by Michael Rowe
In a film of In October, could Mikey be genderqueer? he asked. Could Wroxy perhaps be bi?
My answer, which came with surprising relief on my part, was, Yes, absolutely they could be.
They could easily have been all those things in my original written version, and likely might have been if I had been writing In October today, for a 2017 audience, and if I’d had the nuanced language of queer culture available to me then that I do now. Every character written by a writer shares at least a trace of that writer’s DNA, perhaps even that writer’s history.
Wroxy and Mikey were no exception to that rule. In a way, they were as constrained by the sociopolitical nomenclature of the times in which they were written as they were by the fascist high school politics of the era, or the dictates of Mikey’s mother’s church, or the dark witchcraft he employs to exact his revenge in a Faustian bargain for safety and love that ultimately destroys both of them. We had words like “gay” and “lesbian” and “bisexual” and “transsexual.” Words like “transgender” or “genderqueer” or “gender fluid,” or even “queer”—in the modern LGBTQIA sense of the term it has now become—were still years off from being accessible to a mainstream audience.
And that’s the one thing that would not have changed—the notion that a young person can be so broken by the cruelty of his or her tormentors, including their parents, that his or her moral core is ultimately shattered. I wonder about this every time I hear about violence perpetrated by an outcast teenager, or yet another tragic suicide. It’s not about “weakness,” as it’s sometimes cruelly dismissed. It’s about the notion that some good people can only bend so far before they snap.
After my conversation with the young filmmaker, I revised my ill-conceived plan of including In October in a future story collection. I approached my publisher, Sandra Kasturi, about releasing it as a standalone eBook from ChiZine Publications, retitled October.
Because technology is as capricious a mistress as the social mores that have changed more swiftly in the last decade and a half than they have at any other time in recent history, I found myself with an onerous task—since, as I’ve mentioned, the original publisher was out of business, and the manuscript of In October had been written on a floppy disk in an obsolete computer program (and I had absolutely no idea where the floppy disk was anyway) I decided to eschew scanning the actual book pages and retype the almost fifty-thousand-word manuscript from scratch, which my kind friends and colleagues stopped short of reminding me was a bit idiotic.
But I had my reasons.
In addition to minor revisions to the text and giving it that “one last pass” from a gifted editor that it never had in 2005, I wanted to re-inhabit the world of Mikey and Wroxy and Auburn myself, from the inside, and bring it back to life for me as vividly as it was when I first conceived it.
If nothing else, I dearly hope that the story, including the actions, reactions, and choices made by Mikey and Wroxy, and the people around them, serves as a reminder of the fact that whatever all our differences might be, they’re trumped by the things we have in common—hope, dreams, terrors, a need to feel safe, a desire to love and be loved.
I’d like to think that the current “author-preferred edition” is not only the version I had always wanted for the story, but also a more accessible version that is more in line with my novels Enter, Night and Wild Fell which exist in a world where horror, like life, encompasses people of all genders and orientations.
You, the reader, will be the ultimate judge of how well I’ve succeeded.
David Thomas Lord, whose real name was John Sumakis, died in 2016.
In the years since our first professional contact, our friendship had grown into a mutually supportive, much-treasured one—a friendship with a writer, and a man, of profound kindness and generosity. In his final years he was wracked with pain, but even in the midst of the worst of it, he extended himself far beyond what would ever have been expected of someone in his condition, and he did so without complaint. One of the most tragic aspects of his passing was how many stories he had left to tell and how many books he had left to write. Our field is lessened by the absence of his voice. While I would much rather have him at the other end of the phone, or in my email in-box in the morning, I confess there is a profound sense of rightness in being able to add his name as a dedicatee to the current edition.
Aside from everything else, John Sumakis was, in every sense, the true godfather of October.
Michael Rowe
Toronto, Ontario
July 2017