Writing Archives - The Occult Triangle Lab

August 3, 2019December 22, 2019

Making ‘Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim’, Part 2: Narrative

Welcome back to my ongoing series of posts on my game demo project “Black Heaven: a Necromantic Dating Sim”!

If you haven’t read part Part 1, go read that first, you animal.

BlackHeavenLogoWhite Blog Crop — Logo design by Joel Clapp.

This time, I’m talking about narrative—outlining the story, figuring out the characters, and writing the opening scene. Because Black Heaven is just a demo at this stage, there are only four scenes, each of which introduces the player to one of the key characters: the necromancer No-Eyes, the scholar Ru Okazi, the martial arts master Izagi Ito, and the conwoman Leathe. Still, putting together the demo meant having a general outline of the plot for the entire game, as well as in-depth outlines for the characters.

Plot and Setting

The first step in creating the game’s narrative was brainstorming the plot. After a few iterations on the general idea of collecting ghosts for a necromancer in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, I came up with this summary:

Five years ago, a devastating plague spread across the world, driving humanity into the long-abandoned subterranean ruins known as the Starving Kingdoms. As one of the few survivors, you’ve been living a lonely existence, haunted by memories of the world you knew…until a necromancer named No-Eyes offers you a deal: if you bring him the ghosts of three people, he will bind one of them to you for eternity. However, the others will be trapped in his grimoire forever.

This summary was eventually adapted into the game’s overall description, but first and foremost it was a clear, concise encapsulation of the game’s setting, plot and conflict. I split it into four parts:

Setting: post-apocalyptic fantasy world ravaged by a plague
Plot:
- Desire: your character is lonely, and desires companionship
- Solution: you make a deal with a necromancer to obtain a ghost companion
Conflict A: you must find and capture the ghosts, as well as convince one to become your companion
Conflict B: if you fulfill your end of the deal, the other ghosts you collect will be doomed

Apart from the expected challenge of romancing one of the ghosts (Conflict A), I wanted there to be another conflict for the player to deal with, which was a moral dilemma that asked whether the player would sacrifice the souls of the other two ghosts they didn’t choose to romance (Conflict B). The moral implications of Conflict B eventually developed into a third secret, conflict, which I won’t go into detail here…

Setting

As for setting, I drew strong inspiration from the landscapes and worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne (the latter of which is also afflicted by a rampant plague). I liked the idea of exploring the ruins of a dark, subterranean city, and decided to set the game partly underground.

When it came to the worldbuilding aspects of the game, such as magic, metaphysics, and history, I drew on my own body of stories. One of the key elements I incorporated was “physiomancy,” the study of the human body with the goal of discovering a path to eternal life. The main character used to be a physiomancer, as were No-Eyes and Ru, and the study of immortality is woven into the origin of the plague that swept through the world.

Here are some of the visual references I used when imagining the world of the game (all are from the Dark Souls series or Bloodborne):

Characters

The first and most important character I figured out for the story was No-Eyes—he’s the primary “antagonist” and the person who gets the plot going. The player meets him while scavenging in a subterranean library, an encounter that serves as the intro to the game.

I decided to use a character profile format I’d picked up when I was interviewing at Gameloft, which included an occupation, personality, and key words. Here’s what No-Eyes’ character profile looked like:

NO-EYES

20190616_222553 — A sketch I made of No-Eyes.

Key Appearance Traits: close-fitting black robes, smooth, eyeless helmet, gloves, no exposed skin, tall, emaciated

Occupation: Necromancer

Personality: No-Eyes is irreverent, outgoing, charismatic, highly intelligent, cynical, and entirely without morals. He sees other humans as amusements or puppets, and is highly adept at twisting them to his own ends.

Key words: relaxed, conniving, cruel, humorous

The other character profiles followed this same format—you can read all of them in the Art Brief.

One of the things I learned during my creative writing courses is to set up “trios” of characters: trios allow a writer to flesh out characters by making their traits opposed to one another, which “bakes in” the potential for conflict and tension. For the demo, I decided to introduce a distinct trio of potential romance interests:

Ru, the shy scholar
Izagi, the fierce martial artist
Leathe, the shrewd conwoman

Each of these characters was designed to be easily and intuitively understood, but with a few hidden dimensions unique to each, which would come into play in their horror forms and relationships with the player.

Of course, there’s already an avalanche of articles, charts, and memes exploring the very well-established archetypes of female romantic interests in anime, like this one:

I’m not a huge fan of this kind of pigeonholing, but I do understand that most characters end up falling into archetypes. Ru, for example, resembles Yuri from DDLC: shy, bookish girl who’s nervous around other people. No-Eyes resembles an archetypal Mephistopheles or “manipulative bastard.”

If Joseph Campbell has taught me anything, it’s that archetypes are a part of writing. It’s not a bad thing that a character is recognizable or familiar, but a writer needs to make their own mark on them to make them unique.

Working with Archetpyes and Creating Complex Characters

After thinking about conversation trees and how I would structure player interactions with the characters, I decided to take inspiration from Mass Effect‘s Paragon and Renegade elements. However, instead of a dichotomous ‘hero’ or ‘rogue’ option for each conversation, I created a three-option system, where each choice falls into one of the following attitudes and appeals to certain characters:

Gentle (associated with Ru)
Bold (associated with Izagi)
Cunning (associated with Leathe and No-Eyes)

The more the player chooses a certain type of option (such as “Gentle”), the higher the disposition of the corresponding characters. However, though Izagi responds positively to the Bold options because her character’s ‘archetype’ is fierce and brash, her personality is more complicated than that.

One key idea I took from my writing courses is that complex, believable characters are built on contradictions. When I was designing the character of Leathe, for example, I wanted her to take pride in her ability to manipulate people, emotionally and physically—as a conwoman, she sees it as part of her craft, as well as proof that she’s smarter than other people. The contradiction is this: Leathe ends up getting tired of pretending to be someone she’s not, but is too afraid of expressing herself genuinely, which is something she associates with vulnerability.

These contradictions are present in each character, and end up branching out into smaller traits that define the character’s personality. If you want to read more about how this kind of characterization is employed in games, check out my piece on Mass Effect 2‘s infamous fight between Jack and Miranda.

