I have an idea for a novel. Let’s give it a Ludlumesque name: “The Smith Violation.” I have had this idea for years. It is one of a bunch of novel ideas I have that I have, at most, toyed with; this one I’ve written a few thousand words of, nothing more. Rape is a plot element. Sorry. One key opening scene would include the aftermath of a fantastical rape; the threat of a similar manifestation, on a much larger scale, would be the threat lurking in the background, throughout. Again, I haven’t written the novel.
I am not among those who thinks rape is never a fit subject for fiction. As I’ve said multiple times, if murder is, then rape is. One of my all-time best stories, possibly my single best story, “Of A Sweet Slow Dance In The Wake of Temporary Dogs,” includes a gang rape that I sweated blood to make as horrific, and far from titillating, as I could. I horrified myself. I would defend the particular use of the trauma, in that story, to my dying breath. It’s 2000 words in a career with well over a million published words of fiction. I won’t say the phenomenon itself is unknown in my fiction; it is in the background in a couple of other places. But I have only depicted it that one time. I don’t think you could say I dwell on it.
In “The Smith Violation,” a race to stop the end of the world, rape is central; I cannot think of any way to reconfigure the story that would exclude it. I might be able to avoid that aftermath scene, but the threat, gradually revealed, is fused to the novel’s very core. The more I become aware of that the less likely writing the novel becomes. It’s odd; I’m a horror writer, and have written at length about cruelty, abuse, and murder. There’s even a murder in the background of my middle-grade books. You better believe that in writing any kind of horrific story, I will have to come up with awful things for people to do to one another, and that would include rape; so I can’t self-righteously swear off ever again bringing it in as a story element. But my awareness of it, as an element of this novel, as a manifestation of these particular character types, becomes more and more glaring. I find that I want to do it less and less. “The Smith Violation” recedes. It’s not just that I don’t want to write it; I also don’t want to be the guy who wrote it. Maybe I’ll find some way to reconfigure it. Maybe I won’t.
This is not the only time this has happened to me. You may recall that some months ago I conceived a mainstream thriller — let us call this one “Daddy’s Girl” — in which parents are reunited with the daughter who was kidnapped and held in a basement by a psychopath, for seven years. In that novel, it would turn out that she was a psychopath herself, a predator who picked him as collaborator but was taken by surprise by his own awfulness; she is now free to predate on humanity, and her parents are put in the position of gradually realizing what she is. I think this would have been a terrific thriller, possibly even a best-selling one. I would have killed it. Note that there is nothing in this novel that could not have been written by any number of other thriller writers, to salutary results. What made me put the idea away, probably forever, is the realization that I did not want to write it while bearing the name Adam Castro, not when one guy guilty of imprisoning three women for a decade was Ariel Castro. The connection made me sick, and further made me realize that I would not be the only person to draw attention to it. Hell, Castro’s victims would notice. Any number of other writers could produce this book and come up with a perfectly defensible thriller; Ira Levin forty years ago, Gillian Flynn today. But I am damned by my name. Even if I used a pseudonym, my name would come out eventually, and my name would particularize it. It’s not something I want any part of.
I learned early on that it is part of my job, as a writer whose works sometimes veer into horror, to horrify *myself*. I am supposed to wince and say, holy crap, did that come out of me? The gang rape I wrote about in “Temporary Dogs” was one of my most agonizing days of writing, ever, and yes, I can defend the result. (So can others, apparently; it’s still one of the most acclaimed stories I have ever written.) But I need to be able to defend the result when I sink that deeply into the darkness, and I guess that’s what this is all about: in the case of both potential novels, it is finally my sense of responsibility that paralyzes me. I need to be able to defend what I’ve done, to myself and to my readers. And sometimes that trumps the muse. It steers me into other directions.