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MY RELUCTANCE TO write this Afterword, however flattering a request, had nothing to do with the quality of the stories you’ve just read. Or rather, it has everything to do with the quality of the stories you’ve just read, just not the way you think.
When considering the work of Gemma Files, the author of many books, including Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, reissued here in e-book form by ChiZine Publications, any writer presuming to proffer a literary postmortem (especially after the superb Introductions by novelists Caitlín R. Kiernan and Nancy Kilpatrick) has to first ask themselves one simple question: Why? What on earth is there left for the likes of me to add?
It’s a bit like being asked to apply for the job of the person who stands in front of a burning library that has just been hit by a comet—not just any comet, mind you, but a huge, bright, blazing micro-sun that everyone in the world saw streak down from an obsidian sky pebbled with stars, hit the building, and ignite a holocaust of fire that can be seen for miles.
“A comet just fell out of the sky and set the library on fire,” he says, a bit redundantly.
Everyone can see the library burning. Everyone saw the comet fall. No one needs to be told what they’ve just experienced. They felt the impact, and now they feel the heat from the fire. They don’t need you to say anything, and no one really wants you to, anyway. You have nothing to add to the experience of watching the inferno.
You’ve read these stories. You know exactly what I mean.
A bit of autobiographical backtracking, if you don’t mind.
I’ve known Gemma Files since the mid-1990s when I was still a nonfiction writer, making his horror debut in the third volume of Don Hutchison’s seminal anthology series of Canadian horror fiction, Northern Frights. Toronto horror writers in those days were a spare, tight group, the redheaded stepchildren of the dominant science fiction community. Gemma had made a devastating debut in Northern Frights 2 with her short story “A Mouthful of Pins” (a deeply unsettling title in and of itself, never mind the chilling story it portends).
I was then in my very early thirties, and Gemma must have been in her very early twenties. I have a very vivid memory of meeting her at an afternoon party at Don Hutchison’s house one Sunday afternoon. We were the two youngest people in the room, so naturally we gravitated towards one another. We were drawn to each other immediately and instinctively, and I seem to recall we wound up sitting underneath a very tall table, talking horror to each other.
Gemma’s beauty—it’s relevant, so please bear with me—was quintessentially English. Her skin was the colour of both parts of a cameo: both flush-pink and white. Her eyes were wide-spaced, thoughtful, vastly kind, and fiercely intelligent. There was something vaguely 18th-century about it, like an illustration in a Jane Austen novel—not “fragile” or dated in any sense, but still suggestive of another era. Her voice was (and still is) husky and warm, her manner genial and unpretentious.
As we talked, I occasionally had the slightly disorienting sense of speaking through time. I mean to say, I occasionally had the slightly disorienting sense that there were multiple versions present of the woman to whom I spoke. There was the very modern, very hip Gemma Files, course—the noted Canadian film critic-turned-fiction-writer. But there were others, too—older versions, younger versions, different genders, different ages, from a variety of eras, all of them shimmering and eddying across her face as we spoke, moving beneath the skin. I’d heard the phrase “old soul” before, but I’d always found it a hackneyed, sentimental cliché.
Now I wasn’t so sure. There was no sense of “multiple personalities,” but there was a sense that the woman with whom I was rapidly becoming friends had stood at the crossroads of time itself on more than one occasion, in this life or others, and that she had taken careful notes.
And so we became friends.
We saw each other socially on numerous occasions, found mutual friends, shared our writing, and witnessed the formation of a community of horror writers in a city where one had previously not existed.
In 1999, Gemma published “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” a horror story so taboo-smashing and so chilling, and so beautifully written, that it won the International Horror Guild Award at the World Horror Convention in Denver, Colorado the following year. I have only been able to read “The Emperor’s Old Bones” once. It’s too upsetting, but it’s upsetting in the same way Benjamin Percy’s fiction would be upsetting a quarter of a century later—deriving its power from a brilliant writer’s unflinching depiction of the unthinkable, without ceding an inch of font point to exploitation or sentimentality.
