Death, Disease & Pandemic: How Horror Writers In The Past Have Translated Illness (Part 3: Edgar Allan Poe and Anne Rice)

In the example of Bram Stoker we see how a writer makes sense of a pandemic when he or she is a witness to the event. With King and Matheson, we saw how a writer imagines living through the event. But what if pandemic actually claims someone you love?

Horror has two prominent writers whose lives were touched by such a personal loss in profound and painful ways, tearing at their very souls to the point that they did not so much choose to write about it, as much as they were tormented into doing so.

Both Edgar Allan Poe and Anne Rice lost close family members to the unthinkable: Poe repeatedly lost the women in his life to disease – most commonly tuberculosis, a pandemic that seemed unstoppable and endless in his lifetime. And Anne Rice lost her daughter to a new kind of pandemic: the kind that goes undeclared because the contagion of it is not that of more familiar viruses and flus, but because they ravage our population as silent killers, misunderstood and curiously accepted as they pick us off one by one. With Rice, we are talking cancer – not your typical pandemic disease, but one which by its numbers seems to indicate an undeclared epidemic, one with multiple yet universal origins. But just in case you were wont to dismiss it in the face of the coronavirus, understand that no less than eight viruses have been linked to causing or contributing to the development of cancer.

 

Poe: Masque of the Red Death… and Everything Else He Wrote

Everything that came from Edgar Allan Poe’s pen reeks of premature death, decay, and the decomposition of life – sometimes (as in the “Fall of the House of Usher”) of culture or literal ways of life. Poe was not born of privilege, nor was he ever far from experiencing the judgment of class and condemnation of his contemporaries. Born the child of two actors (not considered a reputable profession at the time) on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, “a city that later in life he would loathe” (Montague 12), his was a life of struggle and loss. Disease dogged his every ambition.

Yet we in Horror hold him particularly close, especially in the United States, because he was the first to remake Horror we knew as definitively British into something local, and organically American. He translated Horror for us, and helped us see the futility in repurposing folklore without nurturing native roots. He became the most Literary and most original of our Horror writers…and he was the one H.P. Lovecraft (the presumed Father of Modern Horror) declared to be the most influential writer for him. (Montague 172)

Historically, he strikes us as a sad, macabre figure, an addict and alcoholic whose craft with language was eloquent and lyric. Yet those works we read as twisted and carefully crafted into perfect Horror in some joyous creative act was (n reality) one writer’s response to both his own grief and the poverty that served as the machinery behind those diseases of mind and body that plagued his life. It is with Poe that we see perfectly embodied the very modern argument that poverty enables premature death, addiction, and mental anguish.

And it is also with Poe that we see something else we prefer not to believe happens even today: the very public criticism and judgment of his failings – from his personal ones to his professional ones – by the very people who should have been able to rise above their own prejudices, but who (like we do right now in modern times) chose to consider themselves his moral superiors and therefore immune from death by such disease as haunted Poe’s existence.

Tuberculosis was the pandemic of Poe’s short lifetime (1809-1849) – taking his mother when he was just a toddler, and no doubt fixing in his mind the effects of that terrible wasting disease on the human body as it steadily stole away so many of the vibrant women in his life. The effect on his poet’s mind was clearly profound – inciting fears of the presence of blood, of the imminent threat to the young and old alike, to the possibility of premature burial, and the pale, vampiric presence of his contemporaries.

Poe was poor. He was born into poverty and remained there most of his life. And he is the example of what it costs us as a society to dismiss the poor to the association that it is the result of something that they have done to themselves (i.e., failure to just “do” better, to work “harder,” to have proper “ambition”) that blocks their pathway to the right to health, and the fault or responsibility of no one else. It is during his time that we cement our modern view that the poor somehow “deserve” their fate, that the poor are “dirty” and purveyors of mental illness and disease, that there is just naturally something “wrong” with them and disease is merely nature’s unfortunate way of weeding them from the herd.

With the rise of epidemics like tuberculosis, we cemented our belief that disease is caused by improper morals and “questionable” behaviors, facilitated by immigrants and undesirables filling boats that deliver them to our pristine American shores. Alcoholism and drug abuse was rampant then as now among the impoverished (even as it was “discreetly” indulged in by the higher classes). Yet by social design we intentionally disregarded the clear connection disease and addiction made between poverty and health, length and quality of life – despite the message being trumpeted by cherished writers of the time like Charles Dickens.

In fact, we have exercised our discrimination often disguised as “precautionary” action against disease – disease being something all people fear equally, and the rich and bigoted can use to exclude Others from the American Dream. We have to look only as far as our immigration practices at Ellis Island, right in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty:

“From 1892 to 1924, about 12 million people from other countries arrived at Ellis Island in New York. Those in steerage were subject to health screenings by physicians from the U.S. Public Health Service. The doctors checked for trachoma, an eye disease that often led to blindness, and watched for other conditions. The process could take anywhere from three to seven hours. Female physicians conducted some of the immigrant screenings on women who were modest and not comfortable undressing before a man…About 1 in 5 arrivals required more complete assessments, and those deemed a risk were quarantined at the Ellis Island Hospital, which closed 60 years ago and recently opened for limited public tours….Nurses cared for the 1.2 million patients suffering from heart disease, measles, scarlet fever and other conditions. Those considered infectious were placed on the wards of the 450-bed Contagious Disease facilities, on the farthest island from arriving immigrants. Those with mental illness were held at the 50-bed psychiatric facility until they could be deported. About 355 babies were born at the hospital, and 3,500 people expired during their quarantine….”   http://essynursingservices.com/ellis-island-immigrant-screening-and-quarantine-is-nothing-new/

Did it pass your notice that it was steerage passengers who were subject to screening? As if the wealthy could not, would not, or were morally immune from carrying disease. Steerage was where passengers with the cheapest tickets would be kept (and that would mean simply The Poor). This was the world Poe was living in… as a poor person, an alcoholic, an addict, and one often simply thought of as “mad.” And we live in similar times now, where both the poor and immigrants are seen as the harbingers of pandemic… Do we not at times feel made a bit “mad” ourselves?

Today we still see this “screening” happening, albeit in different ways. We denounce Others as immigrants first by anticipated moral failings (“rapists and murderers”) because being likely not-Protestant doesn’t work to scare a nation torn between agnosticism and evangelicalism. But if that fails, we resort to “dirty and diseased.” Take a peek at our current immigration policy as applied to our Southern border for proof…

We have long waged war against the poor. And it is a war we are losing as we willfully decimate the Middle Class to benefit the wealthy, disguising it as the failure of lower classes to properly educate and prepare themselves. We tuck it behind the Technology Revolution, implying when not outright saying it is related to an intelligence if not moral failing that certain people are being “left behind” and that it should never be the responsibility of successful Americans to ensure the education, health, and welfare of the poorest of Americans – especially if they are of color.  We remain tone deaf to a subtext that has begun to push to the surface. And we can see from the life of Poe and Stoker that this has been baking in our national culture for quite some time.

