I have recently been receiving a number of queries concerning the origins of my horror fiction. I have been informed by readers that I write urban horror, historical horror, psychological horror, time-travel horror, dystopian sci-fi horror. A few weeks ago V.J. Waks called me up while I was half asleep and, referring to A Fisherman of Tennis, resurrected me with the following line, or there about, "I just read your last piece kiddo—it is horrible, simply horrible!"

"You mean we can't do a collaboration, I suck that bad? What did I misspell?"

Her voice went into the soothing zone, "I meant that it is wonderfully horrific. I don't know where you're going with this but I'm on board."

It is my habit to proof a few old pieces every week. After I do so, and log corrections, the post pops up at the head of the main page. After proofing this piece and finding no typos, and realizing how long ago I wrote it, I thought that it might serve to answer some of those recent questions concerning the darkening aspects of my fiction.

Over the past month I have had three readers make the following comments about my writing:

“It’s too dark and demented. I’m afraid to read anymore.”

“It was great. I learned a lot reading your articles online. It became depressing after a while. You might want to post a disclaimer, ‘Read for more than two consecutive hours at your own risk.’”

“That was a very good piece of writing. It got me depressed though, I guess because it got me considering how things really are.”

Then last night, I was speaking with a fellow writer at work [He writes superhero comics.] As we discussed our latest projects I told him about my novel Hurt Stoker; that I did not think it could be saleable and was going to serialize it online. When he asked why I thought a publisher would not take it I responded, “I’m writing the whole thing from the perspective of a black character. White people don’t want to read from that perspective, and blacks don’t want to read a black perspective written by a white guy.”

He gave me the standard advice, which is not to insult blacks by trying to explore their social condition, and to admit the impossibility of a white understanding what it is like to be black by just writing that character as a white guy; literally throwing in the literary towel. Now, I am too much of a defiant jerk to take this advice. I didn’t have to admit to that though, because there was a more specific reason why I could not write this character as if he were white. I responded, “I understand your point. But, this is an alternative history story set in Two-thousand-thirteen in a world where the Confederacy won a crushing military victory over the Union in Eighteen-sixty-three.”

He gave me a very expressive look that said, ‘How could you even consider writing such a thing’ and then responded, “That’s a nightmare scenario.”

I agreed, “Yeah, that’s Jim Crow squared.”

[I have actually decided, in the writing of Hurt Stoker, that the criminalized Manhattan-run North would be nastier than the anachronistic South with its gentile traditions, stagnant economy, and apartheid. But still, the horrific element—in human form—creeps in with the Northern Pinkertons and Southern Foresters.]

He walked away shaking his head, apparently in agreement over the distasteful nature of the project. I can’t help myself though. My biggest commitment is the Sunset Saga, a 23-novel 2-million word series based largely [40%] on the premise of using a time-branching device to form a splinter universe where the Native Americans might not suffer a total holocaust. It is told largely from the perspective of the two handicapped orphans who pick this fight with an enemy they know to be unstoppable, in defiance of a God they both believe in; the doomed damned paddling against the tide of history.

I have written a good bit of my work from the perspective of people who start life at a disadvantage, either due to their race or handicap or both. I have also gone against my first writing coach’s advice that I end every story with a happy ending with good triumphing over evil. His was good commercial advice. The most successful print genre is romance and the longest running TV shows are soap operas; all about beautiful people beginning and ending their stories in material comfort in the upper echelon of the dominant society on earth. I will get back to my literary logic for writing in ghettoized subgenres at the end of this piece. But first, let me explain briefly how I came by my apparently dark perspective.

My parents were kind, hard-working, charitable, middle-class, Christian folks who taught me that the world was predominantly good, and that my life would be pleasant so long as I followed the world’s rules. My first day out alone in the world was my first day of first grade. The walk to the school was no problem. As soon as I got onto the school grounds I was promptly attacked and beaten by three older kids. Numerous and regular repetitions of this type of thing throughout my childhood [the subject of my upcoming memoir Taboo You, due out in 2014] seared into my young mind an appreciation for the dark hidden undercurrents of the adult world, that could rise and engulf little people and come to dominate the un-parented portions of their lives and haunt even times at home with Mom and Dad.