That same year, I asked her for a story for my third edited horror anthology, Queer Fear: Gay Horror Fiction. Gemma wrote “Bear-Shirt” for me, a violent, homoerotic tale which author and critic Greg Wharton, writing in Strange Horizons, described thusly: “an amazing story of transfiguration and metamorphosis. A story of love, longing, and regret, Files’ tale is also about the animal instinct within, about finding the inner beast, and one’s destiny.” The story became an immediate favourite worldwide, and is still one of the stories most often mentioned by readers who still occasionally write to me about that book.
The fact that an author who was not a gay man had so effortlessly accessed a gay male sexual psyche and not just accessed it, but owned it, surprised many readers. In 2015, we’re fifteen years past the social and literary climate of the time into which Queer Fear was born and, given the number of queer writers writing queer speculative fiction today, it’s almost inconceivable to believe how hard it was in those days to find writers willing to commit to queer horror fiction, let alone award-winning ones like Gemma Files. And yet, suddenly, there was “Bear-Shirt.”
The most logical saw to trot out is, “A writer writes, and a great writer can write anything.”
True, if a bit shopworn. In Gemma Files’ case, though, I’m not sure if that quite covers it. Yes, she’s a great writer, no question at all about that. Reading “Bear-Shirt” for the first time, however, I was struck by two things: its authenticity, and a sudden memory of that afternoon under the table when I momentarily felt the presence of multiple Gemmas, all of them gazing shrewdly and thoughtfully at me through those clear, coffee-coloured eyes.
And, God almighty, the writing.
Take a random line from one of the two books—say, from “The Land Beyond the Forest,” one of my all-time favourite vampire stories: “The moon went out like a lamp. And when Carola found she could see again, nothing remained but the blue-black road, the horizon, and a mouthful of salt.”
It’s the sort of sensual, apparently effortless bit of writing that sets readers a-tingle and makes other writers sit up straight and read it twice or more in an attempt to understand the witchcraft employed in the service of writing a line like that.
Except it’s not witchcraft at all—it’s a once-in-a-lifetime literary gift that is bestowed on precious few, proportionately. Gemma has written about witches, she’s written about angels, she’s written about vampires and neo-Nazis and mermaids and any number of other monsters, human and otherwise. She writes fearlessly and she writes with insight and compassion.
Like all serious writers, Gemma Files is a moralist. A moralist is not necessarily a judge, but moralists can look unflinchingly into the
darkest corners of the human heart—even their own heart—and call what they see there by its name, stare it down, and then render it on the printed page. She’s written across time, she’s written in different centuries. Like a medium, she has allowed countless voices to speak through her, giving them life.
Gemma Files is every lazy writer’s nightmare, because the quality of her prodigious output is so consistently stellar. She is the embodied nightmare of every misogynist male speculative fiction writer who’s felt compelled to unburden himself of his bigoted conviction that women have no place in “the boy’s club” of hardcore horror fiction, justifying their embarrassing fear of women who write world-class horror better than they could ever dream of writing it. And she’s the answer to every young writer’s dream of where talent, craft, courage, and sweat can take them.
I remember sending Gemma a version of my Introduction to my fourth anthology, Queer Fear 2. In that version, I thought I’d be clever and write the Introduction as a horror story in itself. I was beginning to get the itch to begin writing long form horror myself (an itch that wouldn’t be scratched till three years later) and I thought I’d flex that muscle a little bit with the introductory essay to the anthology.
It was . . . dreadful. Truly execrable. I’d like to say I shudder at the memory, but I don’t—I giggle a bit, really. The piece was an exercise in unarmed hubris. But I sent it to Gemma anyway. She emailed me back almost immediately. As I recall, she said something like, Well, I can see what you’re trying to do, but it’s not really working, is it? She was right, and I shelved it immediately and got back and did my job as the creator of the anthology, just like she has always done hers, as a writer of peerless stories. Just as she has done it in these two reissued collections, Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart.
One last thing? I’ve had an extraordinary working life. As a journalist, I’ve been privileged to interview some of the plus grands des grands personnages of horror fiction and film. As an anthology editor, I’ve been privileged to publish them. And as a novelist, I’ve been privileged to call them my friends.
And still, I remain in awe of Gemma Files’ ability to spin her particular skein of moonlight, hell, and redemption. It was an honour to write this Afterword, however ridiculous. You can all see that she was the comet that struck the library—indeed, the horror genre—and set it aflame; you don’t need the likes of me to point that out.