This same attitude held Poe down: his reputation took hit after hit, the name-calling was venomous, the professional and Literary Criticism relentless in its moral condemnations of his alcoholism, drug abuse, and “unsavory” character.

Poe fought back – sometimes lowering himself to his critics’ level, sometimes rising above in stunning Literary Critical essays of the quality that impresses today’s Critics…

He was accused of plagiarism by novelist William Gilmore Simms, and engaged in numerous professional battles resulting in libel suits and “scandalous rows” marked by fistfights and public scenes (Montague 130-131). He had “questionable” relationships with women.  Poe, caught in the web of grief and addiction, seemed unwilling if not unable to help himself. The worst was thought of him while his personal life was quite publicly ravaged by his addictions — clearly fanned by the staggering loss of women intimate to him to disease – especially tuberculosis. Poe is not, then, the best of examples as to how to turn pandemic loss into writing – but he is most certainly living proof that when Life happens to a writer of talent, magic might well be spun from the agonies that torment the grieving mind.  He was also “the first American writer to support himself entirely from the proceeds of his pen” (76 Montague)…

Poe is proof that a writer cannot turn off the words meant to define life. He is proof that even attempts to drown or mutilate the Muse will not succeed. She will, instead, haunt us until we write what we see.

That Poe saw in his poet’s mind what can be seen as vampiric women is also not so unexpected, then, because they are a natural extension of what he saw as a child and experienced as an adult (much like that which affected Bram Stoker). But they are also a natural extension of what writers of Poe’s time witnessed in the premature deaths of women, seen throughout his works like Legeia, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”… both haunted by the notions of life after death and “an emaciated, dying woman…” (Montague 59)

That constant ravaging of his life and loves by death and disease are why we have his incredible writing. Writing through his emotions his images of pale, decimated women haunt us like few others, because they are rooted in truth and genuine grief, in anger and denial, and the cruel acceptance of a life he had no control over.  “He died in a hospital, on Sunday, 7 October 1849, a sad and beleaguered end to an unhappy and harassed life. He was forty years old.” (Akroyd 190)

 

Death of a Child: Anne Rice and Interview With The Vampire

Born Howard Allen O’Brien October 4, 1941 (yes, Howard) in New Orleans, Louisiana, the woman we all came to love as the author of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice, has single-handedly reshaped the Vampire in modern Horror.

Would it surprise you to know it was because of the death of her child that all of the right questions took shape in her books to elevate a good story to a Literary one? Would it surprise you that Cancer has a root in viruses?

For many of us, cancer is not a typical “pandemic”… it does not spread by contagion. It has a “routineness,” a “familiarity” for us… an expectation of survival in percentages. For modern people, cancer is a ghostly familiar – stalking us, devouring us, yet minimized by “treatments” and our own preferred ignorance of the disease within the lottery of our lives.

Yet is has been connected to viruses in our modern research of the disease. So maybe our early human instincts to shy away from those diagnosed with cancer had some preternatural sense at play. Or maybe we were just shocked and overwhelmed by the horrors this disease can deliver – and the terrors of the first treatments we tried to defeat it.

One has only to drift back to the 1960s and 1970s to see that it is there – in those decades – that we realized how prevalent it was to the human species, how terrible, how…fatal. Because we were better at identifying it at the precise time we were environmentally enabling it… cancer felt very much like a pandemic – so much so the common person even today still has trouble really believing we can’t “catch it” from each other.

Cancer is everywhere… quietly rubbing out vast numbers of us. Our governments are silent. Our researchers…struggling in what seems like competition with every other researcher for funds to find a cure.

But for many in my generation, the most vivid memory of cancer’s emergence into our mainstream consciousness is the pure Horror of random and horrific loss.

To understand where we were during the time Anne Rice was facing her loss, movies like Sunshine, Brian’s Song, and Love Story will give you a clear picture as to where we were in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and our loss ratios.

A cancer diagnosis was so horrific, friends and family often fled. And I can tell you that even in 1997 when my mother battled cancer, her friends and family (having clear expectations of what was about to transpire from those very films and life experience) … largely evaporated… rendered emotionally incompetent to deal with her dying, fleeing like her terminal diagnosis was…contagious.

It turns out, we come by this superstition honestly.  According to an article in Healthline titled “8 Viruses That Can Increase Your Cancer Risk” “It is estimated that viruses account for about 20 percent of cancers. And there may be more oncogenic viruses that experts aren’t aware of yet.”

Whether we sense this or simply fear it, we cannot seem to help ourselves when it comes to treating cancer like a contagious virus, and its victims become inexplicably feared.  Virus (to most lay people) means “infectious…transmittable…dangerous.” We are unwilling to believe we have such viruses resting dormant in many of our bodies as a part of simply living. We NEED – desperately – to believe we can control “catching” something as horrible as cancer. We need to believe we do NOT contract it because we were better, smarter, more faithful – and not because we were luckier. Cancer victims remind us we are living in a duck-shoot.

And here it should be said clearly that with regard to cancer-causing viruses: “Keep in mind that having an infection by an oncogenic virus doesn’t mean you’ll develop cancer. It simply means you may have a higher risk than someone who’s never had the infection.”  And keep in mind that had to be said to assuage the fear the words  both “cancer” and “virus” have come to embody.

Hence, I place Anne Rice here among the more traditional pandemic writers. Rice endured the terribleness of a cancer in her child at these early times in our attempts to understand, define, and treat cancer. And with her writing we see the evisceration of a parent trying in vain to save her daughter, to navigate the roller coaster of treatment and prognosis, to bargain with God for the life of her child.

Death changes everything.

And when it takes a child the parents’ world is turned inside out no matter what the era or reason, no matter what is happening in the rest of the world. Despite the almost routine commonality of child deaths until the late twentieth century which saw the development of medicine and discoveries of vaccines (and then even more so within the developed nations where privilege takes on newer and more insidious dimensions)… the death of a child seems always wrong – inverted, out of order, unnatural…

And to any who have experienced such a loss, the profound question of “why” is perilously pushed to the forefront, dragging God and religion behind it. We start asking the deeper questions – everything from why any God would allow such a thing to happen, to what does death mean, what role does immortality play in our processing of a child’s death, and even questioning ourselves as to why we go through a stage of bargaining with God before, during and after that child’s death.

The loss of Anne Rice’s daughter to leukemia shaped almost all of her writing. She handles depictions of children, of pandemics and epidemics, of mother-daughter relationships with a delicate yet firm hand. And once the knowledge of her loss is revealed, we read her works differently… we see… we understand….

