Pulp Non-fiction
...or, Why I Haven't Posted Recently... and/or, Why I Mostly Write Horror Now
I’m aware that I haven’t posted anything on here in a while. I feel I owe you an explanation. Since I also owe you something of significant length, this is me killing birds with stones…
TLDR: I have Long COVID, and it has been interfering with my ability to do anything much beyond the bare minimum these past few months.
1. How It Is Going
It has been going worse, these past few months.
What it’s like, is one of those stories of incremental poison that seeps in through the skin. You know, the toxic book in The Name of the Rose. I’m pretty sure there’s an Agatha Christie that uses it too, or is it a Sherlock Holmes? Poison that penetrates to the bone. Skeletons dyed a bloody shade of purple. Marrow turned into a crystalline grit, like powdered stained glass.
It’s also like one of those storylines where the prisoner is allowed to think he’s escaping, but it’s all a cruel trick by the gaoler and there was never any prospect of escape, the hope was extended only to be dashed, the return to the cell all the worse for having briefly got out. Does this happen in Misery? Something along those lines. Not sure if she deliberately lets him nearly escape but in any case he tries, and fails, and it’s immediately after that bit that she smashes his ankles in with the sledgehammer.
Or, the way I sometimes picture it to myself, it’s like there’s an enormous, invisible fist of scales and talons, a vulturine foot the size of a house, and it’s always there, with you at the centre. A lot of the time it’s loosely spread and it’s so big, plus, invisible, that you can forget it’s there; and you start to relax, going about life like a normal person not subject to the whims of a house-sized invisible fist covered in scales and talons; you forget… and then, perhaps in response to some offence of yours against some inscrutable code of the giant-footed vultures, maybe in your forgetfulness you brushed up against the sides of the invisible foot cage, or perhaps for some other reason entirely, you can’t know for sure, it’s an alien inscrutable being we’re talking about here, but for whatever reason it clenches, the foot clenches into a fist. You are in its clutches. There is very little you can do now. It squeezes so hard that it sinks into your bones. You twitch and shudder. Now, you do not walk: you crawl; and you do not crawl on your hands and knees: you crawl on your elbows and knees; and you do not crawl all the way up the stairs: you get half way and that’s where you stop for the time being, lying on your side on the landing, twitching and shuddering.1
It makes you so angry, all this – getting on for five years of it now, on and off, the clawed foot sometimes so loose you allowed yourself to think it was actually gone this time, sometimes, like now, holding you closer than anything ever has – but the anger is completely futile. What are you going to do? Who are you going to fuck up, the way you want to fuck someone up? Those responsible, if any, are untouchable by the likes of you. It’s very easy in these moments to make the transition from the anger being futile, to everything being futile. The anger colours everything.
There’s a bit, early on in The Stand2: after the army bioweapons research team have accidentally leaked the apocalyptic killer virus, the senior officers who know the truth engage in a ruthless cover-up. I forget the exact details: pretty sure they kill a bunch of people, almost all of whom were going to die anyway. It seems pointless under the circumstances, everyone who might find out or care is going to die anyway, and maybe that’s what gives the cover-up a certain cracked nobility. The officers look upon what they’re doing as analogous to covering the dead body of their father, lest he be exposed to shame in his nakedness – the father being the army, the institution they’ve devoted their lives to; the nakedness being the gross negligence that has doomed more or less everyone in the world to a horrible lingering death. If the army, or any of the conspirators, had any chance of survival, it would be appalling, to cover up such a thing; but given that they’re doomed, there’s a sort of tragic/existential quality to what they’re doing that felt weirdly honourable to me, reading the book for the first time as a young teenager.
2. How It Started
The first rumours began to appear almost exactly five years ago. There was a novel virus circulating in East Asia somewhere. A few dozen people had died, maybe.
