Who You Gonna Call? #ghosts #paranormal #vampires

Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay

For some reason, today I’ve been thinking about ghosts.

Ghost tales are the poor cousin in the paranormal sub-genre. For every story of visitors from beyond the veil, you'll find dozens featuring vampires and werewolves. Ghosts are not nearly as trendy, at least not these days. That's one reason I enjoy writing about ghosts. An author has a great deal more freedom.

A long tradition constrains vampires and lycanthropes. Everyone knows how they behave, their strengths and their weaknesses, how they can be killed, and in the romance/erotica genre at least, why they're sexy. One can only tweak the conventions so far before readers will cry foul. I've actually read posts on discussion groups where readers complained that a vampire “couldn't really eat a steak” or “couldn't sire children on a human woman”. In “Vampires Limited”, published in the altruistic vampire erotica volume ComingTogether: In Vein, I have a member of the undead community who can walk about in daylight, as long as it's cloudy, and who is more endangered by electromagnetic radiation from a cell phone than by garlic or crosses. As I wrote that story, I really wondered if I was pushing things too far, whether I would incite angry protests from vampire-loving readers.

With ghosts, there are very few givens. A ghost represents some manifestation, in the physical world, of a person who has died. The author has fairly free rein in deciding the characteristics of that manifestation. A ghost may be ethereal, a permeable fog taking a human shape, or corporeal, able to interact physically with flesh and blood creatures. (The latter is perhaps more useful in erotica!) Specters may appear only in dreams, or only at night – in certain locations, or associated with specific natural phenomena. Some ghosts may not appear at all, making their presence known only through their effects on the environment, messages scrawled on mirrors, or clues leading to the discovery of secrets. Some of my favorite ghost tales, such as Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, are sufficiently subtle that they leave open the question of whether the ghosts actually exist at all, or whether they are projections of the character's imagination.

Ghosts' emotions and intentions can be at least as varied as their physical characteristics. They may be sorrowful, vengeful, compassionate or horny. A widely accepted belief is that ghosts hang around in the physical realm because of some sort of unfinished business: a murder to be avenged, a mystery to be revealed, a treasure to be guarded, a child to be guided and protected. On the other hand, some ghosts seem to exist purely for the sake of causing trouble, from simple mischief to genuine malevolence. A ghost can be a character as rich and full-bodied as a living being. The chains that tether a spirit to our world can provide a start on a riveting conflict.

In my ghost tales, the human character often doesn't understand that the ghost is a visitor from the grave until quite late in the story. “Twentieth Century”, which is included in my dark paranormal collection Fourth World: Erotic tales of monsters, myths and magic, is a tale of a woman more at home in the past than in a modern city, whose love of things antique draws her into an encounter with history. Only near the end of the tale does she realize that her lover is in fact long dead. 

 

Tomorrow's Gifts, part of Total-E-Bound's “Christmas Spirits” collection, draws on the Dickensian concept of the “ghost of Christmas future”. However, Michael really has no idea exactly who or what Thorne is, other than a hot stud who understands his submissive needs, until the last scenes.

“Twentieth Century” has a bittersweet conclusion. Beth loses her ghostly lover forever, though she learns something about herself. Tomorrow's Gifts, an erotic romance, has a happy ending, but it does not involve the ghost. This highlights a bit of a problem with using ghosts as main characters in romance. How, when a human loves a ghost, to you engineer a happily-ever-after? No matter how deliciously corporeal and carnal a spectral lover may be, a long-term relationship is not likely to be very satisfying. On the other hand, what are the options? One of my readers wrote, in response to a question I posed in a contest:

I hate endings where the ghost just disappears/goes to heaven/finds peace and the heroine then meets a guy who reminds her of/is the reincarnation of/is the great-grandson of the hero. It doesn't count if he is not the hero, I don't want a reincarnation or any substitute, I want her to find happiness with the hero. But there is one ending that is even worse, where the heroine dies too so they can be together forever.

Herein lies the rub. A romance author can ignore this problem by simply offering a “happy for now” ending, where the human protagonist(s) and the ghosts are busily getting it on and not worrying about the future. This is not likely to be effective in a longer work, though. If the reader cares at all about the characters, she is bound to be frustrated, wondering how things will turn out them in the future.

This may be a partial explanation for the popularity of vampires as opposed to ghosts, at least in the realm of erotic romance. The same reader above said:

Funny, it doesn't bother me when a vampire hero turns his heroine into a vampire, but I don't want to have two ghosts living happily ever after.