In Rice’s most popular work Interview With The Vampire, we meet Claudia – a child Vampire whose immortality becomes its own curse. Here Rice has laid raw the quandry of every parent who has ever lost a child: what would you do to get them back? And if you got them back, how would they feel about being dragged back? Does death have a necessary purpose?

Rice tackles all of the big questions about death and religion. She does this not to prove her Literary worth, but because she is living those questions. She is asking those questions for herself.

This is why her work has authenticity. And authenticity is why we believe her Vampires, her stories… This is also why her characters ask the same questions she herself has – making them real… and dragging behind those are the other questions we initially mistake as the theme of the Vampire novels — the very real modern issues of sexuality and gender identity, of societal and cultural mores… issues we often see first because the heaviness of religious questioning opens unwelcome chasms in ourselves.

When we as readers first read Interview, we see the socio/sexual/gender issues immediately and we think “how brilliant!”… how competently she wields the Vampire trope to expound a Literary argument… Yet any reader/fan of Anne Rice will be haunted by one single character: the child vampire Claudia. She dominates. She scene-steals. And we cannot take our Literary eyes of her… There is a subtextual reason for that, but in many ways we are clueless without the detail of her personal biography. Claudia is a big red flag that there is something else, something bigger being hinted at by its screams from another room.

Here is where two things happen for Critics. Either they have to look at the author’s catalog of works to deduce the pattern of religious questioning regarding children and death, or they have to use biography to Critically fully assess the Literary values. Fans will likely read the catalog and possibly come to similar conclusions. But Critics will likely attempt to weigh and argue everything. (Again, this plays into the modern Critical debate about the use of details from an author’s life to weigh the success of their work.)

And then we as fans stumble across Rice’s biographical detail like so many Critics, and then we also see… the scales fall from our eyes… there is something much, much bigger at work in the writings of Anne Rice… necessary to sense the ghost of something much larger moving behind the obvious prose. It is not necessary to treasure Claudia, to elevate her to being a favorite character we are content to let argue subtextually the religious questions that surround the death of a child. We are content to let Claudia as a secondary character leave the questions poignantly pregnant and unanswered as they are to most of us in reality. Because these are the most unpalatable of questions. We are content, then, to distract ourselves….

Why did Rice (like Matheson and Stoker) also choose the Vampire? Which monster is more suitable to question the existence and motives of God? And how innovative to create contemplative, empathetic Vampires!

But was it artistic vision, or simply a mother’s grief?

When we know her biography, we see Rice had no real choice but to write her story the way she did. And THAT is the lesson of writing not only honestly, but writing through grief: the tale cannot be told any other way but the way it is. This means it is not so much a conscious decision about reinventing a monster in the genre – but a necessary means to tell the story that HAS to be told. That natural comingling of need and opportunity becomes genius. One can never read Anne Rice and feel that the story is contrived, because her questions are always sincere.

In her book titled Prism of the Night: a Biography of Anne Rice, Katherine Ramsland explains: “Had any vestige of Anne’s Catholic faith survived the death of her mother, her intellectual doubt, then her emotional crisis from years before, it was utterly destroyed now. The prayers of her family had been useless, empty. There was no God, or at least not one who cared. She rejected any heaven that demanded the sacrifice of a child – especially her perfect, beautiful little girl.

“Two years later she would put this loss into words through the character Louis [from Interview With The Vampire] as he said in despair:

I looked up and saw myself in a most palpable vision ascending the altar steps, opening the tiny sacrosanct tabernacle, reaching with monstrous hands for the consecrated ciborium, and taking the Body of Christ and strewing Its white wafers all over the carpet; and walking then on the sacred wafers…giving Holy Communion to the dust…God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness…”  (Ramsland 130)

Grief, made real, begets terrible truths about our own humanity.

And we can also never see the Vampire in the same way: we have to admit that it is the perfect monster for pandemic – forcing all of the right questions to the surface, dangling our innocent and naïve understanding of what immortality is all about.

The new question is: is it the only monster that can do so? Or is there one out there we haven’t discovered yet?

The Secret of the Best Horror Writings of Pandemic

So what can we conclude from the successes of these six authors?

Each one of them did not set out to write Literature in particular – just good Horror and good stories – and they used their knowledge of, fears of, worst imaginings of, and loss from death, disease and pandemic. For each one the weaving of genre Horror and Real Life Horror involved the supernatural…each to different effect, each with different degrees. All of them could not separate religion completely from the equation, because when humanity is faced with death on a large scale, human beings start looking for the reason in it, and the purpose of our lives if such are to be cut so unfairly short. And all of them danced with the Vampire if not the question of the presence and influence of Good and Evil itself.

The trick has been to balance the Horrors of Real Life and those Literary elements with genre tropes. We still see that struggle happening in today’s Horror, where the Horror often plays a losing role. It is difficult then, to frame reality with what so often comes to feel trite.

Yet do we not love both the monsters and the victims in all of these stories?

The very best of them allow us to read a work strictly as Horror, or as a Literary offering where Something Bigger is being addressed. We see that all-important double entendre brewing.

Did you feel the difference in the three who did it best – Bram Stoker, Poe, and Anne Rice? And did you do so because you almost felt tricked into it? You read the story, thought sincerely you were just reading a genre story of Horror, and when someone pointed out the author’s histories and the possibilities of what all was being discussed, there was an Ah-ha! Moment… one that reinforced that uncanny feeling you had when reading them.

That is how a work “becomes” Literature. It starts with the author’s personal experiences and fears…it is transformed by those fears into a mirror of Real Life whose Supernatural reflection anchors it within the Horror genre.

I say again that it is my opinion that details of the lives of authors should never be the determining factor in interpreting the work. It is, however, a long tradition of Literary Critics to examine those life-details, and a current debate within the field as to the ultimate importance in examining and analyzing a work for its place in Literature. Knowledge derived from author biographies and their intimate secrets of the lives of authors should only enhance their work for a reader or Critic. Those details should contribute to a reading of a work or an appreciation of how an author creates Literature. Those details should be inspirational to common readers and aspiring Literary writers, but knowing them “going in” can only shade and distort our expectations of the work – planting seeds the author never wanted visible, but merely sensed. 

We have to ask: did they do that without us knowing the intimate details – the story behind the story? Or did we need the biography to decipher the Literary elements? Can we savor just the genre if a reader wants to?

How successfully this is done determines the value of the work as Literature. Too much Horror and Critics may see it as a mishandled mockery of Literature, too little Horror and the genre and its fans shy away. It is a delicate balance –but a necessary one to identify if new writers never taught about Literature and what Critics do are to come to an understanding and appreciation OF Literature – and even more so if we are expected to create new Literature.