Planning the Introduction Scene

Before writing out the introductory scene for the game, I made a list of the things I needed to introduce or establish:

The main character’s connection to the character Ru (a former friend)
The main character’s previous occupation as a physiomantic scholar
The plague that effectively wiped out civilization
Ru’s death
The subterranean setting
The way the player survives in the post-plague world (a filter mask)
The player’s current location (the Library of Gizaron)
The character of No-Eyes (including his background)
The three conversation options/paths (Gentle, Bold, and Cunning)
The deal between No-Eyes and the player
Information about the ghost characters
The beginning of the player’s quest

I decided to start with a horror-tinged dream sequence that introduced the plague and the player’s former relationship with Ru. Dream sequences aren’t exactly original, but done right, they can be surreal and horrifying, especially if the player isn’t sure if it’s the real opening of the game.

The dream is interrupted by an immediate threat: the player’s filter mask is clogged with ash and dust, suffocating them. From there, there’s some exposition and the player gets a chance to relax and take in the setting. Immediately after that, they encounter No-Eyes, who hasn’t seen them yet. The player must make a choice about how to approach him, which leads to the introduction to the three-path conversation system.

Outlining the Scene in Twine

When I first started the Twine outline for Black Heaven, I wanted it to be as complex and non-linear as possible in order to give the player a lot of agency. Each of the little squares below represents a text passage, and each of the lines connecting them represents a connection between two different passages, with an arrow showing which direction the narrative is flowing. Depending on the choices a player makes, their narrative path will be different.

As you can see, the map below has a pretty small number of text passages, but has a whole lot of connections:

Here’s a closer view of the story map, which shows how complicated and multidirectional the narrative can get. You’ll also notice that a big branch in the narrative happens at one passage: “Get Up Intro”. This was meant to be one of the key choice moments in the scene, and would cause the player to branch into one of the three routes based on how they handled the initial meeting with No-Eyes.

Unfortunately, this structure caused some pretty significant problems. Because the conversation could go so many different ways (and even cross over into different ‘routes’), each passage in the narrative had to be somewhat modular so it could fit together in many possible combinations. Though this modularity meant the player could get to the same place through multiple routes, it also meant the flow of the interactions between No-Eyes and the player came across as abrupt and choppy.

This caused a realization: the more player choice you allow, the less control you have over the unified effect of the narrative. It’s much more manageable (and impactful) if choices are restricted to a few key moments, rather than try to offer a hundred ultimately minor options that sacrifice quality for the illusion of freedom.

After a few revisions, the story map looked like this:

Notice how clearly defined the three routes are (top, middle, and bottom, joining together about halfway to the right), how many fewer lines cross between the routes, and how few lines there are in general. Though “linear storytelling” is usually a dirty word among gamers, writing this short scene showed me that it’s especially useful in the beginning of a game, when the writer is trying to establish the setting, characters, and situation. Here’s a closer look at the story map:

Conclusion to Part 2:

Like with Part 1, this covers a very small part of the work that went into the narrative aspect of the game—instead of diving into the minutiae, I’ve tried to hit the highlights and big ideas.

In Part 3, I’m going to cover my first interactions with the Ren’Py engine, including learning how to use Python and set up a scene.

You can play through the Introduction scene for “Black Heaven” on itch.io using Twine now! Keep in mind, it’s still a work-in-progress.

July 29, 2019January 31, 2021

Making ‘Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim’, Part 1: Concept

I haven’t finished a novel in at least two years. It’s a pretty shameful thing for someone with a degree in Creative Writing. It’s even more shameful for someone who originally wanted to work in book publishing. Instead, I’ve been playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club, Katawa Shoujo, VA-11 Hall A, and Mass Effect (among others).

I’ve written articles about the characters and narratives in those games, and after a long gestation period in my head, I decided to put together my own game. Or at least a demo of it.

That game is Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim. So far, it’s been one of the most rewarding and challenging projects I’ve worked on, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with people once it’s complete. This series of articles is gonna talk about what it’s like putting it all together, from concept to (hopefully) final demo.

A Story of Two FAN Letters

I don’t think that any creative person ever stops being a giant fanboy (or girl) for the people that inspired them, no matter how experienced or acclaimed they become. So I wanted to start off by talking about two fan letters I wrote to the creators of two games that really shaped this project.

A big part of my drive to create a visual novel game came from playing Doki Doki Literature Club, which won over fans and critics despite being one of the most disturbing, twisted games in recent memory. After I finished my first playthrough, I opened up a window in Gmail and wrote Dan Salvato a letter. Here’s an excerpt:

…I wanted to send you a letter saying how much…I’m not sure. It’s a terrible thing to say I “loved” a game about girls committing suicide. To be honest, I felt sick playing it–it felt like it was slowly picking apart my sanity in ways I believed nothing could…

When I was done, I felt like I was looking at the whole world in a new light. For me, DDLC reignited my passion for storytelling, for games, and for creating elaborate fantasy worlds where, as Yuri might say, you can lose yourself.

You can read my full thoughts on DDLC here, but that game wasn’t the only one that really inspired me.

As the internet legend goes, Katawa Shoujo started as a joke on 4chan that progressively became more and more serious. Forum members started pitching ideas for a dating sim, which ranged from disgusting to surprisingly thoughtful. Some committed posters got together and assembled the game in Ren’py, a free visual novel engine.

The game’s story revolves around the male protagonist’s transfer to a high school for handicapped youth after he suffers a heart attack, and from there, becomes an exploration of vulnerability, honesty, and empathy. After my first playthrough (Hanako’s Path), I wrote another letter, to one of the writers behind the game. Here’s an excerpt:

“…every now and then, I come across something that illuminate my life, whether it’s a song or a conversation with a friend. Katawa Shoujo was one of those things, and I’m so thankful that it exists. I hope that one day I can write something so well-crafted and devastatingly honest.”

What was so striking about these games was how engaging they were, despite having very limited animation and relatively little player interaction. Instead, the strength of the writing had to carry the game. As a writer myself, I wanted to create something that evoked the same feelings I had while playing these games.

Brainstorming Black Heaven

I’m a big fan of necromancers. I wrote a whole post about designing a terrifying helmet for my necromancer character No-Eyes, who appears in this game. I also published a standalone short story about No-Eyes in the professional fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’m fascinated by immortality, forbidden arts, and riding the line between being human and…something else. Horror really hooks me, and I wanted to weave that into the game.

joel culaith helmet sketch oroboro — Concept art for No-Eyes’ helmet, by Joel Clapp

I’m also a big fan of worldbuilding, to the point that nearly everything I write or create takes place in the same world. So when it came time to lay the groundwork for Black Heaven, I decided to set it in my shared world. Because of my love of DDLC and Katawa Shoujo, I decided to make the game a dating sim, but with a necromantic twist: you’d be romancing ghosts.