No need to recapitulate in detail. You don’t want to go back over all that now. Do you remember, though, how those first reports landed? There was a certain obvious basket you could allocate them to: SARS, MERS, bird flu, swine flu. There was a script. A certain sort of person would enjoy getting excited about it, following the story a little too closely, warning anyone who would listen that this time it was going to get serious. But then, there was also The Stand, Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven. I like a good apocalyptic novel as much as the next man but was level-headed enough to distinguish between that, and reality. Reality was a flurry of news stories from distant places, followed by life going on much as usual. Never mind that the subjects of the news stories might have a very different account of reality. They were far away. I was a reasonable man. Life didn’t play out like in the stories. The first time I heard the rumour that the virus had emerged right next to some kind of biolab, and a Chinese one at that, I reacted accordingly: this was far too tropey, this was the anti-science weirdos doing their thing, and/or, probably racist. The truth would turn out to be far more nuanced and prosaic. It was probably a homeopathic hospital or something. People loved to join up dots that weren’t there.
My point is that, in early March 2020, it all felt like a story, even as the death counts got higher and closer, even as friends living in Rome told me about the lockdowns and the bodies piling up in the hospitals. Unreal. Written to genre. Quite badly written, to be honest: I’d have had some edits. The biolab stuff? Come on.
C’s birthday was on the 14th of March, which was a Saturday. H was planning a surprise party for her. There was a WhatsApp group to plan it. One option was a big concert featuring some sort of Cuban electro-funk act in a sweaty cavernous venue in South London. There were other options. The general feeling was that people wanted to go big. We were all at that age, late 30s, when we hadn’t gone big in a while and there was a looming feeling that soon we’d be too old to go big, but right now was just the right time to do it. The stuff on the news about the virus… as it developed, people started to get a bit twitchy about the Cuban electro-funk in the big sweaty venue. And about going big in general. I came up with a compromise, in the form of a speakeasy under Smithfield meat market with live jazz and cocktails and, oh, only about 200 capacity.
It was at capacity that night: I had to make a call to get us a table big enough. In the few days between making the booking and turning up for the birthday party, the virus story had developed such that the Cuban electrofunk now seemed almost unthinkable and the underground venue with 200 people in it felt borderline. A few people who were meant to be coming along, didn’t. Others came, gamely drank a cocktail or two, then made their excuses. There was a general atmosphere of ‘last night before the city falls to the enemy.’ The servers were all wearing flimsy plastic gloves and looking scared. You could feel it throughout the venue, the nervousness, the snatches of conversation about the virus, the febrile, strident quality to the conversations that were not about the virus. The virus was there, too, invisible, among us, being breathed out, being breathed in. I was determined to be a non-party-pooper, plus, level-headed reasonable man not to be swept up in the general air of panic. Almost everyone had left early and C was looking crestfallen. I ordered champagne and we stayed on, C, H and I, genned up a bit of party spirit, afterwards shared a joint outside under the strip lights of the meat market access ways.
3. Why I Mostly Write Horror Now
Then we all came down with the virus and I spent two weeks in bed and at one point late at night I started twitching and shuddering uncontrollably and my wife (eight months pregnant) called an ambulance and the paramedic said not to worry, it was just a panic attack, they’d been seeing it a lot; except, what did he know, really? A couple of weeks into the UK outbreak? I’ve been having the twitching and shuddering on and off ever since, and it sure feels to me like my body’s reaction to being chronically infected with an artificially enhanced supervirus, but maybe it is panic attacks. If so, it seems to me a pretty reasonable response to the new situation. Everything is different now. Before, I always leaned more towards depression than anxiety. Things tended to stay more or less the same. Enthusiasts were to be distrusted, and things that sounded like pulp fiction plotlines were just that: fiction. It’s been a lot to adjust to.
