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In his younger days, my husband was part of a successful Death Metal band in the UK, and in recalling some of their more prevalent creative arguments, introduced me to the term ‘Blood all over the place.’ It was a catchphrase to describe a certain type of lyrical suggestion offered repeatedly by band members who favored torn carcasses and graphically horrific descriptions of doom, whether or not they made any sense or fit into the song in question.

While never in the music business, I could certainly relate to the term in reference to horror writing. I’m reminded of the early days of the Internet when everyone was a horror writer, and flaming skulls graced the doomy black web pages of a thousand zines, each claiming to be the darkest lair of hair-raising fiction. Every writer, it seemed, was competing to conjure the grossest images of depravity. Dead babies hung from trees in apocalyptic settings, people were skinned alive, tortured, decapitated, and often with graphic sexual undertones.

A horror writer I know once referred to this as the ‘and then his dick exploded’ brand of fiction, a literary equivalent to Death Metal’s ‘Blood all over the place.’

I’d like to say I was immune to this tactic, but found myself getting sucked in after multiple rejections telling me my stories were ‘too fantasy’ or ‘too Twilight Zone’ or ‘too humorous.’ I raged at the injustice. I had no elves or swords in my stories! They were paranormal and clever and weird, what more did these people want?

A horror anthology came along that everyone wanted to get into. They wanted dark gruesome stories set to some satanic theme or other, and everyone in my little tribe of writer friends was submitting. This was it, I decided, I’m gonna show’em what’s what! I crafted a tale of dark and dirty deeds, Hell demons and doom I was sure would rival the best of the ‘and then his dick exploded’ entries. I’m so very bad, I thought. Lock up your children, I’m pure evil!

I showed the story to an editor friend who’d published a lot of my previous work, and happened to like my style, before I was confident enough to realize I was developing ‘a style.’ He wrote me back with an unenthusiastic pat on the head and said the story was ‘okay.’ I was baffled, as he usually loved my stuff. So I nagged him for more details.

“I’ll be honest,” he said. “This story is not you. You’re trying to write like someone else, and it doesn’t work.”

Well crap, I thought. I’d branded myself a horror writer, and I couldn’t cut the mustard no matter how many rotting demons I summoned. So I sought to challenge my badness in another way. I was selling a lot of nonfiction at the time, a venue that didn’t require exploding dicks so much as an analysis of strange events. So when a friend who worked in the environmental cleanup business told me about a particularly bone chilling job, I decided to investigate and write about it. I would explore the horror of reality, confident that I could handle the transition and blend these two passions into a unique and powerful article. It was a terrible mistake.

The event in question was the suicide of a young man who’d sat on the train tracks one night and waited for death to come. The engineer described seeing the man at the last minute, sitting cross-legged with his middle finger up - a final fuck you to the world. How romantic, I thought.

But no. My mind, I realized, was reacting like this was fiction. And this railroad engineer, though experienced in the realism of the event, was telling it as such, as if it was some ghost story to be dramatized in a hushed voice by a flickering campfire. But it was not such a tale. It was real.

I dismissed the engineer, wanting to move deeper into the realism, past my image of that mysterious lover of death with his middle finger raised to meet his maker. But as I interviewed the supervisor of the environmental cleanup team, the real mortality began. The shattered pieces of this victim’s life, however poetic, were for his friends and family to concern themselves with. It was the shattered pieces of his body that I’d doomed myself to learn about. And in that capacity, I learned this death was far less romantic.

“Bio-haz cleanups are usually voluntary assignments, unless we’re shorthanded for some reason. We’ve found it’s not wise to force the assignment on guys that don’t feel comfortable with it,” the supervisor said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

He laughed. “These guys are used to cleaning up oil, gasoline and chemicals. You can’t just toss anyone into a zone strewn with body parts and expect them to perform. If you’ve ever seen a guy vomit into his respirator, well, that can be a worse sight than a splatter of intestines scraped off of a rock.”

I begged to differ on that account, but then who the hell was I but a pampered horror fan? I was still picturing a brilliant red spray of blood, spider-webbed Tom Savini style across a neighboring oak tree. I imagined a dislodged eyeball resting decoratively in a nest of crab grass. Judging by the description I was given, I wasn’t too far off the mark.

Save for the smell, and the insects.

“Sure, the stench can be bad if the cleanup happens in the summer, like this one did. But it has its advantages too. The medical crew comes in first and takes whatever whole pieces of the body they can find; torso, limbs, if there’s anything left. It’s our job to clean up what remains after that; tissue, bodily fluids, tiny parts. That’s where the bees are helpful. The bees are attracted to the blood. There was a whole swarm of them buzzing around this one pile of stones near the tracks. So we shooed them away and dug down a bit, and sure enough, there was a finger in there. We would have missed it otherwise.”

I started feeling queasy, and embarrassed that I planned to sell this piece to a horror magazine. The supervisor rambled on about sterilization, bleach solution, tear resistant Tyvek coveralls and three pairs of gloves on each hand. He spoke of approximations of the region around the body’s initial landing, safety goggles to prevent eye contamination, and respirators over the mouth to avoid accidental ingestion of small body parts or kicked up fluids.

“Yeah, we see identifiable parts, but you try not to think of it that way,” he told me. “Doesn’t matter if you’re using your tongs to pick up an eyeball, a piece of brain, or just a lump of tissue. It all goes into the red bio-haz bags and gets sealed up. You can’t think of it as human. It’s all just waste in the end.”
The professionals had become desensitized to the carnage. How they achieved this indifference is hard to say, and likely catered to their individual mindsets. In the film Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz tells us to make a friend of horror, lest it become an enemy to be feared. Could this be what we seek as we expose ourselves to carnage through the filtered lens of the movie director, or the pages of our beloved novels?

Perhaps. And why shouldn’t we? After all, our version is far preferable to that other world, that real world, where life ends in a pile of sealed bags routed for a medical waste facility. In the world of reality, our death is a contaminant to be scraped off of a tree. In our blessed fantasy world, death can be reversed, zombies raised, immortality traded for monstrosity.

The assignment transitioned me back to horror fiction, but not in the capacity I expected. It’s no wonder we prefer to romanticize death. In our coveted fiction universe, blood conducts magical rites, vampirism, opens doors to new dimensions. In the world of reality, blood spawns little more than disease. So has our filtered fiction lens made us a friend of horror, as powerfully cold as the fictional Colonel Kurtz?

Probably not, if we had to use such skills in the real world. Would I be the one to vomit into my respirator if forced to pick decapitated fingers out of gravel? Likely.

And so failing to find my dark side in either fiction or nonfiction, I accepted that I’m not cut out to be hardcore. But as my editor friend so bluntly said, it was never really me to begin with. I’m comfortable now with my quirky, humorous, semi-fantasy Twilight Zone style of writing, and my nonfiction work can be as banal as an interview with a local dog trainer.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t still read horror, and I admit to enjoying the occasional ‘and then his dick exploded’ story. But I keep my filters well in place, and wrap myself in the warm cocoon of a horror fan’s reality, where blood is pretty, bodily fluids are magic, and true death is always optional.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.