One of the guiding ideas of ghosts in my stories is that they’re shattered mirrors of who they used to be–the memories, traumas, and desires of their past warp and twist their mind, and their memories become muddled. This added an interesting dimension to the ghost characters: instead of just building a relationship with a ghost, you’d need to learn more about their past and psychology.

After several iterations on that theme, I came up with the central conflict: your character makes a deal with the necromancer No-Eyes to collect a list of ghosts from across a post-apocalyptic landscape and bring them to him. In return, you get to keep a ghost as a companion. However, as the game goes on, you realize that turning any of the ghosts over to No-Eyes may mean condemning them to an eternity of torment…

Laying the Groundwork

As soon as I had the central kernel of the plot and some rough sketches of where I wanted it to go, I started thinking about the project as a whole: what would the final product look like? How would it be framed to potential players? What would the guidelines be for the art? And what would be the game’s “pitch”?

The original draft of the Black Heaven logo, made in MS Paint.

I came up with a proposal document, written and outlined so that I could show it to possible collaborators to give them a quick, effective summary of the project. Mostly, though, it was meant to be an internal reference document: I’ve found that pretending to explain a project to a complete stranger can quickly solidify what the project is and what it should be, and the proposal did that. In essence, the doc galvanized the specifics of the game and gave me a clearer picture of what needed to be done.

In addition to the game’s description, I listed the art assets I needed for the project (such as character and background art), narrative content, character profiles, and marketing materials (such as a logo and cover art).

You can read the proposal here.

The proposal became my guide for the rest of the project, but I realized I needed to create separate docs to start outlining and designing the characters.

Character Profiles and the Art Brief

You can see the Art Brief for the demo (which includes Character Profiles) here.

I decided to sit down and sketch out backstories for each of the characters, covering their history, personalities, and key experiences, as well as their deaths. I boiled down these backstories into very short, succinct profiles for each of the characters, which listed key traits, physical descriptions, and a summary of their personality. After that, I found reference photos from real-life models to help get a clearer picture of their appearance and assist the artist in drawing character art.

A reference photo for Ru Okazi, one of the characters.

Visual novels live or die based on their art and visuals, I wanted to make sure the art brief clearly expressed what I was going for. In the brief, I give some samples of the type of art style I envisioned for the game, as well as samples of character art from Katawa Shoujo. I also outlined how I wanted the concept art and design process to work.

Because of the visual novel format, each character would need at least three “portraits,” each of which would express a different emotion: happy, neutral, or sad.

In addition to their normal forms, I decided to give each ghost a “horror form,” which must be dealt with before sealing the ghost in the player’s grimoire. The idea was that the player must see beneath the horror form to find the person underneath, and then appeal to their humanity to convince (or force) them to enter the grimoire. Each horror form had its own description and set of reference photos, which were meant to guide their design.

Horror forms were partly inspired by the monsters in Silent Hill, which were designed to be expressions of the protagonist’s suppressed thoughts and feelings. Another influence was my reading into the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which described the many layers of psychological hang-ups a soul must peel away before moving to its next reincarnated form.

Key Question: ARE WE JUST MAKING PORN?

I got in touch with Joel Clapp, an artist friend of mine, to discuss creating some of the concept art for the game. I sent him the art brief I’d put together, but soon after creating some sketches for me, he brought up an important and troubling question: how sexy should he draw them?

Screenshot from Bandai Namco’s “Girl Friend Beta: A Summer Spent with You “

This led to a conversation about the morality of dating sims in general and how comfortable we were with creating a game in a genre where women are explicitly treated as sex objects. Here’s an excerpt from my email response to Joel:

“From the beginning, I’d planned on Black Heaven being a subversion of your normal dating sim, but as you point out, just because Doki Doki Literature Club is a subversion doesn’t mean it doesn’t exploit sexuality to attract players and implicitly promise them sexy times to get them to play—the characters still have accentuated breasts and curves, which were designed to attract people.

This brings up two questions:

Are we making low-key porn and putting up fancy window dressing in the form of narrative and setting to disguise the fact that Black Heaven is essentially a sex doll house, where all the characters are designed to titillate and gratify the player?
If we’re not doing that, then are we being dishonest by calling the game a “dating sim” and marketing it like one?

In my mind, the answer to the first question is no. That’s not what attracts me about dating sims, and it’s not what I have planned. In my mind, this is gonna be a game about romance, but it’s not just gonna be about that—it’s about learning how to put yourself back together by helping others do the same, it’s about being honest with yourself and others, and it’s about choosing between your own selfish desires and what’s best for someone else. It’s not just a pretext for porn.

As to the second question, I think the answer is also no. Games like Katawa Shoujo prove that you can have a conventional dating sim, including sexuality and multiple romantic partners to choose from, and still tell a heart-wrenching story that does not boil down to you picking out a 2D sex doll. It is possible to creating a dating sim that uses romance and sexuality as part of a bigger, unified effect, and I think a lot of players are looking for something like that…

…I think, when designing these characters, we should stick to making them tastefully attractive, but with a greater focus on bring out their individual characters. It’s more important to make them memorable and distinct than making them sexy.”

Conclusion

This is a really short summary of the concept stage of the project, which went through a bunch of iterations and alterations. In Part 2, I’ll talk about the narrative design process, including drafting scenes and revising them in Twine.

You can read Part 2 here!

April 2, 2017April 2, 2017

Highlights from GIFCON 2017 and my trip to Scotland!

Hey, so you probably heard I was asked to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Conference on my 2015 project, The Rats in the Walls. The talk went great, and I’ll be publishing the full text soon, but in the meantime I wanted to give some of the high points of the trip.

First off, while walking around Glasgow, I could catch a few glimpses of the Glasgow Necropolis, which was awesome. I’d never seen a graveyard like it, and the ‘skyline’ of monuments on the hill made it look like a true city of the dead. The giant doors in the hillside were especially cool–they made me think of the gates of a city, leading into the earth.

Second, the actual Conference took place in Glasgow University’s chapel, which was beautiful. The University is over 550 years old, and a lot of the passages still feel more like a castle than a modern building. The presentations, including Phil Harris’ talks on worldbuilding and game design, Rob Maslen’s lecture on the book as a fantastical object, and Julie Bertagna’s speech about her YA fantasy series, Exodus, were fantastic.

