October

by Michael Rowe

  I would die for love. Yes, I would die for it.

  I would kill for it.

  Afterword:

  The Road Home to Auburn—On the Writing of October

  If you want to know how October came about, you’re going to have to bear with me for a bit. The story of how it happened is circuitous, and it starts in 1987. It’s a writer’s story. It’s not in any way essential to understanding anything about Mikey, or Wroxy, or Auburn, or the witches, or even the era in which October is set, though all of those things come into play. You could skip it entirely and be none the poorer.

  But if you’re interested in how stories come out, specifically how this one came about, I’ll tell you.

  The world in which October is set—a pre-millennial, 1990s world of dial-up computers, pay phones, phone books, and bright yellow Sony Discmans—is very different from the world in which it is being read in the current edition from the CZPeBook imprint, which is being published in the autumn of 2017.

  I wrote an early version of this story in late 2005 and early 2006 at the behest of novelist David Thomas Lord, who had struck a deal with a small LGBT publisher to develop a triad anthology of gay-themed Halloween novellas. The only other requisite theme was seasonal. In terms of story, we were entirely free to roam wherever we chose. There were to be no restrictions as to plot, character, or anything else, as long as the novellas encompassed some aspect of the gay experience in the horror realm, and were set during the Halloween season.

  So I decided to go “home” with my novella, then titled In October.

  In the summer of 1987, when I was twenty-five, my husband Brian and I sold our house in Toronto and moved to a small town fifty-seven kilometers west of Toronto called Milton. The move inadvertently set into motion an adventure that would have a life-changing effect on me as a writer, as well as give me a human gift that I never expected to receive.

  Earlier that spring, Brian’s mother, who lived in Guelph, farther west up the highway, had suffered a stroke. Her husband, Brian’s father, was bereft. For a week, it was touch and go as to whether or not her condition would deteriorate. We were told that another stroke would likely kill her. Brian and I had checked into a hotel, spending the days with her at the hospital, or tending to his father’s grief and terror at possibly losing the love of his life. At the end of the week, we were ragged—nerves worn to the nub, eyes red-rimmed from tears and lack of sleep.

  And yet, miraculously, as the week progressed, she began to improve. She’d lost the ability to speak clearly, but her wryness and sense of humour had returned. We exhaled the emotional breath we felt we had been holding for five days and began to breathe again.

  That afternoon we decided to take a leisurely drive back to Toronto this time, as opposed to rushing back home along the same highway we’d taken, in the opposite direction, that terrible night when the call had come through about her stroke. Travelling along back roads and smaller highways, we came to the town of Milton, a blip on the highway we’d passed dozens of times on the way from Toronto to Guelph.

  As we drove down Martin Street, one of the town’s main tributaries to Highway 401, we saw an Open House/For Sale sign in front of a stately red-brick Victorian, set back from the sidewalk on a glorious green lawn bordered with flowerbeds.

  Partly because we were kicky from exhaustion, and partly because Brian and I love adventures, we decided to explore the house.

  In Toronto we lived in a sleek townhouse in a trendy neighbourhood that embodied a particular type of 1980s-specific chic. I was young, newly married—in an era when gay marriage was not remotely part of the cultural language, nor was it possible to imagine that it ever would be—and was beginning to make a career for myself as a magazine writer while Brian established his medical practice.

  And yet, in spite of all the reasons I should have loved our house, and the city in which we lived, it felt like it belonged in someone else’s life, not mine.

  The 1980s were all about hard edges and smooth, hyper-modern anodized surfaces. My persistent yearning was for corners, nooks, and cubbyholes. I craved patina, not gloss, and not only in houses. I craved it in people, and I craved it in my own life and work. In later years I would come to appreciate the detachment and paradoxical privacy that can come from living in a large city, but at twenty-five I craved a more intimate connection to a smaller, more immediate community.

  Furthermore, Toronto was not my hometown: I had moved to the city in 1982 to attend college, and it’s where I’d met Brian and started my professional life. Prior to that I had lived briefly in Paris, where I worked a fashion model after graduating from a boarding school outside a small city in western Canada, which was also not my home. My hometown, Ottawa, was a place where my family lived in between my father’s diplomatic postings abroad, so while it was technically my hometown, it felt more like a beloved vacation destination of which I had fond memories.

  And suddenly, stepping out of the car and inhaling the sweet scent of fresh-cut grass, lilacs, and spring earth from the farmer’s fields beyond a town I had never visited before, I felt at home for the first time in my adult life.

  The house was a restored 19th-century red-brick affair with a spacious living room, a stately, separate dining room, a family room with a studio above it. There were two bedrooms in the main wing, one of which I thought would make a splendid office. The house sat on a quarter acre of land, with a beautiful backyard full of flowers. Both of us felt an utter coup de foudre as we wandered through the house. The scent of the wood, warmed by the afternoon sun, was intoxicating.

  Love is often illogical, and we were in the full throes of love with the house I had already begun thinking of as “our house.” We put a conditional offer on it—for a fraction of what we had paid for our Toronto house—and the offer was promptly accepted. As soon as the Toronto house sold, which it did, quickly, the Milton property was ours.

