Storytellersunplugged

By Special Guest Columnist
Cody Goodfellow

[A note from John Skipp: Once again, I find myself so deep in the trenches that an essay worth sharing was nowhere within me. So I took the liberty of inviting the very brilliant, preposterously little-known Cody Goodfellow to pinch-hit for me. I hope that you find his meanderings meaningful, and go read every goddam thing that boy has ever written. Yer pal, Skipp]

The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.
––Mark Twain

The fungus is among us!
––Fred G. Sanford

Lately, I have been blessed with a rare chance to set aside those burdensome chores that always bog down the semi-professional horror writer –– writing and reading horror fiction –– and luxuriate in the fulfillment of what, lately, seems to be our cardinal duty: morbidly pondering the dismal future of our genre.

While my woolgathering hasn’t gotten me any closer to solving any of your problems, it has at least given me a tasty metaphorical model for judging how to better spend my time making the future of horror a little less dismal… if only for myself.

In order to define what ails, if not kills, the horror field time and again, I offer you the humble fly agaric mushroom.

(I know it tastes like shit, but don’t try to gulp it down all at once; better keep a bucket handy…)

Common throughout Eurasia, the amanita muscaria variety mushroom is a sacrament of Siberian shamanic spiritualism because of its incredibly potent psychoactive properties. The experience of ingesting fly agaric is fraught with perils, from nausea and seizures to overwhelming visions, unhinging revelations and retrograde amnesia, but the euphoric sensation of flying produced allegedly makes it worth doing.

The hallucinogenic toxins in fly agaric are water soluble, but so intense that they can be passed on in the shaman’s urine. In western Siberian tribes, the shaman consumes a brain-wracking few grams of mushrooms to experience a raw vision, then distills the experience for his flock from his bladder.

A fly agaric piss-trip is, naturally, much less intense than the real thing, but the chemicals that cause the hairy, scary parts of the trip––twitching, sweating, etc––are broken down by the shaman.

In eastern Siberia, where fly agaric is popular for recreational consumption, the poor must settle for drinking the electric piss of the rich, who can afford the scarce mushrooms, but apparently can’t afford to leave Siberia.

(How many fingers am I holding up? Hang in there, trooper, this’ll start making sense, soon…)

If Mark Twain was right about the lightning and the lightning bug, then I think the fly agaric ratio could be usefully applied to separating the wheat from the chaff in horror literature.

Think about it: the horror literature that works — that shocks, shatters conventions, and inspires hosts of imitators — is a portal into some unimaginable reality, so unspeakable that you start to forget that another human has come up with it. No matter how alien, how isolating, the vision, it somehow rings true, knocking on the atavistic door in some fundamental cellar of the brain that opens on the sunless sea of the collective unconscious.

It’s that little lightning-in-a-bottle miracle that comes along just often enough to keep you plowing through the endless piss taste-tests of modern small press horror markets.

This little miracle of literary shamanism isn’t worked by reckless experimentation with hallucinogens (not that there’s anything wrong with that*), but by ingesting the most potent hallucinogen of all: pure, undigested reality.

You don’t come up with a taboo-breaking story by aping the best book you ever read, or gleaning the latest freaky tidbits from science magazines. You find them by looking under every rock on the seashore until you discover something that would make Jacques Cousteau puke in his hip-waders.

For example: I don’t care how hardboiled your bookshelf and DVD library are, it’s no substitute for even a glancing flesh-on-flesh connection with the living, seething sleaze of the criminal underworld.

You can add all the flavor you like to your cunningly contrived, bladder-busting concoction. Feel free to spike it with other varieties of exotically distilled influences… but unless you’re trying to hunt down and engulf that wild, ineffable quality of reality that makes truth stranger than any fiction, you’re still just peddling third-hand piss.

My favorite authors, the ones who have unwittingly taught me my craft, all seemed to have learned to warp their own personal realities into metaphors that resonate like a dose of pure acid on the eyeball.

My own best stories have all sprouted from seeds of personal experience, that make the genre conventions with which I fertilize them sing and dance and eat each other. While I’ve had loads of fun tripping on pastiches of pulp and Mythos fiction, the fizz in the stuff is fleeting and hardly worth consuming, so long as someone out there is still writing their name in the snow with the freshest second-hand brain-trips, or, better yet, editing a risk-addicted market that dares you to do it, yourself.

To say that horror is a literature of vampires, werewolves and slashers is to do worse than sell it short; in essence, you are substituting mildly effective third-hand piss – with all the authentic twitching, sweating, fly-over-the-moon terror filtered out of it — for a still-steaming glass of the good stuff, with the spiky ibotenic acids and muscazones of undiluted surreality still sizzling and eager to go all Ken Russell on your gray matter.

Where horror is not merely a spikier variety of the same mental comfort food other readers find in westerns or romance novels, it is a literature of surprise. At its best, it should wield the power to teach us unacceptable truths about ourselves and our world.

As such, it’s not surprising that its future is forever in doubt, because such disturbing trips are not everybody’s idea of an ideal vacation; but I’d rather spend my life in a closet, washing down toxic genre mushrooms with my own bitter kidney-liquor, than go on guzzling ninth-generation literary piss with barely enough lift in it to make you think it’s Country Time.

(OK, put your head between your knees, relax, throw on some Allman Brothers, and have a glass of orange juice; by the way, where’s your wallet? Those babies ain’t free…)

*––None of this should be taken as an endorsement of, or encouragement to try, amanita muscaria or any other hallucinogenic substances. While I don’t subscribe to any Manichean notions of drugs as inherently evil or dangerous, it’s probably for the best that they remain illegal for the simple reason that many, if not most, people just can’t keep it together when their wrinkly gray shit hits the psychotropic fan (which just unfolds further wrinkles in this pretentious, McKennaesque wet dream of a metaphor…)

If you’re the kind of softboiled chucklehead who experiments with potentially harmful substances in hopes of writing more original stories, or just because some scrambled chucklehead suggests it in an article… do us both a favor, and stick with Nyquil…

——-

CODY GOODFELLOW has written three novels, RADIANT DAWN, RAVENOUS DUSK and the forthcoming PERFECT UNION. Recent short story appearances include Hot Blood 13, A Dark & Deadly Valley and Fried: Fast Food, Slow Death. He likes jelly.