Third, I ended up meeting some great people at the Conference, including professors, writers, and academics. It was great to hang out with fantasists, instead of having to expand the gathering to include the other SF genres, like sci-fi and horror. There’s a lot of things unique to fantasy, and for once I was able to talk with people who were familiar and excited by the ins and outs of fantasy worldbuilding without having to explain what it was or how it worked. Most surprising of all, I was surprised when I found out the University had recently christened a new Masters in Fantasy Literature program, and that many of the attendees were members.

Fantasy has been dismissed for decades as commercial, not ‘serious’ literature. Most people who get their writing degrees see a significant stigma attached to writing fantasy in a university setting, including the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, who I interviewed recently for Outer Places. It was good to see more attention and credit given to fantasy as a genre at Glasgow U. At the same time, I felt a bit uneasy when the time came to present papers: GIFCON did so much to accord itself with traditional academia, both in the topics that were presented (including a Marxist interpretation of Dark Souls) and the way people spoke about them. For example:

While listening to a presentation about using a psychoanalytical approach to the dreams and visions in Game of Thrones, the moderator asked the presenter if he had thought about alternate interpretations of the characters’ dreams, ones that didn’t fall in line with his thesis. The presenter responded that there were a lot of visions/dreams that didn’t match up, but he’d focused on the ones that did.

As someone who’s gone through a Bachelors Degree program and written a couple academic essays for Clarkesworld, I’ve slowly realized that academia, especially academic scholarship on literature, is primarily focused on viewing one tiny facet of a subject in one very specific light, then discrediting or ignoring anything else that contradicts it (or admitting the contradictions and claiming that you’re ‘grappling’ with a complex topic that defies even self-definition). I know I’ve been guilty of this–it’s hard to take a complex world and distill a consistent, meaningful pattern from it into writing, rather than just be selective about what you pay attention to and pretend that everything else falls in line. But that latter attitude encourages a very narrow view of any given topic, and the moment it’s presented outside of its very familiar (and tolerant) academic setting, it suddenly appears incredibly myopic and (sometimes) even indulgent.

The ‘indulgent’ element is especially galling. So much scholarship, when it gets down to it, seems to be initiated because the author thought it ‘interesting.’ Certain aspects or viewpoints on a topic are discarded because the author thought it would be ‘more interesting’ to explore what they wanted to write about. There’s also very little consideration for an audience outside other experts in the field, which means all this supposed knowledge will never reach anyone outside a small circle of people. These aren’t new concerns, but they are persistent, and it makes me wary about treading deeper into the academic sphere as a speaker or writer.

GIFCON was a great experience and I hope it grows over the coming years, but I hope that it takes a note from its popular audience and material and moves away from emulating contemporary academia. I don’t know. I’m certainly not advocating for anti-intellectualism, but at the same time, attending GIFCON and seeing fantasy taken ‘seriously’, it throws into sharp relief that there are deep problems in the way academia approaches knowledge and literature. Maybe there’s something to be said for being underground, unexamined, and mocked by the establishment–it means we don’t have to play by the rules.

P.S. The milk in Scotland is delicious, cheap, and plentiful. 10/10.

March 26, 2017

I’m Going to GIFCON This Week!

After a month of preparing, I’m heading to Scotland on Monday to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention on my Rats in the Walls project!

gifcon thumbs up

You can check out the details of the project here, and read an excerpt from my speech here. You can also check out the promo video Alex Sherman and I made for the project here.

Don’t forget about the Rats in the Walls, son!

February 5, 2017February 5, 2017

New Essay in Clarkesworld Magazine: “Frodo is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic”

I’ve said this before: magic should not be science. Magic can be systematic and internally consistent, but it shouldn’t be reduced to a human tool, like astronomy or chemistry. A lot of writers and worldbuilders don’t seem to understand the difference–didn’t Arthur C. Clarke famously say that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?”

But there is a difference. That’s what my new essay is about.

In this essay, titled “Frodo is Dead” I wanted to show how basing magic off of science, ration, and the Enlightenment philosophies that informed them inevitably leads to a breakdown of its fantasy world by turning it into a mirror of our world.

You can read the essay here on Clarkesworld!

January 29, 2017

I’m Going to Be a Speaker at Glasgow International Fantasy Convention!

Last month I saw a post on the SFWA website calling for papers and presentations for GIFCON, the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention, and decided to submit a presentation on my Rats in the Walls project. Now, I found out I’ve been accepted–I’m going to Scotland to be a speaker at the con (March 29th-30th)!

“The Rats in the Walls,” inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, was something I put together for the Twitter Fiction Festival, but it quickly became something bigger. It received some coverage by folks like The Dusty Rebel and ANIMAL New York, and it kept me sane while I was unemployed. Otherwise, I might have been up in a clock tower with a rifle rather than drawing chalk summoning circles.

kilroy union square rats walls

Here’s the abstract for the presentation:

The Rats in the Walls: Storytelling That Blurs History, Reality, and Fantasy

Two years ago, an anonymous figure in a white mask began appearing in Lower Manhattan, handing out cryptic messages and drawing occult diagrams in chalk. ‘Kilroy’, as the figure called himself, claimed to be the spokesperson for an enigmatic group called ‘THE RATS IN THE WALLS’, which was planning an apocalyptic event that would shake all of NYC. In reality, this was the beginning of a carefully planned, city-wide fictional narrative played out over two months and multiple mediums, including scavenger hunts, original video, and live performances.

“The Rats in the Walls” project incorporated elements of New York history, graffiti culture, and the work of H.P. Lovecraft to create an innovative, meta-textual storytelling experience that turned Lovecraft’s signature obsession with cosmic horror and local history into a narrative that blurred the boundaries between fantasy, reality, and urban legend. My presentation would take the form of a faux-journalistic account of the history of the Rats in the Walls, beginning with Lovecraft’s “Horror at Red Hook” (which will be treated as history) and ending with the fictional apocalyptic event Kilroy and the Rats brought about in 2015.

Along the way, the presentation will illustrate how the project incorporated elements of alternate reality games (ARGs), alternate history, worldbuilding, and metatextuality. The importance of live storytelling, the use of technology to create dynamic narratives, and the practical challenges and methods that come with allowing wide-scale audience participation will also be addressed.

October 30, 2016October 30, 2016

The Occult Triangle Lab Reading List Vol 4: The Mind of a Psychopath

This is Vol. 4 of the Occult Reading List, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week. Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties.