  In the next few years, I found the home I had been looking for during my young but nonetheless relentlessly peripatetic life.

  That first year I set up my writing room in the loft that the previous owners had built as a quilting studio, but in spite of the high ceilings and impossibly perfect sunlight, I felt lost in the size of it and eventually installed myself in a small, cozy, book-lined room under the eaves at the top of the house.

  The local newspaper, The Canadian Champion, took me on as a freelancer, allowing me to explore Milton and its people in the way I knew best—by talking to them, interviewing them, and writing about them.

  I wrote a prize-winning feature profile of a local young police officer working the night shift in a small town. I followed the production of Oklahoma! at E.C. Drury High School over the course of several weeks leading up to the performances. I fell so deeply in love with the young actors and their work that I brought in a well-known fashion photographer from Toronto to shoot the portraits that accompanied the feature—an aspect of my process that was not appreciated by the photography department of the Champion.

  I wrote about the town in any different way I could spin an angle, with the full support of my editor. In this age of diminished print media, it seems a surreal gift to have ever had that chance. My magazine career had continued to flourish and had become lucrative, but I never turned down the pittance the newspaper offered me for another chance to chronicle the life and times of my town.

  Writing about the town led to connections, to friendships, to a sense of belonging. As a chronicler of small-town life, I had a role that was time-honoured and welcomed. More importantly, I was allowing myself to plot a literal personal geography, which would eventually form the basis of a literary geography.

  In 1990, I read Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour. As a reader, I was enthralled by the lushness of it, the rich historical detail, and the glorious descriptions, particularly of the Mayfair house in the Garden District of New Orleans. As a writer, I was intrigued to learn that Rice had used her own house as the model for t
he Mayfair house.

  In the summer of 1992, at twenty-nine, I signed up for the summer session at Harvard to take two creative writing courses—one, a fairly conventional literary fiction course, the other a course in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, taught by the esteemed editor, critic, and anthologist, Kathryn Cramer.

  I would be thirty in September, and I needed some answers from myself about my intentions for my own future as a writer, the direction I wished my career to take, and how to make that happen.

  I moved into Adams House for eight weeks with my word processor. On my second day there, I went to a local barber in Cambridge and asked him to give me as close a crop as he could without actually shaving my head. The gesture was symbolic as well as practical—the summer of 1992 in Cambridge was breathtakingly hot and humid, and if there was air-conditioning in the dorm, I barely noticed it.

  The haircut also served the purpose of making me look nothing like myself. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a tabula rasa. The person in the glass had no history. He could be anyone. No one had ever told this person that he was a wonderful non-fiction writer and that he should probably work on that and leave fiction to the fiction writers—no one, frankly, including himself.

  No one would say, “This is interesting, but we know you. This isn’t you.”

  For eight weeks, the person in the mirror could reinvent himself and reimagine himself into any future he chose through sheer force of will and imagination, bringing everything he’d experienced to bear, including that precious newfound personal geography, and hopefully emerge as his own definition of a writer.

  In Kathryn Cramer’s class, exploring my version of the locational technique Anne Rice had employed in The Witching Hour,I wrote the first draft of a short horror story set in Milton, in our house on Martin Street.

  The story, “Wild Things Live There,” is about a young boy’s terrifying encounter with an entity that disguises itself as an old woman named Mrs. Winfield, but which is, in actual fact, a member of a race of ageless, carnivorous trolls that make their homes wherever there are hills and caves. In the case of “Wild Things Live There,” the rocky landscape is not only Milton itself, but also the Niagara Escarpment framing it.

  In Cambridge, Massachusetts, five hundred miles away, the town and its people were vivid to me in a way that they never were when I was home.

  The story would eventually be published in 1994 in Northern Frights 3, the third installment of Don Hutchison’s World Fantasy Award-nominated anthology series of Canadian horror fiction.

  By that time, Brian and I had left Milton and were again living in Toronto. The distance only served to sharpen and burnish the clarity of my memories of the time. Two more “Milton stories” were published in 1997: a werewolf story titled “Red Mischief” in Northern Frights 4,and a vampire story titled “The Dead of Winter” in Brothers of the Night, an anthology of gay vampire fiction I co-edited with Thomas S. Roche.

  All three of these stories would be obliquely referred to in In October as part of the small town legends of the region.

  By the time David Lord and I first talked about the novella anthology in 2005, I had already edited or co-edited four volumes of gay horror fiction myself, including two gay vampire anthologies with Thomas S. Roche. I’d also published a book of interviews with erotica writers on the topic of censorship, pornography, and popular culture, and a book of social and political essays. I was also the first-tier Canadian correspondent for Fangoria, and I had begun my tenure with The Advocate, the legendary LGBT news magazine for whom I would eventually write seven cover stories.

  But during all that time, I hadn’t written much fiction of my own, so the invitation to essay my first long-form fiction for this anthology was as flattering as it was daunting.

