A good friend said to me over the weekend, ruefully noting he can’t read as much as I do, “I really admire the way you get through so many books.” But I replied, “Thanks, but remember it’s because reading and writing are basically my life. You have other things to occupy your time–you’re married, you compose and record music, you have children and family.” Whereas books have become in recent months the most intense focus of my more solitary sort of existence.
Since the spring I have been reading fiction more constantly than ever. I’ve always read novels and short stories, so that’s nothing new, but not as many as lately. And it pays off in deepening my own writing: during a conversation with another friend last night about my most recent story, The Delusion He Could Hug, I realized from his comments that I had achieved my goal with that story: to depict a sensual situation between a man and a woman–“slice of life” style, not erotica–a situation which may be a kind of supernatural or science-fictional one (it’s revealed at the end) but also a tale which is entertaining yet complex and, importantly, successfully shaded with the ambiguity of real life.
I published this on Amazon Kindle right after Thanksgiving.
The two most recent novels I’ve read are both heavily dramatic but ambiguous too. (The descriptions below will contain spoilers.)
The Night Is So Dark by Robert M. Coates was heartbreaking. It takes place in NYC in the ’50s, about an older Hungarian-American man who works as a piano tuner in a factory, a highly skilled trade, and a younger waitress with two children, who date and eventually move in together. From the outside it seems like an average relationship with the ups and downs and quirks and eccentricities of any two people trying to make a go of it (with the additional difficulty of their age difference, which is not specified in exact years); but there is a disconnect between them that, despite their efforts, leads to mental illness and stark tragedy. The author writes from an omniscient viewpoint from the start and we are aware it will end badly. The story is told in a very detailed way, evoking the world of Manhattan rooming houses and neighborhood bars and boozy parties in the home of the couple’s friends; but humble events like a family picnic take on a sad resonance that foreshadows trouble to come. The book painstakingly showed the growth of madness in the man because he was too rigid and could not accept the unpredictability and free-spiritedness of the woman; her qualities played into his specific personal obsessions and set him off to violence. Ironically too, it is clear throughout that they do indeed both love each other in their flawed ways.
After reading that, I thought the next book would be more of a conventional suspense experience, but The Eleventh Hour by Robert B. Sinclair turned out to be haunting in its own way. Basically it’s about a writer in the early 1950s whose pulp magazine career isn’t going well, and how his hyper-critical wife keeps riding him about it. One day, instead of writing a murder plot as a story, he decides to do it in real life on his wife. What is especially interesting about this book (published in 1951, it was nominated for an Edgar as Best First Novel) is how the guy is so convinced he is a kind of “artist” committing the perfect crime that he is willing to risk the gas chamber rather than get a good lawyer at the end and face the fact that his crime is not foolproof after all. Additionally, before he is apprehended, he meets his late wife’s sister and discovers she is more his soul mate than his spouse ever was–but it’s too late for them both; his ego does him in. His bullheadedness seems ambiguous, however, not just a function of inflated self-regard; in fact, on reflection after reading it seemed to me just the opposite, as if he’s trying to compensate for feeling small to his badgering spouse, as if he’s trying to prove to his wife, even after he’s murdered her, that he is NOT a failure, and has triumphed in crime if not in fiction writing. It’s a weird, unusual story.
Additionally, in an old mystery anthology given to me by a friend, I read No Motive, a long story by Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, the famous novel (and Hitchcock film source). No Motive is about a titled woman in England who, despite seeming to have a happy life and expecting a baby, abruptly commits suicide. A detective tracks down the intricate backstory of what in her past life could possibly have caused this tragedy; and his investigation vividly shows the fragility of the human mind when it shuts down for years from emotional trauma, blanking it out; and how dangerous the emotional flood can be when the brain suddenly remembers what it has so long suppressed. I don’t want to say more; it’s a terrific novella, and again, it had the thrust of entertainment but was full of provocative and subtle ambiguity.
Here is my point: to create such ambiguity in fiction has always seemed to me one of the highest goals, as a work achieves a sense of real life happening in front of the reader. I’ve even tried for it in my erotica writing, which is why I’ve called my style “Erotic Realism.” But for my “slice of life” stories in my “Specialty Library” (as opposed to my “Erotic Library” in which I publish my femdom stories) I’m able to focus primarily on the psychology of things, rather than primarily stimulating the reader through sexual scenarios in the porn/smut/erotica (call it what you wish).
The Delusion He Could Hug, available here in the U.S. and at Amazon stores worldwide with my other stories, may be stimulating too in its way (especially a sensual shower scene), but its primary objective is to show how its main character tries to get past his lonely longing on Thanksgiving weekend, and how he seems to find a woman who can help him get past that isolation and yearning. The key word is seems…
Irv O. Neil's EROTICA IS MY TRADE 