This is a special edition of the Reading List that deals with building a picture of a psychopathic mind. This is not the clinical definition of a psychopath, as defined by the DSM–this is the popular idea of a psychopath. I’m working on a new story that deals with a Mephistophelean character who’s a liar and master manipulator, and I wanted to delve into some material that could flesh out his mindset and worldview. I also asked my friend, Joel Clapp, to help compose a sketch of Yute based off the infamous photo of Charles Manson:

No one should romanticize real-life serial killers or cult leaders, but there’s something fascinating and deeply disturbing about delving into the mind of a psychopathic character. Trying to capture the essence of that sort of person ended up leading down interesting paths, especially ideas about the self, including Zen, Jungian archetypes, and German philosophy.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers

Reading the highlights of this book was like finding the Cliff’s Notes for American Psycho. Written in 1998 after observing the behavior of Hollywood’s power elite, the book is a apparently a big hit among celebrities, prison inmates, and corporate Machiavellian types, the kind that read The Art of War in order to get an edge in the boardroom. Some of the laws include things like “Court Attention at all Cost”, “Keep Others in Suspended Terror”, “Think as you like but Behave like others”, and the best one of all, “Assume Formlessness”.

Despite supposedly being a guide to the laws of power, the central tenets of the book revolve around the idea that appearances, not substance, are what really matter. You are who you appear to be, and your reputation is the most important thing you have. It really is a new Machiavellian handbook, and the worldview it espouses closely resembles nightmarish, uber-wealthyworld that Patrick Bateman inhabits in American Psycho.

Patrick Bateman is going to be an ongoing touchpoint for the reading in this week’s list, and the video above gives a great interpretation of his fictional character. As for the character of Yute, The 48 Laws of Power offers the bedrock for a master manipulator’s view of the world and his relationship to the world: everything is illusions, and the world is a zero-sum game that must be played every waking hour.

The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions: A Handbook

Everyone knows there’s a certain way to frame a conversation so that you’ll always win in the end. For police interrogators, the key is following certain techniques, like the Reid Technique, which consists of seven (sometimes nine) steps. All of it’s based on psychology and the mental stress of a guilty conscious (and imprisonment). At the same time, reading through the book made me realize just how much police offers can deceive you, trick you, and abuse your rights in order to get a confession–one passage essentially says “don’t remind a suspect of their Miranda rights against self-incrimination” and encourages the officer to keep the suspect away from a lawyer. It’s all about pressuring someone and manipulating their emotions to break down their will, which is disturbing.

At the same time, the methods and techniques in the book offer a good primer on how to structure dialogue and character dynamics in a story, especially when someone is being subtly (or overtly) pressed to reveal something they don’t want to. For the story I’m writing, it offered a body of knowledge to draw upon when trying to show that a character was an accomplished liar.

The Matrix and Meaning of Character By Jacqueline J. West and Nancy J. Dougherty

I read the first chapter of this book, titled “Schizoid character structure:
Encapsulated in ice”. I’ve never had any love for psychoanalysis in practice, but as storytelling inspiration, it’s a great resource. I actually came across the idea of the “schizoid” in Emmanuel Carrere’s biography of Philip K Dick:

“The source of all evil, he thought, was withdrawal in the self, into one’s shell—a symptom, in psychiatric terms, of schizophrenia…A schizoid thinks more he feels. His comprehension of the world and of himself is purely intellectual and abstract, his awareness an atomistic aggregation of a number of disparate elements that never cohere into an emotion or even truly into a real thought…”

This idea is expanded in the text of Matrix and Meaning:

“The schizoid patient experiences a terrifying emptiness, a nameless dread, an inner landscape unpopulated by human figures. She frequently turns to endless dreams and fantasies, which may be rich, symbolic, and mesmerizing. She may find solace in a well-developed intellect and develop an internal crystal palace in which she lives alone, safe but frozen. However, she may also find dangerous depths, unpredictability, and deadly horrors.”

It’s a fascinating idea, and good insight into what a twisted mind might look like. One of the most uncanny and frightening things about psychopaths or serial killers is that they appear to be normal people, but their minds often seem completely alien to “normal” people. It evokes the title of one of the most famous books on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity by Hervey M. Cleckley.

Hegel’s Theory of Self‐Consciousness: Deducing the Necessity of Inter‐Subjectivity by Julia Batty

This was an honest-to-god MA Philosophy thesis from the Universiteit van Amsterdam that I found online, published in 2009. It’s on Hegelian phenomenology, the most complicated, confusing, and absolutely unintuitive brand of German philosophy possible. I studied some of it college, and it turned out to be not as bad as I remembered, though it was still a labyrinth to read.

The central idea of the essay (and intersubjectivity) is that “the self only becomes fully self‐aware by seeing oneself through the eyes of another in mutual recognition…” Subject-object relationships are the big thing for Hegel, where the self is the “subject” and everything else is an “object.” The problem arises when the self tries to examine itself–who is the little voice in your head talking about your thoughts? Well, that must also be you. When you examine yourself, you make part of yourself into an observer and part of yourself into an object of observation, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to “get outside yourself” and see everything.

This is supposedly solved by viewing yourself from the perspective of another person–but, as the essay says, you can never understand anyone or anything except in your own terms:

“…Hegel’s interpretation, consciousness is never in direct relation to an object, but in relation to an object only in a self‐relation.”

If “man is the measure of all things,” then each person is their own measure of the world, and of themselves. When we see other people, we aren’t really seeing them, we’re seeing aspects of ourselves. Strangely enough, a great articulation of this idea comes from American Psycho again, in his monologue on Whitney Houston.

Hegel doesn’t seem to be too troubled by this infinite loop of the self seeing the world as reflections of itself, but it raises some terrifying questions, especially when it comes to the ego-driven world of the psychopath. The whole subject-object relationship Hegel puts forward reminds me of the 48 Laws of Power, and how much emphasis it puts on the self being totally dependent on other people–not just socially, but existentially.

Alone Down There by Modest Mouse

This is the song I’ve been listening to while writing this new draft with Yute. The lyrics fit the story scarily well, especially this one:

The Devil’s apprentice he gave me some credit
He fed me a line and I’ll probably regret it

It speaks to the Mephistophelean nature of the character: the lyrics “fed me a line” can refer to both a line of credit, which is a great tool for putting someone in debt, and the line of a fishing hook, which catches someone in a trap. The lyrics “I don’t want you to be alone down there” makes me think the song is talking about Hell, and that the singer is trying to make sure he fills Hell with plenty of victims so they won’t be alone.