What these works show us as uneducated readers and writers (that is uneducated in the ways of Literature) is that the Supernatural has to be more than hinted at, more than a prop – it must have an integral and working role in the story.

Horror should never be mere decoration, draped around a story to wedge it into genre: it should fit naturally. It should breathe.

So if we are to write some great, potentially Literary-level Horror during and after this pandemic, the lesson is that there must be authenticity in both the story and the Horror meant to tell it.

Imbue your monsters with Life – like Anne Rice (who changed our ideas about Vampires for us forever). Imbue your monsters with reality – like Poe did (by wrenching our terrors from our imaginations and having his characters live them literally). Imbue your monsters with the power of death –  like Bram Stoker did (by letting the slow dread of creeping disease ransom our reason in our Horror of death). Imbue them with humanity — like Richard Matheson did (by drowning his protagonist in Vampires while battling the crippling Horror of human loneliness). Imbue them with cultural myth – like Stephen King did (by showing us that who we are as people determines real outcomes in times of pandemic, and that such is choice). And don’t date your work by too much name dropping and dated material that might necessitate rewrites if not later explanation –  like Dean Koontz did (by proving our ignorance of the future can cause whole new interest and eager – if not misguided – reinterpretations of our work long after we ourselves have given up on it).

Knowing these things now… won’t you re-read “classics” differently?”

And more importantly, aren’t you inspired to try to write one?

  

 

REFERENCES

Ackroyd, Peter. Poe: a Life Cut Short. New York: Doubleday, c2008.

Healthline Newsletter. “8 Viruses That Can Increase Your Cancer Risk”  retrieved on 6/25/2020 from https://www.healthline.com/health/cancer-virus  

Montague, Charlotte. Edgar Allan Poe: the Strange Man Standing Deep in the Shadows. Oxford: Chartwell Books, c2015.

Ramsland, Katherine. Prism of the Night: a Biography of Anne Rice. New York: Plume, c1

Tanith Lee: Why Was One of Horror’s Best Female Writers Blacklisted? A Women In Horror Month Tribute (Part 1)

This is what I remember about reading Tanith Lee:

Dark, haunting prose that made me feel like I was reading it with the lights out; potent and pregnant narrative that was so Gothic and eerie that I thought of Poe; characters that to this day remain vibrant in my head…

I remember devouring paperbacks written by Lee – full of envy of her mastery and use of language, somehow more accessible and less lofty than that of writers like Anne Rice, but the kind of prose that lingers long after it is read. And I remember being stupid enough to give those books away. It was a product of the times, that way of thinking – trusting that decades could scroll by and one would always be able to find another paperback copy somewhere. I was wrong.

Years later, when I wanted to re-read and compare her vampire trilogy The Blood Opera Sequence to Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, I went looking to repurchase those books. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I could not find them. I could not find anything by Tanith Lee anywhere. I looked in vain for decades…She was neither in used bookstores, new book bookstores, nor Amazon at the time.

It struck me as odd: Lee was a Horror standard for a while, part of that now extinct Horror Section. In fact, that was how I found her. And while I don’t remember any reason ever being given as to why she seemed to have simply evaporated, her books missing from bookstores, what I found out much later surprised – and disappointed – me. It caused me to look with wrinkled brow at our Establishment – the same way it did when we “mysteriously” lost Clive Barker.

Because now she HAS died; we quietly lost Tanith Lee with little more than a peep from the Horror genre. Only the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres claimed her body of work:

“’Lee died peacefully in her sleep May 24, 2015 after a long illness,’ according to Locus Magazine…More details have not emerged; in 2010, Lee revealed she had been treated for breast cancer on at least two occasions.” https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/26/409726390/prolific-fantasy-and-science-fiction-writer-tanith-lee-has-died

What happened to Tanith Lee?

Something Rotten: When the Establishment Goes Too Far

It appears to be about sex. And that is weird, because isn’t all Horror in some way about sex?

This time however, it was even about the Literary stuff: about the underpinnings of feminism and gender issues – about gender identity and sexual orientation. Tanith Lee, you see, never shied away from LGBT characters, storylines, or situations. What exactly was it about Tanith Lee or her writing that “someone” saw to it she was blacklisted? And worse, that she was never even told WHY she was being blackballed? Was she Anne Rice before Anne Rice was cool? Was she ahead of her time – at least for the Horror Establishment?

No, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you have never heard of Tanith Lee. Even those of us who loved her work have consistently found it hard to find her work – especially in the United States, and especially after the Technology Extermination Plan of all things print. We have as a genre, in fact, lost a lot of accessibility to older titles because of Technology…Lee included.

But Tanith Lee was also increasingly hard to find because of what appears to be nothing less than bullying – the professional kind, by the very people who should be immune from nasty, personally motivated censorship – all because of her alleged queer writing as it was claimed she claimed in later work was channeled through a dead gay man. Indeed, there are such quotes, but they are (in her defense) not waved about in crazy fashion, but delivered with the matter-of-face sincerity of personal belief.

Yes, okay. I get it. Most folks are just not into the whole New Agey spirit channeling thing left over from the 1970’s. But let’s be honest: true or not, believed or not, the woman wrote awesome fiction – relevant fiction; and everyone has their right to their own beliefs. With some of the first featured gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual characters in Horror and thereby “popular mainstream” fiction, what Lee did was make an important contribution to contemporary fiction – including our genre.

While some may argue (as though to distance themselves from an awkward author scenario or politically delicate LGBT fictional subjects) that if this was part of the emergence and journey of Queer fiction (and thereby more “Other” than Horror), doesn’t that make it all the more important to the Horror genre?

Sure, it becomes yet another subgenre. But isn’t it also an important one? Doesn’t it Literarily speak to our times? Doesn’t it educate its readers?

Why, really, was Tanith Lee ostracized? This, after having written almost 300 short stories and over 90 novels… and in multiple genres including Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Poetry, and Mysteries, often credited with breaking the glass ceiling in genre, and being the first female writer to win the British Fantasy Award.

Why, indeed? Does Horror have some sudden, new and exclusive sacred criteria? Are some subjects, some human conditions suddenly taboo?

And is there a reason Lee and all of her work seems banished from Horror (at least while she was alive and it mattered, ye Best Of people…) whereas openly gay Clive Barker is welcomed back whenever we can get him? Why is Lee treated differently? Hasn’t she paid her dues? Earned her laurels? Does she go too far because her characters are clearly wrestling with gender issues and identity? Or because she claims she sees dead people…and takes notes?

