JOHN SHIRLEY on WETBONES

On one level Wetbones is a novel about a man whose daughter disappears, who is forced to search for her in the deepest, darkest levels of a city that, the pundits mistakenly claim, has only one level...a city people talk of as shallow and sun-lit, when in fact it is deeply layered in murk, in living shadow: Los Angeles. Our hero -- hero, anyway, of one of the major strands of the novel's interweaving narratives -- is a man with a profound spiritual commitment that is his last ditch defense against his own inner darkness, his past as an addict and alcoholic. When his daughter is taken from him and when -- at first -- he fails to find her, he loses all defenses against that darkness; loses his faith, and his hope. He's a single father with a sweet but errant teenage daughter who's lured into the grasp of a man who's worse than any Ted Bundy or Leonard Lake -- because this bizarrely refined sadist can do worse than destroy her body, he can rape her soul, he can loot her spirit, he can corrupt her...

And we follow other characters drawn into that same underworld -- the underworld under the underworld that the police know. There's a Hollywood writer, his career faltering, who's looking into the death of his estranged wife, whose body is found weirdly desiccated, like a thing of papiermâché. Something has been taken from her body -- some vital principle that, in any other corpse, would have left traces of the spirit that had been there. But it's as if the spirit were torn from the body, untimely, suddenly, utterly consumed...Her end-state symbolizes a great deal to our writer character -- it's as if she represents all that he's feared he's done to women over the years...By slow degrees, he finds out what happened to her -- and how this connects with a particular, very distinct evil found in a certain part of Los Angeles: the same evil that has taken that young girl, and dozens of others...

And if there are some scenes in which the writer character is talking to heartless agents and hypocritical, fickle, anti-creative executives, and venal, backstabbing producers -- that make the reader wonder if the author has had similar experiences...given, after all, that the author, was one of the screenwriters of The Crow, and worked on other projects for other studios, and producers...Well, deponent sayeth not.

And then some observers might also point out that the author is a rock singer, at times (and used to do it a whole lot more), and that the book contains scenes in rock clubs, and touches on the rock 'n' roll energy, its lyrical irony and imagery...

However. Few novelists, Proust and Truman Capote aside, borrow from their own lives without at least some mitigation and alteration. Real life can be dramatic, but it rarely follows the rules of storytelling -- that's why movie biographies that stick close to real life, like say Seven Years in Tibet are often unsatisfying to people: they tend to trail off at the end, to come to no clear resolution. Epiphanies and closures are rare in real life. Real life does not arrange itself into units of three acts and a climax...and perhaps an epilogue. So even if I've taken some scenes, some images, from the darker sides of my own life, readers should not conclude that this novel is autobiographical -- of course, if it were, you'd be justified in calling for my immediate arrest...

One of the viewpoint characters in Wetbones is a serial killer. This was a hard thing for me to do -- I've always disliked stories, like Natural Born Killers, that glamorize serial killers (I maintain that my story "Jody and Annie On TV" while about two young serial killers -- and which predates Natural Born Killers -- is a satire of their attitudes, and ridicules a certain distinctively American degeneracy, and hence is counter-glamorous). But it was important for me, in this particular book, to try to show readers how a man could be seduced by the fantastic, intricate, and even magical worlds of decadence, and how there's a victim, there, too, in the victimizer -- not that he's a victim of society, no, but of something far worse: an influence that reaches like a ghostly tendril through the cracks we allow in our spiritual armor, in the inadequacy of our self-knowledge, to take command of us, to subtly possess us, to puppet us for its own ends. Possession need not be obvious. It is most powerful and most dangerous when it is at its subtlest. (And in this, perhaps, the book shows the influence of C. S. Lewis -- not only his great novel That Hideous Strength, but his Screwtape Letters).

When this influence is exposed for what it is it has a Lovecraftian feel, though this book is not part of the Cthulhu mythos. The somewhat-Lovecraftian imagery -- which comes for the most part (and briefly) at the end of the book -- is a statement about how some human "consensual sicknesses", like addiction and like our fantastic exercises in self indulgence, in materialism and vanity, which we pass off as psychological and social problems, can at times represent something cosmically evil -- so far-reaching are the consequences, so dark the spiritual ramifications. Do I mean that such things are "the work of the devil"? Not at all -- only that the vision of cosmic evil can symbolize the intensity and quality of suffering that awaits us there. Addicts -- sex addicts, drug addicts, cruelty addicts -- are not able to articulate their own "hearts of darkness". If they try, it'll sound like they're whining. But there is enormous suffering there, which can only be represented symbolically.

So, there are other levels of Wetbones -- there is a statement, a cry of warning, a very sincere cry of protest.

Making a statement in genre fiction, in horror, is dangerous. Audiences are justifiably impatient with it. They didn't come there for it. So with Wetbones, though I felt a powerful imperative to make a statement about the power of addiction, in all its forms, and about the dehumanization of life in certain scenes in Los Angeles, I had to approach it in a way that gripped people, that delivered on the promise of the horror genre. The book is structured like a detective novel about abduction, and a suspense novel about the supernatural -- and it is those things too.

It's not as if there isn't plenty of "horror" already in addiction. As a recovering drug addict, I'd seen plenty, things I am afraid to remember. I fear that moment that's said to come at death, when one relives one's life -- I dread it more than death: there are things I fear to relive. Some of it I wrote about in Wetbones. Some I didn't have the heart to re-live.

One aspect of this metaphysically-complex novel was inspired by a real legend I heard of that, in the book, I call the Akishra: a kind of "astral worm", invisible parasitic creatures that swarm etherically about you when you're addicted to something...to anything! To cigarettes, to heroin, perhaps even to verbally abusing your spouse. The more nakedly powerful addictions will, of course, attract more and bigger psychic parasites. Imagine if you had the power to see these things...You go to see your broker, and it just happens that your broker, say, is secretly an alcoholic. He maintains a fair level of competence but he's on a slow downward spiral, and what if by some miracle you were able to see the Akishra feeding on him...He's sitting there, smiling, talking about interest rates, about returns from that blue chip stock and the bonds he talked you into buying, one hand tapping a pencil on his desk, say, and you're seeing translucent giant worms sliding in and out of his body, sucking onto him like great hungry gelatinous ectoplasmic worms as he says, "You know, Union Carbide is a real pay-off stock..." And you see them slowly, slowly, but quite visibly, suck his soul into themselves, even as he smiles and points at the computer monitor, and asks you how your wife is...Because all the time what's really on his mind is slipping into the bathroom for another drink from his flask...

Some Hindus believe these creatures actually exist, feeding off the spiritual energy we slowly leak away into our addictions -- perhaps they do, but they don't have to: addiction itself is sufficiently destructive, and has a quality of "personality", of presence about it, as if addiction itself is feeding... Wetbones implies, in short, a normally-unseen but ever-present metaphysical reality that reflects the consequences of our psychological state, our actions and interactions, in the spiritual world...And in opening the doors into that world, the novel -- I hope -- challenges us to face our own inner darkness; to embrace self knowledge, and thus pass through that darkness into the light.

-- John Shirley