After spending most of last year working on longform projects, I’ve been enjoying spending the first couple of months of this one writing some shorter things. One thing I’ve noticed is that my short story-writing muscles have definitely atrophied. Even the shortest piece I’ve written lately is nudging 6,000 words. I should probably keep my hand in to curb my wordier tendencies.
The other thing I’ve noticed is how much of my writing revolves around bodies of water. All three of the shorts I’ve finished recently have had someone meeting (or avoiding) a watery doom. And it doesn’t stop there. The novel I’m currently querying revolves around a river of the dead. The novella I’m trying to find a home for takes place on an island besieged by strange sea creatures. The next one? A holy well that might not be so holy.
So, what’s the attraction?
Originally I’d planned to write something more general about water and horror, but that’s too big a subject for one essay. There’s the seductive allure of a dangerous freedom in running away to sea. There’s evolutionary horror – the idea that life came out of the water, and one day humans might devolve to the point we sink back in. There’s the sheer otherness of a realm close to home where we can’t survive without specialised equipment, and whose inhabitants are probably the closest thing we can imagine to alien life.
But I think it’s something more classically gothic that draws me to these stories. An essential component of the gothic is the return of the repressed. Something that has been hidden away – perhaps a horrific crime, or perhaps an oppressed Other rejected by the dominant society – is brought back to light, and in reappearing, disrupts the social order around it. Bodies of water make an excellent setting for this kind of thing, convenient for dumping the bodies but also fluid and ever-changing, with the potential to dry up, change course, or simply wash the evidence ashore. They’re also places of transformation and escape. The rejected outsider might run away to sea and return changed by the experience – or find a watery grave and return as a revenant.
Last year I read Junji Ito’s Gyo for the first time. I’ll be honest – it didn’t grab me by the throat the way Uzumaki or Tomie do, and it doesn’t always succeed at what I think it’s trying to do, with the flashes of toilet humour puncturing the horror instead of serving to vary up the tension. But it’s also endearingly weird, and very effective in some other ways.
The manga starts with a young couple, Tadashi and Kaori, on holiday in Okinawa, where they encounter a fish with legs. It smells unusually bad, and Kaori is particularly disturbed by the smell. There’s a tension present in the lovers’ relationship that seeds in unease from the start. Their strange encounter presages a wholesale invasion, with all kinds of newly-legged marine life coming ashore and even following them home to Tokyo.
Back in the city, they take the legged fish to Tadashi’s uncle, Dr Koyanagi, who reveals that it’s the result of a biological warfare programme from WW2. The fish smells so bad because it’s been infected with an engineered virus – and the ‘legs’ are a walking machine designed to carry the host further so it will infect more organisms. But the original research was lost on a ship that was sunk in the war, so how have the virus and the walking machines resurfaced now?
Well, it’s a pretty clear return of the repressed, a hidden sin coming back in grotesque, unignorable fashion. Successive Japanese governments have been criticised for downplaying the country’s actions during WW2. Here, Ito creates a fantastical war crime (though the science fiction trappings are really the only unrealistic part – the real life Unit 731 carried out horrific human experimentation with deadly diseases) and has it return to decimate the mainland.
By the time we find out the full extent of what’s going on, the pandemic has devastated the city, and Kaori and Dr Koyanagi have succumbed to the virus. Tadashi encounters a group of survivors, immune to the disease, who are researching the virus. They explain that the new walking machines were created and attached to the marauding sea creatures by the virus itself, which salvaged parts from shipwrecks. Here we see the sea as a space of transformation, where the boundaries between animal, machine, and disease become blurred. And when those creatures cross the border between sea and land, humans are drawn in too, as vulnerable as any other animal. (Oh, look, there’s evolutionary horror again.)
I was going to do a Top 10 of my favourite water-horror tales to round this off, but time, as usual, has got away from me – so maybe next month. In the meantime, don’t fall in…
Writing news
Since last month, that secret anthology project I kept banging on about is no longer secret, and it's out now!
is the third Cthulhu Cymraeg anthology edited by Mark Howard Jones. It features seven brand-new novelettes interpreting Lovecraftian themes from a Welsh point of view (something of which, I'm sure, he wouldn't have approved). My story is called "The Last Days of Don Juan Jenkins", and it's about dropping everything to go on a bad idea road trip with your one-night hook-up (who might be turning into a fishman but shh, don't worry about it, I'm sure it'll be fine).
What I've been reading
I loved
Eartheater
by Dolores Reyes, a gritty, modern gothic coming-of-age novel with a sullen teenage heroine who gets none of her edges sanded off.
What I've been watching
We caught
Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die
last week. Honestly, it did feel a bit like one of those conversations with my Xennial friends where we bemoan how you have to have an app for everything these days and everyone is always on their phones, but also it was kind of a blast, so.
What I've been listening toHonestly, not much new this month. If you've got any recs to vary up my usual rotation of podcasts and albums, send them this way, I guess!
That's all from me this month. 'Til next time.
JL