By age six I was fairly alienated from the rest of the world. I did not withdraw, but chose to observe. Sure, I had my brightly lit fantasies—but there was always the darkness, the male relative waiting to torment and humiliate me; the big polish teenager who would run my fat little butt down in the alley and press my face against the fence links until I cried. As I bided my time, waiting for that day when I would morph into a big menacing teenager, I sat back and studied the troubling composition of the world of grownups that they all seemed so blissfully ignorant of. One example should suffice.

My parents had some regular friends, and these were the best: beautiful Miss Vicki who looked like Angie Dickenson, and cool Mister Vergil who looked like Elvis. One day, I think when I was ten, they came over for a crab feast, one of those rare occasions when us kids were permitted a half a glass of beer to go with our steamed crabs, a carnivorously festive Baltimore ritual.

The feast was being prepared outside and I was waiting for the call in the living room. I had recently taken to watching documentaries when I could get TV time alone. I was watching The World at War, the classic WWII documentary. Mister Vergil and Miss Vicki came in to sit with me on the couch. They gave a troubled look at the screen, at a concentration camp scene, and Mister Vergil spoke up, “What the heck is this Jimmy? Are you sure you should be watching this?”

I protested, “It really happened—it’s a concentration camp, they used to gas all of the Jewish people and stack them up!”

With a look of horror, reflected in his wife’s glassy eyes, he stood up and switched the channel until he got to Soul Train. He returned to the couch. “Now that’s better Jimmy.”

All I could think was, That must be why they are so good-looking and happy. They just sit and watch other good-looking people do the happy dance.

That solidified my opinion that adults were deluded people who looked at the dark world I lived in and saw a bright shining place. This was confirmed 20 years later when I was waiting for the patriarch of our family, Uncle Fred, a strong, successful, positive kind of guy, to show up at my mother’s for dinner. I had already been there for an hour or so and had turned on a movie, The Mission, about Europeans wiping out Indians. The movie was toward the end of the slaughter, when Uncle Fred stopped to take a look. “Jimmy, what the hell is this? Can you get the game? We can’t have the women and children watching this.”

It was a control study, my adult effort to verify the Mister Vergil finding of two decades past. Mister Vergil’s replacement in my living-room sized lab had demonstrated the same response to the same stimuli. So, now I knew why Uncle Fred was so sure, so confident; so positive. He had not been so unwise, so monkey-brain curious, as to look under the covers, let alone peel away the mattress, and see the rotten box-spring upon which our cultural bed rested.

I do not see my practice at looking under, behind, and in the past for the roots and nuances of the human condition as ‘dark’ but as ‘detailed’. I do not obsess on violence and horror, and have never suffered from depression. I also engage in less self-medication than anyone I have ever known. I will not even watch most horror movies on principle; and in the 1980s when some coworkers insisted I watch Faces of Death I refused. I can’t look into darkness never-ending. In 2000 I stopped my violence study, not because I had collected enough accounts, but because I was beginning to have nightmares; was taking on a fraction of the emotional burden of the hundreds of hurt souls I had interviewed, and it was adding up.

Let me give you an example of how I think being forced to consider the negative as an alienated child has informed me positively as an adult. I shall compare myself to one of my friends in the matter of women. In this matter he is very similar, and no more critical, than the typical man I have known. We both like attractive women.

This translates to me liking most of the women I meet, because I look for their good points. If she is 300 pounds and pretty; well, she’s pretty. That is how I see her. If she is skinny but has real nice hair, than to me, she is the girl with the real nice hair. So I am freed, by not having bought into a particular desirability template, to have a relationship with a woman based on her character, not her BMI.

My friend, on the other hand, is only attracted to women 5’ feet to 5 ½ feet tall. They must weigh less than 120 lbs, preferably have large breasts and a tan, and be 30 to 40 years old. They should also be educated and intelligent but not assertive.