On top of that, the song’s lyrics are sung in a sort of seductive lilt, while the chorus is shouted, which makes it sound more abrasive, desperate. It sums up the story and the character well.

Alan Watts: The Void Pt 1

Zen is a constant inspiration for my writing and my worldbuilding. A lot of my stories start from ideas about self, illusions, reality, eternity, and the human relationship with the universe, even if those ideas aren’t explicitly brought up in the course of the plot. When thinking about the character of Yute, I realized that The 48 Laws of Power and Zen Buddhism both share a central tenet: formlessness, or the Void. The Zen idea of the self is mu, or emptiness, as explained in the video. There is no innate self, according to Zen, and the experience of realizing mu is the feeling of annihilation. Upon the annihilation of the self, one experiences enlightenment, which is the realization that one is not an identity–one is the universe.

So formlessness can be the birthplace of a manipulative, psychopathic mind that consumes and tricks people to further itself, like The 48 Laws of Power, or it can birth a mind that sees no division between itself and the rest of the universe, where any injuries it inflicts on others are really injuries to itself. This ties into intersubjectivity, and the idea that your sense of self is inseparable from those around you.

Patrick Bateman and the DAO of the Psycopath:

I think psychopathic characters, like Hannibal Lecter or Patrick Bateman, are fascinating because their internal world is so foreign and alien to other people that they end up functioning like broken mirrors on humanity. You get a sense of vertigo when you read them, like you’re looking through a window into another world. That’s the heart of the uncanny attraction, I think. But what makes them frightening, in an existential sense, is that it may be a thin line between ego-driven, manipulative madness (like Charles Manson) and transcendental enlightenment (like Zen Buddhism).

The difference, I think, is one’s perception of oneself and one’s relationship to the world, which is where phenomenology comes in. Hegel seems to say that we can only truly understand ourselves through the eyes of others, but can anyone really see into the essence of someone else? Can we even see into our own essence? As Patrick Bateman claims in the chilling ending monologue of American Psycho, the “inside” of people, the substance or essence, may be of no consequence–an absurdity.

According to the Hegelian view, the self is only beholden to the beliefs and bounds it submits itself to, and it decides what it should submit itself to. With nothing guiding the self but itself, self-defintion becomes an ouroboros–your definitions of the world and yourself may be completely incomprehensible and unintelligible to anyone else, and what you perceive as your “self” may be a bunch of incoherent babbling with nothing at its center and no meaning, even to you. Self-examination may be a futile exercise, since there’s nothing to know or understand that you didn’t already know on some level. This is what Bateman may be expressing when he says “I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”

So what is at the heart of a person? What makes their identity? Bateman says early in the movie:

“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.”

This would be a profound and positive realization for a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, but for anyone else, it’s absolutely alien. Of course Patrick has a self–who’s talking, if not Patrick Bateman? It’s a similar question to the one the Emperor of China asked Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism: “Who is speaking before me?” Bodhidharma’s answer was “I don’t know.”

If you’re a Zen Buddhist, having no self is the gateway to enlightenment. And there is a name for a person that comes back from the self-annihilation of Nirvana and tries to enlighten others: a Bodhisattva. It’s the highest good you can achieve in the Mahayana view of Buddhism, and it all starts with mu, the Void. But this sense of no-self, of emptiness in the soul, can lead to the opposite: someone who desires to inflict suffering and anguish on anyone and everyone, with no reason beyond the fact that there are no reasons not to:

“My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape.”

I think when anyone writes a “psychopath” character, they’re only making their best guess. But even if those characters are only simulacra of the minds they’re supposedly based on, they can still cause us to ask difficult questions about what it means to be a human. It’s unsettling that, of all questions, that one has never been settled.

One of Joel Clapp's initial sketches of Yute, based on Charles Manson

September 29, 2016September 28, 2016

The Occult Triangle Lab Review: Ubik by Phillip K. Dick

ubik occult triangle lab chris mahon I first heard about this book when reading through Philip K. Dick’s biography, I Am Alive and You Are Dead, which took its title from one of the more chilling lines in Ubik. It seemed to have everything I could ever want: existential crises, meditations on eternity, entropy, and the human spirit, and a mind-bending journey through an illusory world created in the dying psyches of twelve people.

But Ubik reads more like a rushed draft and a splatter chart than “One of Time’s 100 Best English-language Novels,” as my edition claims. So many different rules and plot strands are set up (including Pat Conley’s time-reversion ability, Runciter’s manifestations, and the eponymous Ubik) that seem to hint at a single, mind-blowing explanation, but everything that is built up falls apart about 50 pages later. The effect isn’t, as The Guardian claims, a “squishy” novel that defies explanation and evokes the malleability of reality; the result is book that fails to function as a story, or even a comment on stories.

The front cover blurb from Rolling Stone sums up the disconnect, I think, between the people who see Ubik as an avant-garde masterpiece and people like me, who think it’s a goddamn mess: Phillip K. Dick is “The most brilliant SF mind on any planet.” It doesn’t say anything about being a good writer or storyteller. Books like Ubik can get away with being absolutely incoherent by claiming to deal with big ideas. For all its foibles and shortcomings, Ubik can still claim that its telling a sci-fi story that deals with telepathy, eternity, reality, and the nature of life and death, counting on the sheer weight of those ideas to make it worthwhile.

This is a tough claim to assault because a lot of really brilliant experiments in literature and art fail. You can argue hypertext fiction and House of Leaves failed at their attempts at revolutionizing the format of the novel, but their attempt inspired other writers and maybe some readers to reassess what a story can do. The ideas and concepts they brought to the table, like non-linearity, ergodic literature, and multi-media storytelling, have value, just as Ubik has value in exploring the concepts of reality, life, and entropy. Some passages really stuck out to me:

“One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.

This is the same looming horror at entropy that was embodied in “kipple” in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. This passage sums up the apocalyptic, reality-destroying horror that waits for Joe Chip and his friends, evoked in the material decay of everything around them: milk, tape recorders, even elevators.

“But the old theory–didn’t Plato think that something survived the decline, something inner not able to decay? Maybe so, he thought. To be reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says…Because in that case, we all can meet again. In, as in Winnie the Pooh, another part of the forest, where a boy and his bear will always be playing…a category, he though, imperishable. Like all of us. We will all wind up with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable new place.”

This reminds me of the poem Heaven by Patrick Phillips. It’s a surprisingly tender image of an afterlife, apart from all decay and the reality we know. It’s transcendental in the deepest sense of the word.

