Joe has followed in Keel's footsteps in his own way: reserving sober reporting for his books of "stories that might not be fiction," and his extrapolations from Keel for his fiction. The fact that DEUS-X was published the very same year as Joe's first compilation of "stories that might not be fiction," Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls, and Unsolved Mysteries (1994), demonstrates how singular his path was and is. What we have here is a devotee and successor to Charles Fort and John Keel consciously working, as a novelist, in the tradition of Nigel Kneale. I can think of no other living writer who can make that claim—or who has demonstrated, in such a singular work, how perfectly the extended paths of Fort, Kneale, and Keel inherently resonate with one another, and expand with exponential power.
Let us further warn the timid and cautious reader, that having visited a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, and having seen or experienced "bad things" there, and having been irrevocably altered by whatever was seen or whatever occurred at the "bad place," there is no telling what might follow…
Bear with me for a few final paragraphs, and let's follow my genre map-making just a bit further. I promise, I won't lead you too far astray. There is another aspect of genre mutation, evolution, and revelation I wish to discuss before leaving you to steep yourself in DEUS-X.
While Citro is known in New England as "the Ghost-Master General" and "Bard of the Bizarre" because of his folklorist work, he has never written a ghost novel, per se (he has written one ghost story, "The Last Fortune Cookie," in 2002, but only that one). Still, I hasten to note that there are aspects of DEUS-X that anticipated clearly where ghost fiction was headed in the 1990s, and again Joe was following and furthering Nigel Kneale's footsteps.
As I've asserted, Kneale was a unique genre cartographer. Quatermass and the Pit wed its science fiction conceit with what could only be called supernatural manifestations. Without Professor Quatermass's grasp of the real cause of events (psychic echoes of the Martian invasion and genetic manipulations conducted in that very spot millions of years ago), Kneale's chilling procession of (invented) historical sightings of specters, demons, and paranormal activities in and about Hobbs' End were far closer to the ghost stories of M.R. James than any science fiction of the 1950s. This is what made Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit such a revelation in its day, a fusion of traditional British ghost fiction with science fiction that was mind-and-genre expanding. Kneale subsequently became the BBC's go-to author for further fusions of the spectral and science fiction, and he continued to extend both genres in the 1960s. Among British television's adaptations of classic ghost stories, including those of M.R. James, Kneale forged his own distinctive originals. Kneale's The Road (1963) concerned the 18th century investigation of a haunted stretch of road, revealing that the place is haunted by reversed echoes of a future event: the sounds of a 20th century populace fleeing the outbreak of nuclear war. Kneale brought a similarly clarity and originality of perception to his reinterpretation of venerable "ghost story" tropes for The Stone Tape (originally broadcast Christmas, 1972), which anticipated our current video vérité ghost cycle (Paranormal Activity, etc.) by proposing that "hauntings" are in fact environmental recordings of traumatic past events being "rerun," like old videotapes. Having articulated this radical theory of what "haunts" may actually be, Kneale's protagonists then "erase" the haunt via a video-age exorcism. But this is a ghost story, and it cannot end happily: all they have done in fact is purge and peel away one century-old "haunt" to allow an older, more malign "haunt" to reveal itself, with unexpected and terrible consequences.
Citing only three of Kneale's creations—Quatermass and the Pit, The Road, and The Stone Tape—one can clearly see how Kneale expanded the realm, range, and resonance of M.R. James's brand of supernatural fiction into the 20th century. Kneale explored and reinvented the metaphysics and physics of "the bad place" in The Road and The Stone Tape; with The Woman in Black in its 1983 (Susan Hill original novel) and 1989 (Nigel Kneale's adaptation for Granada TV) incarnations, we have a new wrinkle, and a new interpretation of M.R. James's "moveable haunt." The haunting begins with a singular traumatic event in a singular locale (and oh, what a locale), but it thereafter becomes a sort of contagion. Visiting the haunted location will "infect" the visitor who not only sees the ghost, but lingers long enough for her to see the viewer, and the haunt will then follow the seer/haunted to another place, to inflict its vengeance upon the seer's children.