  Still, the chance to bring together the disparate elements of my career and obsessions—horror fiction, social issues, and gay rights issues—was professionally irresistible. While one or two anthologies of gay “erotic horror” had been previously published, my anthologies Queer Fear and Queer Fear 2 had been the first-ever pure gay horror fiction anthologies. Clive Barker hailed them as changing the face of horror fiction. We’d broken the ground, but I had participated in that groundbreaking as a curator, not as a storyteller.

  With In October, I would finally be able to throw my hat in the ring.

  The genesis of the novella was, of course, bullying. Today it’s recognized as the pernicious, destructive force that it is, but at the time I was growing up (and even into the 1990s, when the story is set) it was considered to be a rite of passage, particularly for boys. For gay boys, particularly femme gay boys, it was the price we paid for not being able to be anything but who we were.

  During my first year in Milton, someone to whom I was not “out” had told me an off-the-cuff story about a gay man who had been beaten to a pulp outside one of the roadhouses on the outskirts of the town. Though possibly apocryphal, the story was delivered in such a deadpan, matter-of-fact tone that it chilled me. We lived across the street from a Catholic church that put up crosses on its lawn every Mother’s Day in memory of “the babies murdered by abortion,” and left the gruesome mock graveyard up until Father’s Day. Milton was also the home of a rabidly homophobic preacher with political ambitions and a growing platform.

  From the vantage point of thirty years, it seems surreal to imagine how easily we took for granted that this sort of ugliness could co-exist in a beautiful small town with so many genuinely kind and loving people in it, and that I could make a life there, but that was where the world was in 1987, even in Canada.

  Another story I heard, this time from a group of teenagers at the Golden Griddle restaurant in the Milton Mall in 1989, detailed the apparent existence of some sort of coven of witches that had been spotted on occasion on the outskirts of town. I suspected this was a classic exurban legend, but I was entranced nonetheless. On the other hand, there was no serious talk of black magic or Satan worship, and in fact there was an absence of the sort of lurid detail that usually accompanies this sort of small-town story, which lent it some possible credence. In any case, I made a mental note and filed it away.

  The town of Auburn, if it existed anywhere but in my imagination, would be geographically situated between Milton and the neighbouring town of Campbellville. I had first used Auburn in “Wild Things Live There,” and had given it many of the attributes of Milton, with a few embellishments. All that was left, in the writing of In October was to bring them all together.

  The eventual result was the story you just read, about Mikey and Wroxy, the witches of Auburn and, of course, Adrian. In Wroxy I celebrated the friendships that many gay boys have with edgy straight girls who are often outcasts themselves.

  I was once asked, during the Q&A session after a public reading of this story, if I “hated” Milton, or if I regretted having lived in a small town as an adult gay man who could have lived anywhere else, and if that was the reason I set horror stories there. The question struck me as absurd, but I could see where someone blessed with an uncomplicated imagination could draw that conclusion.

  In fact, I replied, the answer was quite the opposite.

  I loved Milton. I loved living there, and I loved being a part of it in its last iteration as an authentic small Ontario town before the suburban creep turned it into just another bedroom community for Toronto.

  These horror stories are love letters from a horror writer. The beauty of my former hometown is as lovingly rendered as I could manage within the limitations of my talent, and there are flashes, here and there, of people I’ve loved. Each of the stories is a grouping of mental photographs of a vanished time, carefully placed in an album of words. The novelist Jane Rule once wrote that she had one audience in mind when she wrote—herself, decades later.

  In a way, I suppose, I’ve unconsciously followed Rule’s lead with these stories, because they take me back to those years with a clarity that is personally shocking. A
nd the people who populate these stories were, and are, as real to me as people I’ve actually known.

  In the summer of 2017 I was approached by a young filmmaker from Los Angeles about the possibility of optioning In October as a feature. I was already a massive fan of his edgy, queer-themed short horror films, which were a marriage of technical filmmaking expertise, a brilliant, beautiful vision, and a sophisticated horror aesthetic that spoke to me from the first frame of the first film of his I’d seen.

  His inquiry about In October surprised and delighted me.

  The original anthology was long out of print, and seemed very much of its time. I was flattered that it had caught his attention. It had also always seemed to be the most unfilmable of all my books. Too, after a gruesome battle with the company charged with handling the post-mortem affairs of the original publisher, which was now out of business, the rights to In October had reverted to me in 2015.

  I’d made vague plans to have In October anchor a collection of my short horror fiction at some point, but my publisher gently pointed out that, at more than fifty thousand words, the possibility of that anchor thematically sinking the entire ship was something worth considering. In October, for better or for worse, had always been a novel, not a novella.

  Speaking to the young filmmaker, however, I was able to see that while In October was, in his words, “a bit dated,” its central theme—the homicidal effects of bullying on LGBT children—was more relevant in 2017 than it had been when I wrote the story. The cultural discussion around bullying has reached an unprecedented level of mainstream currency. In addition, as a society we have moved past the binary “gay and lesbian” conversation to encompass an umbrella of variations on queerness that are now as likely to be reached for by many kids as they are by adults.