But none of it counterbalances the seemingly haphazard, half-baked, and frustrating plotting in the book. Good ideas might be able to salvage a badly written book in the eyes of critics and literary theorists, but no amount of avant-garde cred can make Ubik a passable read. The best experimental writers, the ones that deserve the highest praise, learn how to violate the rules of narrative and meaning within their stories and create a piece of fiction that has its own logic and its own intuitive way of reading it, like a dream.

Phillip K. Dick doesn’t accomplish this in Ubik. He sets up a world with a number of rules, but discards them one after another, until he discards everything. So there’s nothing to talk about and nothing to read in Ubik except its profound ideas and its profound failures. There’s no “vivid and continuous dream,” as John Gardner called it. So ironically enough, Ubik, a book about being immersed in a dream world that can’t be distinguished from reality, never tricked me into forgetting, even for a moment, that it was anything more than a bunch of words on a page, written by a man named Philip K. Dick.

August 14, 2016

The Occult Reading List: Zen, Martial Arts, Annie Lennox, and Tickets to the Moon

I have a bad habit of reading, listening, and watching too many things at once, and at the end of every week I end up with a new list of fascinating things to check out. I thought it would be fun to share some of the stuff I’ve read and listened to in the past week, including some of the books and articles I’ve come across. I’ve also included the songs that have been on repeat in my head.

Reading this list is guaranteed to make you fun at parties.

Books

zen buddhism d.t. suzuki occult triangle lab NON-FICTION: Zen Buddhism, Selected Writing of D.T. Suzuki, Edited by William Barrett

An interesting look at Zen Buddhism by one of the foremost writers and translators on the topic. So far, the introduction has drawn connections between Zen and Kierkegaard’s Knight of Infinite Resignation, which is really interesting. It’s also got some fun stories about Bodidharma, the founder of Chinese Buddhism, and his shenanigans. I spoke a bit about Bodidharma before, in my post about Terry Pratchett’s Rule One.

burglars guide to the city occult triangle lab NON-FICTION: A Burglar’s Guide to The City, by Geoff Manaugh

This book started out with an interesting premise: burglars, by their nature, have an arcane knowledge and a unique mastery of their surroundings. With this knowledge, they can pull off seemingly impossible, or even supernatural, feats. Liminality is a key idea in this book, which mirrors a lot of studies in magic and the occult. However, like a lot of non-fiction topics written by academics, it ends up losing track of its thesis and instead indulges in whatever the author finds kind of neat. DNF

FICTION: Clarkesworld Year Six Anthology, Clarkesworld Magazine

Clarkesworld Magazine, one of my top three favorite short fiction markets. These are the same folks that published both my essays on fantasy (you can read them here and here). I just started reading their Year Six anthology, and I’m excited to see what kind of insane stuff they’ve got in store. I also sponsor these guys on Patreon, along with Menton3. JOIN THE CULT.

opus satoshi kon occult triangle lab MANGA: Opus, Satoshi Kon

Despite the most disappointing ending of all time, I highly recommend OPUS by Satoshi Kon. It’s the INCEPTION of manga, with a manga artist, Chikara, getting pulled into his own manga, called Resonance. He meets his own main character, Satoko, and ends up breaking the news that her whole life is a manga, and he’s essentially God. At the heart of the meta-story is the quest to resolve the ending of the manga, which is yet unwritten. It’s a great piece of metafiction, and it pulled at my goddamn heartstrings more than I expected.

Articles and webpages:

Wikipedia: Bagua
The heart of the I-Ching, the same book of Chinese divination that fascinated Phillip K. Dick, is the bagua, or trigram. There are eight trigrams: earth, water, fire, water, thunder, mountain, lake, sky. Combined into 64 pairs, the I-Ching uses them to supposedly provide a map to all creation. In fact, Leibniz, the famous mathematician, thought the I-Ching’s use of binaries in the trigrams (each bagua is made of three broken or unbroken lines) could provide a way to express everything. And he was right: binary became the basis of all computing, with 1’s and 0’s expressing things as insanely complicated as weather patterns or the show Neon Genesis Evangelion. You can read my article about using binary in magic systems here.

The Five Animals in Martial Arts

I’m trying to figure out the basis of a system of magic that would use movement, rather than written symbols or spoken words, as its main component. Sort of like interpretive dance, or the bending in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The Five Animals is what I’m turning to for inspiration, as well as the Shaolin Luohan martial arts.

luohan shaolin fist occult triangle lab Luohan (Martial Arts)

This is just really fucking cool: a martial arts discipline given by the aforementioned Zen founder, Bodidharma, to the legendary Shaolin monks. The Luohan forms would become the basis for all Shaolin martial arts, and have strong connections to Buddhism and enlightenment–the 18 skills are called the “arhat skills,” with “arhat” being the name for an enlightened person.

Songs:

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Annie Lennox

This is a beautiful, melancholy song. I came across it when I was reading V FOR VENDETTA: during one of the last chapters, when V is giving Evey a final tour of the Shadow Gallery just before his death, Evey plays a couple notes on the piano in the piano room, saying”‘How strange the change…from ma-jor to mi-nor’….no, I still can’t get that part right.” I finally googled those lyrics and found that they came from this song, which is fitting since the whole sequence in the book is essentially an extended goodbye from V.

Ticket to the Moon by ELO

This is another melancholy song. I came across it after listening for “Yours Truly, 2097”, also by ELO. I had an especially weird moment of synchronicity while walking to work one day–I was listening to this song when I came across a piece of graffiti on the sidewalk, saying “TO THE MOON.” This guy is a graffiti artist who tags in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and I’d see the tag before, but it was surreal to hear the song and see the marker pointing down the sidewalk. Even more surreal is that the phrase may be a reference to a famous Zen teaching, expressed below pretty succinctly in the picture below (right).

graffiti moon occult triangle lab
graffiti occult triangle lab moon

What is Real by Trevor Something

I love Trevor Something. I have two of his albums, including TREVOR SOMETHING DOES NOT EXIST, which has this song as its last track. The song opens with a piece of dialogue from the 1974 comic sci-fi film, DARK STAR: a scientist is speaking to a sentient bomb about the question of “what is real,” which culminates in the problem of the intellect and Cartesian doubt. Sprinkled in are quotes from The Matrix (“What is real? How do you define real?” etc.), which is actually just a verbatim quote of Alan Watts, the lecturer on Zen Buddhism, and haunting last piece of dialogue from the bomb in which it quotes Genesis. All of this is sandwiched in some really amazing 80’s synths.