I see an attractive female population. He sees ugly hags everywhere. This extends to sports as well. He can only enjoy 5 sports as a spectator, and cannot tolerate viewing most sports. He also cannot enjoy watching amateur level athletes. He can only be entertained by the best athletes, and finds nothing interesting about how the normal athlete gets the job done. I, on the other hand, find nearly every athlete worthy of watching, in every sport, even those I loathe like golf. The biomechanical details and questions of character, which matter so much in sub-elite athletic competition, keep me interested and even intrigued as he turns away in disgust at the lack of perfection. He is not odd. I am the odd one. He, like Mister Vergil and Uncle Fred, is just behaving according to extensive cultural conditioning, a process I was excluded from due to whatever flaw was somehow sensed and acted on by bullies throughout my childhood.

Let us use the sky as a metaphor for life. In this instance we are discussing life in literary terms, as a view had through narrative and dialogue. What most people choose to write, and choose to read, is the tale of a brightly lit world, at 11:00 am, under a sky clearly, but not yet harshly, lit. The writer then introduces a patch of darkness into the world via the storyline and the heroes combat this anomaly until the sky is once again bright and clear.

Now, what exactly is illuminated by this process?

Certainly no truth is illuminated in this manner. The truth is that the sky is dark nearly as often as it is light, and for those sublime periods of dusk and dawn and during the tribulations of storm, is often gray. This is the truth. It still, however, does not illuminate those deeper truths often hidden.

Consider this, other than the sun, which will burn your retinas if you look into it, how many stars do you see illuminated in the late morning sky?

It is the night sky, the inky darkness; that permits us to see the stars.

Let us step away from that metaphor and look to the human condition. If I had a time-travel agency I would make certain to list the top 10 places-in-time not to travel to. Number 3 would be France during the Hundred Years War: mud, blood, plague, misery—have your pick. Yet out of this pit of misery came Joan of Arc, one of the most amazing humans to have lived. If she had been born today she would just be someone’s weird dyke sister who talked to cats.

Think of Jesus without the evil of Roman rule? If he had been born on some island paradise who would have listened? Speaking of which, it entertains me to no end that those most convinced of his Second Coming are living in a state of luxury that would have shocked a Roman senator. When he comes back, don’t you think he would choose some pesthole of a third world nation that our economy is sucking the resources out of every bit as thoroughly as the Romans were draining Judea?

As a writer of speculative fiction it is my job to ask, and at least offer answers to, such questions. My job is illumination. For me to attempt to illuminate our collective plight I need use of the entire spectrum from bright hope to dark despair and the gnawing gray in between. Speculative fiction is for the person given to pondering. But even for such a reader it should only occupy a portion of his or her reading list. If you just read sci-fi, just horror, just fantasy, than I suggest you mix something else in there.

Before I close, let me use another one of the wonderful adults from my childhood as an example: a woman I have sat next to, first on her mother’s couch, and now on my mother’s couch, for half a century; Aunt Madeline. Aunt Madeline was the candy bringer, always with a pack of life-savers or gum in her purse for us kids. She has also always been a big reader. We still sit next to one another and read. She finds comfort in her books, where I find questions and answers in mine.

When it comes time to negotiate a TV channel—me wanting history and science and her Lifetime or Hallmark—we compromise on The Price is Right. She likes game shows and I like the curvy models.

To ask her to read something I wrote would only disturb her. We need romance novelists to comfort some; mystery writers to intrigue others; non-fiction writers to satisfy our curiosity; and speculative writers [including us horror nut-jobs] to shakeup those people for whom it’s a positive experience. For me writing horror is just a thread of the speculative process, one that I spend more time trying to disentangle myself from than trying to get wrapped up in.

I have written some things that disturbed me when I proofed it months later. But at the time the story was composed, I had ‘felt’ that it was a scene, a reality that has been experienced by someone and will again, that belonged in that story, even if I didn’t like it. Recently I reread The Road to Dolphins from Behind the Sunset Veil and was frankly horrified by the violence. If everything I wrote was along those lines I’d agree with whoever wanted to lock me up and throw away the keyboard. Until then, I hope what goes up on this site and out in print, is something you find useful, entertaining or insightful; hopefully all three.