Says Lee of her exile in an interview five years before her death: “Recently, alas, with today’s climate, I have apparently been outlawed by those large “major” companies through whom, for over thirty years, I’ve previously had quantities of work. I don’t entirely understand that, either. But naturally I hope that things will improve, and that all the very good young and new writers I have glimpsed around me will prosper, female and male together. (Gidney)

Photo by Beth Gwinn https://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/04/Lee.html

 

Women in Horror: On Living Down to Stereotypes

Yet again a female writer has drawn the ire and fire of influential powers and publishing houses… all because someone in power saw the need to exact punishment for freedom of artistic thought and speech.

In fact in the 1990’s, Lee so struggled to find publication and her readers toiled to find her works in kind, that many of her fans often wrote to enquire if she had died. Between the damage that Technology had imposed upon the Publishing industry and some self-righteous censorship, we almost lost her works entirely.

Why is this? Could it be that because her work was so sexually infused that “someone” decided she needed to be reined in lest she burst the sexual bubble so many of us have been forced and coerced into living in?

Is Horror so the personal property of a certain type of white male writer that only certain types of infractions are to be tolerated – the ones that titillate the ruling class? Not the ones the rest of us struggle with, or struggle to understand?

Already we see a trend toward censorship within the genre – the long list of plot themes or damaged characters we are told “not to bother” to write. We are told stories about surviving sexual assault or child abuse are not welcome – at least if they are “troubling” tales instead of Harry Potter-magic-overcomes-all types of tales. For some reason, all of a sudden it is not a preferred thing for Horror to represent the honest truth – something that should have many a late nineteenth century female Gothic writer spinning in her grave.

Is this part of something bigger? Is this about uneven censorship against rebellious – dangerous – women? Women who confront and sometimes live in politically precarious waters? Is that why we insist on clarifying that Lee is “normal”… feeding readers details that explain that she is “married and heterosexual” ? (https://www.advocate.com/obituaries/2015/05/26/remembering-tanith-lee-celebrated-author-queer-science-fiction

 

On the contrary, describing human monsters and exquisite details of sexual violence on women as part of a plotline is somehow ok. A woman’s death and dismemberment the Establishment will allow, but harping on the PTSD that comes from survival is just too much of a downer. Boring. Unworthy. And God forbid if we tackle gender identity along with it.

What the hell kind of message is that? And should we be surprised then that we have that same heavy hand of censorship plucking works out of our canon that contain certain unsavory details we don’t want to “have to explain” to our youth?

I don’t want to have to explain The Holocaust, either. But some things are righteously necessary.

How is it that the one single largest social challenge of the day – that of gender identity and sexual orientation is so freaking scary that we cannot abide its literature?

And are we really so shallow as to feign that fear and abhorrence forced us to draw insinuation that channeling a dead guy for a novel is just frankly too “crazy” a notion, and gender-muddy characters too horrifying to keep publishing Lee?

What was so scary? That the dead guy was dead, or that he was a gay dead guy? Anybody got an attic?

Lee’s worthy Vampire Trilogy…

At what point do we grow up and start acting like reasonable adults so all of us and our children can simply breathe? At what point do we stop running ahead of the coach in an attempt to prevent an imagined accident?

I most certainly “get” it…I repeat, I grew up in the sixties and seventies. And no one wants life to be complicated for our youth, and our brains are all weary thinking about this stuff. But it is we who are complicating it. What was it my generation harped on so long and so loud? Live and let live?

And what about that whole Literary argument? The Big Goal of Horror? Tanith Lee was always there, right in the mix of all things Feminist Theory:

‘I was very interested by the eastern idea of death as a woman, which I used in the ‘Flat Earth’ books. In the type of eastern literature where death was personified as a woman; women were considered dangerous and untamed and pariah material, and that was why death was in female form. Conversely, in the western literature where I came across death personified as a male, it was because men were seen as powerful, and death was seen as powerful, so he had to be male. So it’s two ways of looking at death, as well as two ways of looking at gender.” http://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/04/Lee.html

Since when is a competent writer’s taking on a contemporary and contentious subject like feminist or LGBT issues by writing believable characters seated in that controversy NOT ok? NOT Literary?

It may not make us comfortable. But maybe we don’t deserve to be.

Still Mistress of Her Domain

If I had to point to the one influential female writer of Horror in the 1980s other than Anne Rice, it would be Tanith Lee.

Renowned for her use of poetic prose and imagery, she is also known for writing the previously referred to other vampire series…The Blood Opera Sequence, a trilogy of books titled Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994) and a Horror standard, The Secret Books of Paradys, which included The Book of the Damned (1988),The Book of the Beast (1988),The Book of the Dead (1991), and The Book of the Mad (1993).

Let me say it again. Over 300 short stories and 90 novels. And awards…my God the awards:

Nebula Awards

• 1975: The Birthgrave (nominated, best novel)
• 1980: Red As Blood (nominated, best short story)

World Fantasy Awards^[31]

• 1979: Night’s Master (nominated, best novel)
• 1983: “The Gorgon” (winner, best short story)
• 1984: “Elle Est Trois, (La Mort)” (winner, best short story)
• 1984: “Nunc Dimittis” (nominated, best novella)
• 1984: Red As Blood, or, Tales From The Sisters Grimmer (nominated, best anthology/collection)
• 1985: Night Visions 1 (nominated, best anthology/collection)
• 1987: Dreams Of Dark And Light (nominated, best anthology/collection)
• 1988: Night’s Sorceries (nominated, best anthology/collection)
• 1999: “Scarlet And Gold” (nominated, best novella)
• 2006: “Uous” (nominated, best novella)
• 2013: Life Achievement Award^[32]

World Horror Convention

• 2009: Grand Master Award ^[33]

British Fantasy Awards

• 1979: Quest For The White Witch (nominated, best novel)
• 1980: Death’s Master (winner, best novel)^[34]
• 1980: “Red As Blood” (nominated, best short story)
• 1981: Kill The Dead (nominated, best novel)
• 1999: “Jedella Ghost” (nominated, best short story)
• 2000: “Where Does The Town Go At Night?” (nominated, best short story)

Lambda Awards

• 2010: Disturbed by Her Song (nominated, best LGBT speculative fiction)

 

She didn’t deserve to be sent into the darkness. And we, her fans, need to insure she is not kept imprisoned there.

Reports Laura Flood in an article on Lee, “Lee has written tons of books; these are some of her earliest, and rather hard to get hold of. It’s a shame, as are her comments to Locus that “if anyone ever wonders why there’s nothing coming from me, it’s not my fault. I’m doing the work. No, I haven’t deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can’t get anything into print”. And on her own website she says:”As for new novels, earlier plans are becalmed. When I know I’ll let you know. Otherwise, no ‘large’ house at the moment has taken any interest in any of my work. Macmillan and Hodder both refused/dropped offered proposals. Tor passed on reprinting Red as Blood. Others I have approached don’t reply at all.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/aug/27/fantasy-death-master-tanith-lee

On what planet is this ok? And how do we move forward respecting our own Establishment – editors, publishers, Critics all – if this type of blackballing is acceptable practice when a woman “gets out of line” in our genre? Or even the Clive Barkers among us?