July 17, 2016July 17, 2016

The Occult Triangle Lab Review: I Am Alive and You Are Dead by Emmanuel Carrere

occult-triangle-lab-chris-mahon-fantasy-sci-fi-philip-k-dick-review This past week I finished I Am Alive and You Are Dead, a biography of Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the inspiration for Blade Runner) and The Man in the High Castle. Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963, and ended up being the namesake of his own sci-fi award. I’d read Do Androids years ago, and it’s one of the few sci-fi novels whose ending made me cry.

With Dick’s reputation, I expected a biography soaked in the zeitgeist of the 60’s, with all the drugs, revolutionary fervor, and avant-garde intellectual chops that characterized Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, and the rest. Dick is part of the sci-fi canon, and canonical authors exist in a special limbo between our world and the Great Conversation of literature. So I expected a bloodless account of the ideas and influences of a great man.

But the book is not that.

The closest thing I can compare I Am Alive and You Are Dead to is a “walk-in,” where you are a co-inhabitant of Philip K. Dick’s mind. And the mind of Philip K. Dick is an existential and epistemological nightmare, a turbulent, labyrinthine house of mirrors where nothing is real. The most terrifying thing is that, as the book goes on, you learn that this is Dick’s normal operating procedure, from cradle to grave.

Madman or Mystic?

There have been all kinds of articles about Dick’s madness and eccentricities, hailing him as a mad mystic and visionary (including the recent follow-up article in PW for Kyle Arnold’s new 2016 biography), but the image of Dick portrayed in I Am Alive is perhaps closer to the human who lived and wrote and not the legend he became. It lays bear his self-indulgences, his immaturity, and his toxic string of relationships, where the casualties of his lust and boredom were often young women and his own children.

And as the book illustrates, Dick’s forays into “madness” and mysticism were always self-aware and self-reflexive–as he was experiencing hallucinations or alleged religious epiphanies, he was inspecting and analyzing them as someone who is aware that they might be products of chemicals or his own biases. No one was more skeptical of Dick’s legend and genius than Dick himself. While looking back on “Faith of Our Fathers,” his contribution to the self-professed cutting edge sci-fi anthology assembled by Harlan Ellison, Carrere describes his reaction as follows:

“‘Faith of Our Fathers’ is a horrific tale. While writing it, Phil felt a surge of pride. Reading it a year later, after the deaths of Jim Pike Jr. and Maren, he saw it differently. It was still horrific, but in a new and even more distressing way. All his tricks and hobbyhorses were on display: totalitarianism, the idios kosmo and the koinos kosmos, psychedelic drugs, Ultimate Reality, God. Here was the little world of Phillip K. Dick in one package.”

Dick was plagued with such Cartesian doubt that one of his chief anxieties was that he was not himself, but rather a doppleganger or someone who had replaced the real Dick, complete with false memories like Rachael in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Nothing was as it seemed. The Ultimate Reality, Dick’s ultimate object of contemplation, was always behind another layer of illusions, and there was no way to ever know if he had found it. For anyone else, these kinds of purely philosophical problems would be navel-gazing, something to ponder for an hour while looking out a window and then put aside to get down to the business to living. But according to Carrere, matters of reality, metaphysics, and perception were the operating questions of Phil’s life, forming the lens through which he viewed every aspect of his day-to-day life.

So you can see where the dueling claims of mystic and madman come from. But in truth (at least according to the book), both were stage roles that Dick played for the benefit of his observers, his ego, and his career. The “real” Dick, if there ever was such a thing, never found the inner tranquility or blissful ignorance that insanity or religious experience supposedly granted. He never transcended anything, never settled any of the questions that haunted him, and at the end of his life he realized that maybe all of his questioning and searching had led to less than nothing. Carrere characterizes Phil’s thoughts while working on one of his last projects:

“There’s nothing more pathetic than the mistrust of immediate reality by people who never stop splitting hairs over Ultimate Reality. They always think they’re getting to the bottom of things, whose surfaces they turn away from as unworthy of their attention; they end up never knowing the flesh of the world, the softness and resistance it offers to the touch. They manage to bypass their own lives.“

The dialectic conversation between Phil and his own alter ego, Horselover Fat, provides an even more (to me) horrifying image of Phil’s life: solipsism.

“Since the day you were born you’ve been confined to the labyrinth of your brain. What you’re hearing now, all you’ve ever heard, and you’ll ever hear are the magnetic tapes of your own voice being played back to you in closed-circuit transmission. Don’t kid yourself: that is exactly what you are hearing at this very moment. It’s your own voice that’s telling you this. You sometimes let yourself be fooled by it, because the voice wouldn’t have been able to stand itself all these years without learning how to fake other voices, to echo them, to ventriloquize so that you think you’re speaking with other people. The truth is that you’re alone in there, just as Palmer Eldritch is alone in the world that he has emptied of its substance whose inhabitants all bear his stigmata.”

Someone (including Kyle Arnold) might be tempted to sort through Phil’s chaotic, ouroboros-like life and attempt to relegate everything to symptoms. Dick was suffering from schizophrenia, Dick was suffering from anxiety, Dick was suffering from paranoia. From an early age he met with a psychiatrist regularly (I believe it was weekly), and one of the key drivers of his fiction was the abuse of prescription drugs. He experienced hallucinations and amnesia. All of the symptoms of any number of diagnoses are there.

But the key question for me is this: if Dick was mentally ill, where was the line between himself and his disease? Did his schizophrenia give birth to his fascination with the ideas of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos (the difference between personal reality and shared reality, which Phil delineates in stories like Time Out of Joint)? Did his paranoia cause his obsession with ultimate reality and truth? Was mental illness the unconscious wellspring for Philip K. Dick’s stories and the source of his unhappiness, or was it his own thinking? I don’t know. It’s a Phildickian question. Maybe that’s the ‘genius’ of it all, the kernel at the heart of what makes him such an interesting person to read about: the most important questions about PKD’s nature are the ones he helped to define. Selfhood, simulacra, reality, truth…it reminds me of a quote from another android: “Who are you? Who slips into my robot body and whispers to my ghost?”

I recommend I Am Alive And You Are Dead. I don’t know if it’s the truth, or even the seminal portrait of Phillip K. Dick and his writing, but I think it’s worth reading as a cautionary tale for writers who romanticize the hermit-genius and the madman, and as a window into one of the most interesting, infuriating minds in sci-fi.