As my followers have probably realized, I don't necessarily require all my stories to end happily, so this structural problem with ghosts doesn't really bother me. I love the other-worldliness of a ghost tale. There's not much mystery left in vampires. I also appreciate the fact that ghosts are not necessarily monsters. They may have supernatural powers, but fundamentally, they are as human as my living characters – heroes, villains, creeps and clowns. Ghosts offer a wide scope for the creative imagination.

Kicking and Screaming (#HEA #romance #Exposure)

Let me say right off that I have nothing against happy endings, if they're right for the book. My first three novels end happily, with plenty of sexual satisfaction and the intimation of more to come, possibly even in the shape of - gasp - marriage (although non-traditional in every case). On the other hand, my fourth novel Exposure has a far more ambiguous conclusion. The heroine has lost everything she owned. She's torn between two relationships, neither of which is completely what she wants. Her future is a huge question mark.

Personally, I really liked that ending. However, I had a tough time getting that book published, and it hasn't sold all that well. Meanwhile, over the past three years I've been drawn deeper into the world of erotic romance, where a happy ending ("HEA", i.e. Happily Ever After, or at least "HFN", Happy For Now) is the single most important requirement of both readers and publishers. These days, romance can be sweet or steamy, with any mix of genders and quite a level of flexibility in numbers, but the story must conclude with the protagonists in love and together for the foreseeable future. And I'll admit, sometimes I find it difficult to deliver the sort of HEA that readers want.

Before I began writing romance, I really hadn't read any of the genre, the one major exception being Daphne DuMaurier's delicious Frenchman's Creek. The stories I've always considered the most romantic - Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The English Patient - have tragic or painful conclusions. Meanwhile, sexual relationships are so often fraught with conflict - even if it's something as simple A desires B but is married to C - that not-so-happy endings are far easier to imagine than happy ones where everyone gets what he or she wants.

So, sometimes I find I have to drag my characters, kicking and screaming, to the rosy resolution that readers seem to crave. Even worse, sometimes the constraint that all must end well limits my story ideas in the first place. I'll throw away a perfectly usable premise or set of characters because, honestly, I can't imagine a happy finish.

Some of you might be shaking your heads, thinking, "So why the heck does she keep trying to write romance? Why doesn't she go back to her first love, erotica?"

First of all, the romance publishing world offers some things that are hard to come by in erotica: a plethora of publishers, a huge pool of potential readers and many opportunities to interact with them, and yes, money. More seriously, I see signs that happy-ending-ism has infected the erotica publishing world as well. More and more calls for short story anthologies are looking for "romantic erotica". Others explicitly say that they do not want "dark themes". There are fringe publishers who will look at such work, but the mainstream erotica publishers (if one can use this term without snickering) seem to seeking fantasy-generating material, where everyone orgasms and even more sex looms on the horizon. Unhappiness, darkness, even serious ambiguity, threaten the post-climactic glow.

Obviously I'm generalizing here (and every generalization can be attacked). One could also claim that my complaints are the result of sour grapes. I recently had a story rejected, a story that I wrote specifically for a particular call from a well-known editor working with a well-known publisher. I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect that the ending of this tale was the main reason for its rejection. The story concludes with the woman leaving her husband of thirty years for a man she has just met. The ending is right for the story; I'm quite confident of that, although I wavered as to whether I was brave enough to write it. It's not a happily ever after, though, certainly not for the abandoned husband and probably not for the woman either. No matter how fulfilling her relationship with her new lover may be, she'll always have doubts and possibly regrets. Not HEA material.

In short stories, especially, I'm drawn to the unresolved. The very first short story I published, "Glass House", ends with the following:

Still, I am not thinking. I do not dare. Mechanically, I gather my clothing and make myself as presentable as I can. I turn off the light as I leave, and stiffly navigate the spiral stairs, every step reminding me of my exquisite violation.

On the sidewalk, I wonder where I should go. The city is foreign and strange. I am fragile and lost, but not, as I had imagined, empty.

There is something in my pocket: the delicate glass unicorn Lukaš gave me. The horn has broken off, but it is still a lovely thing.

I do not know what will happen next. But I sense that something will shatter.

This is the way of real relationships. We meet and couple with strangers, then say goodbye. We discover, sometimes, that even our long-time lovers have secret faces we've never seen. We desire multiple futures, with multiple people, and are forced to choose only one. Love and sexual communion are both peak experiences, to be celebrated in fiction as well as in life. However, the intricacies of desire thwarted, the bittersweet pangs of longing for what might have been, the bite of envy and the sting of rejection, are equally worthy to be chronicled in our stories.

Then I remember my deadlines and drag my imagination, kicking and screaming, back to the task of making my characters happy.