I was discussing a short story with a friend the other day, Mary Gaitskill’s The Other Place, featuring a failed serial killer who, despite never having consummated his kink, is always aware of the possibility of going there and actually comes very close to doing so at least once. The one time (that we know of) that he tries to go to the Other Place, he’s posing as a hitch-hiker and his intended victim turns out to be quite willing, even eager, to die – on her own terms – and he fails her: she kicks him out of her car, telling him he’s wasting her time. While they’re riding together in the car, there’s something on the radio about bombings in the Middle East, families dying, families mourning. He thinks the Other Place is something special that only he can access, that he is bringing the Other Place to the car; but the Other Place is there already, coming through over the radio, it’s where the woman driving the car appears to live full time, it turns out he’s a bit of a neophyte when it comes to the Other Place. It was there all along, and most of the time the normal people are huddling around a small circle of firelight, with their backs to the darkness.
I remember those two weeks in bed, lying awake late at night, listening to the silent London streets, utterly silent apart from the wail of the ambulance sirens, sometimes close, sometimes so distant, all the way across the city, you’d never have heard them if there was anything else to hear. The normal noises of the city abolished by fiat, and all that was left was the signals of death, walking in our landscape.
I started to recover, then it faltered. They shut down the world for months on end. For a year and a half, everything tasted and smelled very faintly but unmistakeably of baby poo. The clawed foot clenches, relaxes. Clenches, relaxes.
It turned out the virology lab was very much not a homeopathic hospital, and… look, I realise intelligent people disagree on this. Even if the thing that seems obvious to me is actually true, it’s futile. Everyone involved, if anyone is involved, has got away with it3. The research continues. There will probably be a next time, and it may be a lot worse.
And then it was all over, for the vast majority, and people understandably wanted to move on and in any case it seemed like globally some tipping point had been passed because there was so much other weirdness cropping up, now, that there was genuinely no longer space for the mysterious pandemic that had killed maybe 20 million people and permanently debilitated perhaps hundreds of millions more. UFOs4! Russian invasions! Men in horned helmets stalking through the US Capitol! The first glimmers of artificial superintelligence!
Garish stuff!
I’ve tried various things for the long COVID, and none of them have worked long term. Maybe I’m just not good enough at navigating it, maybe there’s something I could access if I had the energy to treat it like a full-time job, like a startup, like Ross Douthat shopping for maverick Lyme Disease treatments. Maybe some of the things actually were helping, and I just got too tired and dispirited to keep them all up.
I’m seriously considering putting myself in the hands of Claude, the friendly chatbot that excels at medical diagnosis and that many highly qualified people think could be an early iteration of something that will end up taking control of the future and wiping out humanity.
Maybe I’ll do that, and report on it here. Pivot to non-fiction. Writer infected with impossible-to-shake artificially-enhanced supervirus turns, in desperation, to possibly-potentially-omnicidal AI for medical advice. Definitely a pulpy kind of story. A certain Philip K. Dickian quality, don’t you think? Maybe a bit much. Would you read it? Would you believe it?
Look, I know this all sounds a bit lurid and dramatic and those of you who’ve seen me in person from time to time these past few months will not recognise this picture. What I’ve just described is the worst of it. There are days, many of them, when I pull off something approaching normal: sometimes, months of those days in a row. And in any case, is any of this a reason to give up on the one thing I’d promised myself and, by implication, all of you, to do: i.e. write stories on this platform with something approaching regularity? Other people have had it much worse than I do, and done much better. John Donne wrote some of his finest work while direly afflicted with a disease that stretched out for years and years and eventually killed him. Ross Douthat, by the sound of it, suffered a lot worse than I have and never missed a deadline and even wrote a whole long and wonderful book about his agonising experience, also years and years long, also never fully recovered from. I should get a grip. This, now, is in part me attempting to do so.
No idea if the linked miniseries is any good, or if it includes the scene I’m thinking of; but it’s five and a half hours and it’s free… and the song used for the opening credits is chef’s kiss perfect.
…that I know of. I guess heads may have rolled, in China and in private.
"Would you read it? Would you believe it?"
Probably!
Jon we love you. You're great and this is magnificent.