Why hasn’t anyone in “authority” bothered to address this, and all of the mysterious exits of writers who clearly chose to “shake the dust from their feet” and give up on Horror?

”Suddenly, I just can’t get anything into print. And apparently I’m not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. In my own case, the more disturbing element is the editor-in-chief who said to me, ‘I think this book is terrific. It ought to be in print. I can’t publish it – I’ve been told I mustn’t.’ The indication is that I’m not writing what people want to read, but I never did.” http://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/04/Lee.html

“TOLD I MUSTN’T”!?! By what Power? By which Horror God? I want names.

Because when a writer’s entire catalog is suppressed, when you cannot find her work and you don’t even know if she is alive because NO ONE is publishing her…How can anyone possibly say with truth that she is writing what people don’t want to read?

I wanted to read her. I wanted to repurchase books I stupidly got rid of in various moves. I wanted her back on my bookshelf because I am PROUD to have her there. And I wanted to read more of what she was writing – no matter in what genre, no matter with what kinds of characters… No matter if she thinks a dead gay guy is channeling it. But the caveat was and remains I cannot find her…

It took a while for me to find out why. And it has made me furious.

Says Storm Constantine in the introduction of a recently “republished” ebook edition of Dark Dance:

“…printed copies of the novels have been unavailable for many years. Immanion Press’s republication of this trilogy is part of our commitment to help keep Tanith Lee’s work available in book form – as we believe good books should be. Any reader who has not read Dark Dance before should leave this introduction – or review – until they have finished the book…” Storm Constantine, November 2017, Dark Dance (The Blood Opera Sequence Book 1) (Kindle Edition)by Tanith Lee, Storm Constantine.

Thank you, Immanion Press, for being the one light in the darkness – for seeing exactly what Tanith Lee’s fans have known for decades, and for giving her back to us.

Now it is time for the Horror Establishment to reclaim her, to demand she be included in the evaluation of foundational authors in the Horror canon elect. It is time for an apology if not an explanation of shortcomings and owning the misstep.

Tanith Lee deserves the recognition we so stupidly refused her in Life. What say you, Horror Establishment? Will you make this right?

So here it is: this is my attempt to poison the minds of the Tanith-deprived: READ TANITH LEE. Wherever and whenever you find her work. You will not be sorry. But you may need to weigh in, to make sure we keep bringing her name up to Literary Critics for our genre. For sure, she will be one of the most fascinating writers that you never heard of in Horror.

And as for our genre, for our Establishment, for those who sent a perfectly good Horror writer into the arms of another genre and backlist oblivion: congratulations. You proved Lee right… she most certainly was a dangerous woman…

And for a brief time, she was ours.

1947-2015

“To wake, and not to know where, or who you are, not even to know what you are – whether a thing with legs and arms, or a brain in the hull of a great fish – that is a strange awakening. But after awhile, uncurling in the darkness, I began to uncover myself, and I was a woman.”… (Tanith Lee), The Birthgrave

 

References

Constantine, Storm. Introduction. Dark Dance: Book One of the Blood Opera Sequence by Tanith Lee © 1992, 2^nd edition 2017, eBook edition through KDP 2018 An Immanion Press Edition published through KDP, http://www.immanion–press.com

Ennis, Dawn. “ Remembering Tanith Lee, Celebrated Author of Queer Science Fiction.” Advocate,       May 26, 2015. Retrieved 1/30, 2019 from https://www.advocate.com/obituaries/2015/05/26/remembering-tanith-lee-celebrated-author-queer-science-fiction

Gidney, Craig. “Tanith Lee: Channeling Queer Authors.” LambdaLiterary, September 13, 2010 as retrieved 1/9/2019 from http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/09/13/tanith-lee-queer-authors/

Flood, Allison.“World of fantasy: Death’s Master by Tanith Lee.” Alison Flood’s world of fantasy Books , Fri 27 Aug 2010 06.05 EDT, as retrieved 1/9/2019 fromhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/aug/27/fantasy-death-master-tanith-lee  

“Tanith Lee: Love & Death & Publishers” excerpted from Locus Magazine, April 1998), as retrieved //10/2019 from http://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/04/Lee.html

 

Author Biographies: Can or Should You Separate an Author From Their Work?

For most of us, one of the harder challenges of writing fiction is deciding what to put in those little, abbreviated bios that editors want.

We agonize over the details. We do our best to find some outstanding characteristic of our lives, our qualifications, ourselves to share with strangers. Maybe even to impress or endear those very strangers to us.

For the most part, those brief bios are meant to be introductions: brief summations of why we might be qualified to call ourselves a writer – mentioning relevant university degrees, real-world jobs, past publication, or professional organizations (often depending on the story or the publication), or even a synopsis of the story in play– but also to shed just enough light on personality that we see a bit of author as a person. In sum, these succinct profiles are blurbs of the author’s life – not full on biographies. And that is a more fortunate thing, as it turns out.

Because if existing author biographies are any indication, actually having one written about you might not be the perk it sounds like. For example, we seldom think about the harder reality that today in particular, anyone can find out pretty much anything about our private selves. And they will. And they will publish or promote the most unsavory of these details. For all of us would-be and under-published authors, those short little author bios are – in reality – the least of our worries.

At what point is some information too much information? And should an author’s life and philosophy be kept separate from their work? Does who the author is, really matter?

In the world of reading, analyzing, reviewing and Criticizing an author’s catalog of works, author biographies can enhance our appreciation for an author, or ruin everything.

What Do We Know and When Should We Know It?

I have always loved reading author biographies. I love them because they teach me more about the struggle to write than the writing.

As a writer, this is important. I’m not sure it is significant at what point on which train J.K. Rowling decided to write Harry Potter. But am I curious about why…about her decision making process in the writing, about her background and where she developed such a keen marketing savvy that it puts Amazon to shame.

Yet for some, knowing the details of a person’s life – like Lovecraft, for example – leaves them proudly proclaiming a distaste for the works themselves. They may declare a deliberate omission of the writing because of how the writer lived his or her life, how they THOUGHT. In short, they disapprove.

When and whether to separate an author from their work has been part a long discussion. And such things took a particularly evil and pronounced turn after the Holocaust, when scientists had to sort out whether to keep ill-gotten scientific results gleaned from torture, or to abandon it all as a condemnation of how it was derived.

One point of contention may well be intent.

While an Artist’s beliefs are not actions; their work is action. And there is a significant difference in belief and incitement to degradation or violence.

Where do we draw the line?

