Reactor has published my essay “Poetry from the Plague Pit: The Early Stories of Clive Barker and Joel Lane”, which explores the work of two of my favorite writers of horror/weird short fiction within the context of Thatcherism and the AIDS crisis.
This essay is the product of a year or so of research I’ve been doing on horror fiction, sexuality, fear, and rightwing politics from roughly 1980 to 1995, working toward a book tentatively titled Fear of Men. This is the first chance I’ve gotten to move beyond piles and scattered notes and into an actual piece of writing for the project, so it’s exciting. It also confirmed for me that this really is a book project — my first draft of this essay was about 2,000 words longer, and I started cutting not because Reactor was being tyrannical about word limits (quite the opposite) but because I realized I was on my way toward a real book chapter, and that wasn’t my purpose with this piece. So I cut out discussions of the miner’s strikes, Stuart Hall, Derek Jarman, Section 28, etc., though they’ll be important to the chapter this ends up getting expanded to for the book. I look forward to figuring all that out, but other work calls at the moment…
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