The Monster in Me

 

To me sci-fi novels featuring monsters are a necessity, though we can do without them in life itself no doubt. Novel writing is still an experiment in self-discovery, one measuring the “monstrous” forces within the writer’s own psyche, and it is a task sometimes bordering on obsession. A review of Splanx by an associate sees my short novel in cinematic terms, but his invoking the shade of Philip K. Dick is probably more to the point, and he mentions my crossing-genres in a way that, to him, defines this novel’s stylistic form. To me a novel is a novel if it works well enough and unifies its various formal aspects no matter what. There are elements of paranormal, speculative sci-fi, horror, and perhaps some noir-detective defining the genre cross-currents in Splanx. Hopefully these aren’t discordant distractions for any reader who might find such mixture a bit inappropriate or even pretentious. Sometimes it’s hard to judge one’s writing being so close to it, but that hardly matters in crit-class when the author is always asked to explain his or her fictional intentions.

I wanted to tell a good and suspenseful story with as much scary stuff as possible, building it all to “the grand climax” via a plotted design that breathes without any imposed literary constraints. I employed Zen impulses here and there to keep things fresh along an artful trail that becomes more fictionally real -- with effectively spontaneous-seeming surprises -- until the final word is reached. I do see chapter scenes in visual ways somewhat, more in the manner of any artist (not a film auteur) who must select what details to include in the scene and focus on in literary or even non-literary ways, until vivid images merge with linguistic forms becoming subtly inseparable in the reader’s consciousness. But of course that doesn’t always work.

Naturally I’m for writers who stay within the traditional bounds of fiction, including the avant-garde, but aren’t afraid to gamble beyond what’s per usual (or what’s accepted as real or unreal to the reader) in revealing the fictional lie or the artistic truth that sometime, perhaps, go hand in hand to create a more dynamic piece of writing. That’s when the reader believes he’s reading fact and not fiction.

But back to the monster in me, and maybe in you? Whatever pulls author and reader together like a gravitational force of literary physics to produce the strongest attraction (and reaction) seems truly awesome. The unspeakably monstrous in all of us comes from the unconscious depths where the murk of animal urges forms the human brain’s original bedrock. The other night I saw Joan Crawford’s last movie, Trog, about a doctor’s attempt to educate and learn from a throwback caveman – with disastrous results, of course. Yet who among us wouldn’t waltz with dinosaurs and aliens in new primeval worlds if given the chance? Men and alien beings seek to find and confront each other somewhere in the future, and maybe science and the incredible inventions of the digital and space ages will abet the merger. A new human nature would evolve, one in sync with scientific guidance rather than the outmoded and stormy one of Mother Nature. A new harmony of humankind with powerful man-made forces would define this “neo-nature,” creating in essence the most evolved and perfect Man (something Leonardo Da Vinci dwelled on in defining the attributes of The Vitruvian Man who followed Mother Nature’s perfect vectors of celestial being, seeking to become one with the universe’s central focus, a godhead of all existence men through the centuries have sought unity with).

In Splanx that Vitruvian Man of Leonardo of course is obsolete and can never be reborn, except via the forbidding powers of reconstruction brought about by a miraculous digital tablet of the near future. And that purposeful rebirth becomes a frightening possibility indeed, especially when the ghosts of past alien monsters thought extinct gain control of the tablet’s codex – abetted, of course, by the novel’s man of science, Doctor Hiram de Hazeraux, who essentially invented the damn thing initially to serve his own needful ends and those of human despots. So too the neo-Nazi menace is rechristened as a new hybrid species of Man and Alien made from the latter’s DNA – another perfect recipe for disaster, but also the basis for a hopefully relevant and entertaining novel.

 

--Peter Magliocco

Categories:

0 comments on this article

This thread has been closed from taking new comments.