This is a tougher question than we think. We cannot step anywhere (for example) in the United States where we are not stepping on stolen ground, adoring older structures that may have been built by indentured or enslaved hands on property that once belonged to someone else, or even constructed for the purpose of insuring the taking or keeping of property thusly gained.

We cannot even brag on technology without facing character flaws: what of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who gave us our Space Program in exchange for overlooking his service as a member of Hitler’s SS? Or perhaps we justify that today things are less threatening when we consider that the founder of Facebook was alleged to have stolen the concept from fellow students at Harvard University. Perhaps when we benefit from advances or enjoyment, we are fine with wearing rose-colored glasses.

We manage to be myopic when it suits us. But at all times, humanity is faithful to its tendency to commit all manner of sins. And when considering the Arts and writing, this becomes important. Because when an Artist’s work reveals something too easily forgotten or buried about a time or place, that work – no matter how despicable, gains a value.

Looking at Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a recurrent visitor on the banned books list is a perfect example. The use of racist language places the book in a time capsule that in these more allegedly enlightened times should make us uncomfortable, yet it reveals nevertheless an important question as to whether or not the book still serves a purpose. That it does, but now perhaps presents an additional purpose, keeps it relevant. The language and context are now important things to discuss. And perhaps that raises the age when the book should be read, but it does not negate the most important message of the book: Life for many of our fellow citizens is often unfiltered and unpleasant…. It is time we look at what is under the whitewashed fence.

H.P. Lovecraft has long been the Horror poster child for these arguments. But he is by no means alone. In fact, there have been times when the flaws of many of our greatest American writers have all been paraded past us like they are qualifiers for greatness.

If you are a writer, that probably gives you pause. And it is certainly not why I read author biographies.

Like all writers, perhaps I seek a community awareness, some reassurance that the best writing often does come from enduring horridly difficult times, dashed childhood dreams, flawed thinking, lost friends or absent or invisible ones, the bitch-slapping life of poverty so many of us wind up in, the sense of being outcast, downcast, and just plain lost.

As Arts people, we have long endured the rumors: that the true geniuses among us are fatally flawed characters… They are not only misfits, but drunks and drug addicts, mentally disturbed and disrupted individuals, living tragic, abbreviated lives we all should envy for the permanence and quality of their life’s work.

It makes it hard to want to be successful if one must sacrifice one’s life, health, and sanity to the cruel gods of creativity. And it makes one wonder what could possible go right in a writing career if one isn’t spectacularly flawed enough?

But is it true? Must we be ruined human beings to be successful writers? Or perhaps the right question is: is it ever NOT true?

After all, part of being human is being flawed…is living. We are all damaged, to some extent, by our own navigations of life and by the intrusion of unwelcome others within it. Whether it is having the unloving, nasty family of Poe, or the loss of support family members and terror of racially different people like Lovecraft, we create our own mental baggage that we perpetually lug around with us in our writing.

Likewise, we experiment with different ways of soothing the open wounds, of denying the pains and humiliations of living.

Who among is NOT thusly shaped and affected?

Like with writing, it is what we DO with those bits of baggage that makes or breaks us.

It is always comforting to know other writers overcame, and that many needed to. It is sometimes helpful to know how, or to see that Art is shaped by the strain of battle…it is born in turmoil.

But it is always helpful to realize that living a life in the Arts by its very nature is one of struggle, that in fact it may well have called to us because we can SEE the intimate connection.

Yet when should we know the gory details?

How much is too much information?

The answer is not that easy. But Literary Critics have finally begun to address the issue themselves, and all because production of possible Literature is outpacing the number of Literary Critics needed to READ it all… a collision of facts derived from living authors and suppositions and allegations made about dead authors forced a radical idea to the surface.  Just how connected ARE authors and their lives to their works?

By 1967, we had so many more living authors producing published works, it became vividly apparent that knowing details about an author – especially ones still alive and verbally kicking – was having an effect on Critics. And French Literary Critic and theorist Roland Barthes wrote a detailed essay on why the knowledge of an author’s intentions paired with biographical facts should have no bearing on the Criticism of their works. https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf

It is this very essay that created a schism in the school of Literary Criticism, which had up to this point used an author’s biographical information – facts like politics, religion, prejudices, preferences, lifestyle, class, etc. – to decipher their catalog of works.

But with the increasing amount of living authors, Critics began having difficulty divesting their judgment of author lives, of author intentions, and author blowback.

Tremendous verbal battles have spilled their vitriol all over the recent decades (most notably for Horror fans in the verbal barrage between esteemed Literary Critic Harold Bloom and Stephen King fans), and which has had a terrible effect on both the field of Literary Criticism and how we all see various authors and their works. In fact, the worse consequence had been the inserting of the uninformed opinions of the common reader into the Literary Critical academic process.

Once again, the function of Literary Critics is not to devolve into mudslinging arguments about writing quality with the secular crowd, but to present academic arguments to other academics for or against the admission of a work or catalog of works into the Literary Canon based on Literary Critical Theory.

The introduction of the concept of the author’s intimate life details having no bearing on the decision is an important one.

Because without it, we must keep asking that pesky question: at what point should we know, and how much should we know?

Maybe the MORE important question is: in knowing it, what should we DO with the knowledge?

http://enjoy-teaching.com/enjoy-teaching-biography.html

The Whole Dead Author Thing

One of the dangers of reading intimate details about a favorite author is never looking at their work the same way again.

Whether you are “just” a reader or a budding author or Critic, knowing the backstory is not always a good thing.

Words and situations take on new nuances. We begin to ascribe hidden meanings, possible subtext, and autobiographical details to stories we once loved for their own sakes. And we may get it all wrong…because then we begin to drag in our own interpretations based on our own experiences…which have NOTHING to do with the writer’s works or what he or she INTENTED…

The truth is, once we know about an author, their loves and losses, their frustrations and failures, we often lose the magic that their work represents. We start looking for the author inside their work.

And I can tell you as a writer, that is never the intent of the writing. The story is meant to stand on its own, to sneak up on the reader and send a familiar chill down their spines. I want them to see something of themselves in my stories, not something of ME in them.

Of course I am in them. They derive from my own memories, my own fears, my own revulsions and yearning for justice. But no one character is me. No one story is true. No one reader is invited to dissect me psychologically.

Therefore in my opinion, knowing “too much” about me as a writer and person might well get in the way of the magic I intend to conjure. It’s like having a pesky reporter behind the curtain with me in Kansas, giving away my tricks.

Yet I also can’t help but be grateful for the biographies I have read about other authors.

Could it be there is a time and place to know an author more intimately?

I do believe so. And sadly, for the most part I think that time comes after an author is dead.

While I also believe it helps to read biographies only after one has read a catalog of an author’s works, so as not to taint any reading of them, I find that reading such details as one finds in biographies leaves me reading new works and rereading old ones differently.

