Today is the release date of my novel THE ACHING PLANE. Yay!
As I stare out the window of the train I’m currently on, partly captivated by the passing view and partly in my own head, I think back to the final days of the writing process of The Aching Plane. How I dropped into a dark depressive episode, but made myself continue writing despite my body’s withering energy and my mind’s numbing assault.
It occurs to me that I’m not certain how to talk about my book. This also means I don’t know how to sell it. What’s new? What you’re seeing here is me attempting to learn how to talk about it in real time.
To begin talking about this book and why it isn’t easy to talk about, I want to tell you about the types of stories I most love to read, both in the horror genre and outside of it.
SMALL HUMAN STORIES:
For most of my life, I’ve loved what I consider to be small human stories. Stories about interiority, about relationships, about our relationship with the past, with longing, with darkness, and especially with the things and emotions within us that feel too big to be contained but which we have to try and live with anyway. I love stories which focus in on the small spaces of our inner and outer lives. It’s within those small spaces that, I feel, the largest of themes can play out and the most important things can be said.
For example: In what is arguably my favorite film—Bela Tarr’s dense and unforgiving The Turin Horse—the narrative’s bare-bone simplicity is in service of a literal and philosophical apocalyptic vision.
But that’s the nature of our lives, isn’t it? We are so small. On the cosmic scale, our smallness—our insignificance, if you will—is incomprehensible. And yet our eyes can hold so much, and our minds even more, and our hearts even more than that. Even in the smallness of our lives, our individual experiences are undeniably singular, and our capacity for depth—the depth of our emotional experience—is infinite, it seems to me.
INFLUENCES ON THE ACHING PLANE:
I’m beginning to feel pretentious, talking about these things. What I’m trying to get to is: The Aching Plane is the result of me asking myself a few questions. Most prominent of those questions was this: What’s the book I most want to read? Followed by: Deep down, what scares me the most?
The Aching Plane is the story of someone whose life exists in the shadow of a great love, but in her present life can no longer tell if that love was merely part of the magic of late childhood or if it was as real as it felt. The girl she loved, Marion, vanished a decade ago under mysterious and unexplainable circumstances. In the book’s opening chapters, Marion returns as mysteriously as she vanished. At the same time, Charlie’s lifelong hallucinations escalate into the horrific, and reality itself seems to be in question as an unimaginable darkness encroaches.
The influence of The King in Yellow, by Robert Chambers, is all over the story, both in simple references and deeper themes. Some of what I love about The King in Yellow comes down to its ambiguous approach to cosmic horror, the characters haunted not only by otherworldly visions but also by their longings, their heartaches, their emotional and philosophical fears. In those stories, we’re never told or shown much at all about the actual Yellow King, or the mysterious realm of Carcosa. The horror is an ever-present backdrop, a shadow that hangs over every word.
Equally an influence is the work of Sally Rooney, one of my favorite writers. I feel similarly about her writing as I do about the writing of Raymond Carver, how clear her eye is for the language of this coming-of-age generation in all its contradictions, angsts, hopes, fears, joys, and wonders. Her stories are mirrors. In some ways they’re so simple, yet capture such rich, textured complexity about the inner life. Psychology, romance, mental illness, philosophy, cynicism, sentimentality. Oh, and her language! The prose itself. I could write for pages about Rooney’s work and its influence on my life and my own writing, especially since her work echoes some of my own life experience.
While The King in Yellow and the work of Sally Rooney inform The Aching Plane, I’d be terribly remiss to leave out the names of three immense writers of literary horror: Peter Straub, John Langan, Dan Simmons. In more ways than one, they introduced me to weird, imaginative fiction which was as fun as it was serious-minded.
I was fortunate, from a young age, to be introduced to the literary side of horror. My first Stephen King book was IT. My first Peter Straub book was GHOST STORY. I’d seen plenty of horror films at that point, but it was with some of King and definitely Straub that my interest in horror became full love. The marriage of thoughtful, well-constructed, sometimes beautiful prose, with rich, sometimes complex themes, all stirred into a pot of the pure genre fun of horror. All of that, yet grounded inside human stories of perspective and emotion. This led me to the work of Dan Simmons—and, more recently in my life, to John Langan. Langan’s The Fisherman has the cosmic heights of the Lovecraftian, the inspiring human madness of Moby Dick, plus the great prose worthy of those influences, and yet is rooted in the language and perspective of a person and their grief, their loss, their messy, uncertain path toward life and away from darkness. His books The Fisherman and House of Windows are such brilliant horror novels, but they also are so authentically heavy with their depictions of life, loss, and grief, and all the complexities of the human experience.