By the 1990s, in Japan, this was brought to a whole new level by the novel Ringu / Ring by KMjiSuzuki (1991) and by Takashi Shimizu's j( / Juon (literally, "Curse Grudge") / The Grudge Japanese TV and movie series (1998-2009, to date). In Ringu, Suzuki expands upon Kneale's use of technology (video) as the haunting agent: a single videocassette spreads a "haunt" from its source to anyone viewing the video cassette. As in The Woman in Black, seeing alone becomes all it takes to become infected/haunted. Takashi Shimizu's Film School of Tokyo teacher Kiyoshi Kurosawa fed this new 21st century viral strain of "hauntings," manifest via the internet-accessible viral "haunting" of Þï / Kairo / Pulse (2001). Note, however, that Kurosawa's meditations kissed the screen years after DEUS-X: Joe had already envisioned the internet as a virtual doorway to the netherworld.
In terms of ghost literature and cinema, I'd argue that Kurosawa's student handily outflanked his mentor. In its deceptively simplistic manner, Shimizu's The Grudge, in all its incarnations, took the viral-haunting-as-apocalypse further. The titular contagious haunting of the "grudge"—its locus the dwelling in which a horrific domestic tragedy occurred—spread via any contact with anyone who had visited that dwelling. Thus, the "grudge" essentially "infects" and spreads its infection, like a disease, far from the boundaries of its home base. The victims have no idea what is happening to them, or why, because they've done nothing to bring destruction upon themselves: it arrives, unbidden, and many die (terribly) having not even the vaguest notion why what is happening to them is happening. They visited no haunted place; they transgressed against no supernatural force; they saw nothing to initiate the supernatural manifestations that plague them; there is no rational reason for their suffering. This conflation of ghosts/hauntings with the slow-spread epidemic nature of diseases is the current pathology, if you will, of the contemporary ghost story: now, one need not even do anything to become "haunted," and in turn become a "haunt" once you are dead, further spreading the contagion. That's where we are now, with ghosts and hauntings and curses and contagions—and it's pretty scary stuff.
But Joseph A. Citro had already taken it much, much further, back in 1994—and that's the import and impact of Joe's entry in this apocalyptic strain of "haunts," wherein the "haunts" may manifest locally, but (to paraphrase the venerable activist handbook) act globally. One need do nothing to become a target; one need not go anywhere special to encounter a haunt. A walk in the very woods one has walked all one's life is all it takes—the haunt, the doorway, the pathogen will come to you. Oh, whistle, and it'll come to you—or don't whistle. It no longer matters. Come, it will, and come, it does. Can you see it? Can it see you?
DEUS-X is not a ghost story. But it's important we understand why it is part of a changing spectral landscape, and as such, a major landmark in that landscape.
Let us conclude by noting that there are, in and about us, "bad places." If you visit a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, you may see "bad things."
I hope you understand. If you don't now, you soon will. It's like the videocassette in The Ring: once seen, it can never be unseen. Once read, DEUS-X cannot be unread.
As I told you, Joe has never written a ghost novel. But DEUS-X is a novel of haunts, and horrors, of seeing that which one wishes one had not seen; and of thus being seen. It is a tale of experiencing that which one wishes one had not experienced; of enduring that which one wishes one never had endured; and it is a haunted novel—cursed, as Joe himself puts it.
And now, the haunt embraces and includes you.
So, like I said,
you don't even have to do anything any longer. The "haunt," if you will, has already begun.
It began when Joe conceived of DEUS-X. It began to spread in 1994, when DEUS-X was first published. It spread further, again, when it was reprinted in 2002. It spread further the second you bought this e-book. I began by telling you I had a stake in this book—now you do, too. We all have a stake in this book, whether we know it or not.
It's already happening, with or without you seeing it, with or without you knowing it—with or without you, period.
Since it no longer matters whether you're in "a good place" or "a bad place," so go ahead—get yourself situated in a good place. You might as well begin reading in a comfort zone, even if you are already tainted, for no rational reason. You're tainted whether you've done anything or do anything, or not.
What begins with apparently unrelated, localized events spread over a wider geography than any prior Citro novel proves to be—
Well, now you know.
This, you see, is the "realer than real" curse of DEUS-X:
X no longer marks the spot.
There is no "spot."
There is only X—
—and here it is.
Stephen R. Bissette, Mountains of Madness, VT
February 2012
The Reality Conspiracy Page 49