing more. I suspect both groups would be unhappy with the seventeen stories that comprise Kissing Carrion.

Because these aren’t casual undertakings.

These are the things that make us who we would not be, and what we can’t help but become.

Sex. Blood. Death.

Secrets and transformations.

Appetite, and loss, and love beyond any explanation.

But I’ve said enough, surely. More than enough. These stories, and their author, speak for themselves and have no need of anyone else to speak for them. They know themselves well enough without me.

Now, turn the page . . .

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Atlanta, Georgia

17 January 2003

Kissing Carrion

Q: Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new Gods?