These influences are what most informed the writing of The Aching Plane. It was the book I wanted to read, so I needed to write it.
WORST FEARS:
There’s one last aspect of the story I want to talk about.
When I talk about The Aching Plane, I’ve sometimes brought up how the story was a way of exploring my own philosophical fears. One of the things I love about horror is how it’s a confrontational genre. This is as true—if not more so—for a writer of horror as it is for a reader.
The story’s main character, Charlie Louise, is someone haunted by the past, tormented by what she sees as “the life she didn't get to live,” as she grapples also with deep-rooted abandonment issues and a darkening worldview.
I have many fears, but there are two which return to me often enough that I think I can say they are my deepest.
First: the “unlived life.” The fear that I’m not living the life I’m supposed to. That I’ve made a wrong choice, or a series of wrong choices somewhere along the line, and the life I’m now living isn’t the way it was supposed to go. In some ways, I know this is absurd. There is no right way, no one true way of doing things. There is no “supposed to,” beyond the inevitable could’ve-beens which the mind invents. But this fear is alive within me all the same. The first time I encountered this feeling was my first encounter with grief. The thought returned to me every now and then: It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it? And just as, in some ways, grief never leaves us, so too has that feeling, that fear, never truly left me.
Two: Probably the fear which haunts me most. What if the way my life and the way the world looks through the lens of my depression is, in fact, the truth of things? When I’m inside of my depression, there is no color, no emotion, no color, no clarity. There’s numbness, a nullity, but there’s also an aching sense of sourceless, encompassing pain. Nothing is interesting, nothing is ugly or beautiful, nothing seems worth doing. Anything I muster myself to do, I barely have the energy for. And from that vantage point, my regular life looks like a flimsy, cardboard illusion. Happiness seems like a fun trick I once played on myself, and love seems empty and false.
It is probably my worst fear that this is all the truth, that depression isn’t a liar but a truth-teller. I know this isn’t true, of course, but as Thomas Ligotti so aptly put it in his book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, part of the horror of depression is “the uselessness of reason in the absence of emotion.”
With this book, I was at least partly able to explore these fears. To try and confront them, see what I could learn from them, see how they might fit into and form the narrative. This turned out to be surprisingly prescient. During the book’s climax, I experienced a depressive episode of no small severity. In both my life and in the story, I dropped into the aching plane, and wrote myself through it. The days bled together, and I sat down with my notebook and wrote furiously, letting all the darkness of the depression flow into the story. That is something I’ll write about more in a forthcoming post; this one’s already long enough.
IN SUMMARY:
In some ways, this book felt like it was a long time coming. Years ago, a much younger me—younger as a person, as a writer, and in many other ways—wrote a story called Fairlane Road. That book is no longer in print, which I’m glad of. But it represented, at the time, my attempt at writing what I called “philosophical horror,” because I didn’t know there were such genres as cosmic and Lovecraftian in the genre. As an experiment, that book was, in my opinion, more of a stumble than any type of achievement, albeit perhaps an interesting one. It was the work of a much younger person. Years before even that one, I wrote a novel—unpublished—called Charlie Louise. She is a character I’ve been trying to write since I was twelve or thirteen.
So, The Aching Plane is the culmination of a lot of things. If nothing else, I hope it is also a good and compelling story.
Whether you were curious or remain so about The Aching Plane, and whether this post convinced you toward or away from the story, thank you for your time. I’d been wanting to talk more about the book in a post somehow, and today—the book’s release day—seemed a good opportunity to do so. A lot of work went into it, a lot of darkness—but light, too. Healing. Hope. I think about that now as the landscape flies by through the train window. There’s an image of me, numb and in pain at the same time, forcing myself to keep writing because I knew it was helping even though it seemed pointless. That image is far away now. That version of me, suffering inside of that depression—I think I did right by him. I always hope to.
Happy birthday to The Aching Plane!