Is it horror?
Recently, New York’s response to questions about genre and marketing is that it’s all about positioning, but asked to define positioning with any degree of clarity, our “bosses” in the industry are confounded.
The latest issue of SF Crow’s Nest contains an interview with Eric Flint (Rivers of War; Del Rey Books). Like so many of us, he responded a trifle irritably to the topics. He said: “…objectively speaking, the distinctions are absurd. If you were to take it seriously, you’d have to start shelving in the science fiction and fantasy section such works as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. (Of course it’s a fantasy! No whale that ever lived acts like Moby Dick.) The same with most of the works by Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, and Rabelais–and Tom Clancy, for that matter.”
I like that a lot because I think he’s saying a rose is a rose, even if you call it a horse, and a horse is a horse, unless it’s Mr. Ed.
Have I lost my senses? I don’t think so, besides it provides a perfect segue into my question of the day: Why do we find the need to call what we are writing here blogs when we could call them essays and allow our mothers and grandmothers to understand what it is we do in the dead of night. I mean, “I’m blogging, Grandma,” just doesn’t hack it, but “I’m writing an essay,” is fine. Impressive even.
Essays are such wonderful creatures that my love of them has heretofore kept me from entering the world of blogging whose inhabitants are so often people with nothing to say. I was afraid that would happen to me. I first learned to read sitting under a card-table that was covered with the morning newspaper. I read upside down and imagined that I was writing the words. Years later, I found a small (4″ x 4″), old, green, hardcover book of essays called Alpha of the Plough. I have it still and read it often.
So, I want to use this blog to write about something. Like today I set out to define horror and to say why I must look so horrible (sorry) in my photograph to those who knew me when. Trust me. The two subjects merge together. It goes like this: To me, horror isn’t about monsters or chainsaws. It’s about what frightens me.
What frightens me is the real world; what frightens me is Man’s inhumanity to Man; what frightens me is growing old in America.
What scares me spitless is what I’ve been doing since late 2003.
Since around 1980, when Myasthenia Gravis kicked in, bugs have looked for me. When they hit, within minutes I can go from feeling relatively well to ERs and ICUs. This time, I spent 8 months on a ventilator, unable to hear, talk, or move. I had pneumonia four times. I shared a room with an old lady whose husband claimed to be a physician, part owner of the hospital. Daily, he checked my vitals–and told me I was being used as a guinea pig for a major experiment: doing lobotomies on high IQ people. He said it was such a pity, since I was so pleasant to have around. He’d tried to stop them, he said, but alas….
Understand, I had hospital-induced amnesia and was on morphine, living a vivid second life inside my head. In that other life, I was transported by helicopter to a cow farm in Hawaii where I was injected with a smelly serum. In my other life, I could hear people in the passageways, talking about the lobotomy program. Scheming. Planning. Laughing.
And–I had diarrhea for weeks at a time and lay in my own feces for half a day and more. Old men came into my room and felt me up. I wore heavy boots and couldn’t move my feet or much of anything else.
Was it real? Was it fiction? When a sadistic night nurse disconnected my bell and, pinned a note to my pillow saying, “Don’t help this bitch”. Was it horror?
How about the next life inside my head, the one where I was working for a branch of the CIA? I was in Afghanistan, a prisoner, being tortured. I fell out of bed trying to escape and injured myself badly.
Is that horrific?
I’ve been home for almost a year, sorting out present-time reality from unreality, coming off cortisone and other drugs, relearning motor skills–not all, yet, but hey, I’m typing, aren’t I? When I came home–Bob tells me it was July, but I remember nothing before late August 2004 and almost nothing until well into 2005–I could not feed myself. I had tremors from having been given wrong medication. I taught myself to write by practicing the letters of the alphabet, one letter a day, over and over and over…. I couldn’t sit up unaided; I essentially couldn’t walk. One step on my own took months to accomplish. I used a walker and hated it, a cane that helps, and a wheelchair, which I still sometimes use.
If…when…I can bring myself to write about it, be it framed as fact, fiction, or both, where will my book be shelved?
–Janet Berliner