If the catalog is fixed, then I begin to look at them slightly askew like a Critic might look at them. But because I am not a Critic, I find it changes things in subtle, sometimes uncomplimentary ways. The work does lose its magic, and that is replaced by a study of and appreciation of technique.

Now, as a writer, that is exactly where I need to be. I need to see how the trick is done, and appreciate how a writer took some event or memory from their lives – no matter how major or how trivial – and turned it into something living.

But what I must resist doing, is making excuses for an author. And if we have certain details of an author’s life, that is exactly the natural thing to do…”of course, the book was not as good…his wife had just died, after all…”

We also tend to blanket “approve” certain sentences or paragraphs that the editor in us might suggest should not go unchallenged…assuming that it was the opiates, or the fury of battling unsympathetic Critics. If one is going to learn about an author’s technique from the finished product, we simply cannot be running in front of every word with a broom and dust pan.

And on the reverse side, we cannot devalue the importance of a work because we find out the author was, for instance, a bigot.

So at what point does knowing an author become detrimental?

I think it is when and only when we excuse an author for the wrongdoing.

Lovecraft is the obvious example in Horror. Many of his opinions were nothing less than offensive, odious attitudes toward immigrants and women.

But reading his fiction, we weren’t supposed to “know” that. Deduce it, yes. But to condemn Lovecraft’s writing on the basis of his failures as a human being is also to overlook the whole of the human condition.

We are – all of us – flawed. And history has come to place Lovecraft on the wrong side of political correctness, the wrong side of morality.

Yet as a human being, Lovecraft also reflects a period in our history, in our developmental growth and national psychology. At the heart of Lovecraft’s work is nothing less than irrational fear. That’s what bigotry, racism, misogyny and religious persecution is all about. So as sadly pitiful as his beliefs have come to be, he not only represents the time in which he lived, but sadly, even a subculture that exists still today in this country and all others.

Lovecraft is a lesson in humanity. His writing is a showcase of our flaws, many of which many of us still proudly display, and that should give us pause and cause for discussion.

But should we elevate the work of such a man?

I say with Lovecraft yes. The reason is because even in his writing Lovecraft was not advocating for violence against those he feared. He was simply displaying his fear by using some pretty amazing monstrosities and nightmares to emphasize the terror that beat in his bigoted, misogynistic heart. In other words, he reflected us…humanity….and our struggle to accept each other.

This is not the same as someone who “preaches” in their work to rise up and destroy other people, other genders, other nations, other religions.

The key here is whether a work is Literary by depicting or revealing a truth about ourselves or is a manifesto – incendiary and inciteful, meant to groom hatred.

If we started tossing out Art because of the thoughts of the Artist, we would be left with nothing to make us think.

Poe, like many writers of his time, was a drunk and an addict. If we throw out his work as ill-begotten gain born of drug trips and poor judgment, we need to lose the Beatles, Roman Polanski, and every Weinstein film ever made.

This is not to say we excuse the offender.

Rather, it means that we weigh the value of the message of the work. Some of the best Art has come from those dying for penance, whose secrets were the acid of their souls which in turn generated cautionary tales for the rest of us.

When a writer is still alive, it becomes a harder choice. Because then we worry about financially endorsing a behavior, for funding a lifestyle that may include reprehensible behavior. A look at how we are responding to Hollywood’s outing of sexual assault is the perfect example.

But we can also see when a writer is dead, that when his or her art imitates life – comments on it – it can elevate a work to Literature because of the mirror it becomes. It becomes useful. It becomes a teaching tool… a prompt for meaningful conversation.

Which brings us back to those little, abbreviated bios.

They should be honest. But they should also be constructed of things that are not presumptuous. Because in the end we will ALL be outted… especially if we (it turns out) are any good at what we do.

So When Should We Read Author Biographies?

I think the answer is: when it is helpful.

Biographies contain lives. They introduce flaws that will expose your heroes as human beings. You might discover that you like their work more than you like them. But you may also find yourself encouraged, inspired, comforted in knowing that this road you are on has been traversed by many.

You may find that failure is part of the process. That sometimes rejection is a blazing sword to the heart, and that like you – writers of the past have suffered from many of the same problems – be it writer’s block, bad parenting, cruel Critics, ill health, mental struggles, lost love, betrayal, poverty, addictions, homelessness, the question of self-publishing, the search for mentoring, and a belief that all may well be pointless.

You may find that some of them were Poe, or Lovecraft, or Dante, or Shakespeare. You may even find an awkward kinship with a select few.

Biographies will tell you things about why you feel as you do, about the commonality of lives lived in service of the Arts.

And it may cause you to realize that we might not really like our idols, especially on their worst days…Just as sometimes we don’t like ourselves, or fear being thusly revealed to others…

This is the case of Lovecraft for me… I adore his monsters, love the British Horror atmosphere he managed to transplant to America for us to savor. But reading him is to see the more distasteful aspects of his quirky, misfit personality, to realize how little we have changed. Reading him also makes me worry about myself, and my flaws. It makes me agonize over those darned little bios.

The trick is not to rationalize. We are none of us saints.

The trick is to take biographies for the lessons they offer us: that there is hope we can communicate our deepest fears and anxieties in story form, that we can entertain as well as educate, that we can hope to persuade and shape our times by holding up a hand mirror to those who need to see the images therein.

By all means, don’t deprive yourself. Just know that once the genie is out of the bottle, he will not be put back in. Be sure you are ready for the capriciousness of magic.

Beware the power of enchantment. And then go forth anyway…

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/320388960975160324/

Recommended Author Biographies

Ackroyd, Peter. Poe: a Life Cut Short. New York: Doubleday, c2008.

Franklin. Ruth. Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life. New York: W.W. Norton, c2016.

Gaiman, Neil. The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction. New York: HarperCollins, c 2016.

Joshi, S.T. I am Providence: the Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft v.1. (& 2). New York: Hippocampus Press, c2013.

King, Stephen. On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft. New York: Simon & Schuster, c2000.

Montague, Charlotte. H.P. Lovecraft: the Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness. London: Chartwell Books, c2015.

Montague, Charlotte. Edgar Allan Poe: the Strange Man Standing Deep in the Shadows. London: Chartwell Books, c 2015.

Ramsland, Katherine. Prism of the Night: a Biography of Anne Rice. New York: Plume, c1982.

Skal, David J. Something in the Blood: the Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. New York, Liveright Publishing, c2016.

Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley, a Biography. New York: E.P. Dutton, c1987.

Sturrock, Donald. Storyteller: the Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl. New York: Simon & Schuster, c2010.

Winter, Douglas E. Clive Barker: the Dark Fantastic: the Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, c2002.