Writing the Uncomfortable: On Digging Into Transgressive Fiction

How deep do you dig into the heads of your characters? And do you dig with a trowel, a spade, or a giant excavator capable of scooping up a dump truck’s worth of material with one scoop? Do you want your reader to squirm? Do you want your reader to approach a passage and wonder how much of your characters’ inner thoughts you’re going to expose?

Some writing remains in the world of polite society. I will put it this way: no basements (metaphorical or actual).

Some writing opens the basement door. Of course, it’s always accompanied by a foreboding screech. The text lights a torch. It beckons you down into the messy quagmire where an observation might make your mouth run dry—did she (or he) really go there?

(5 Things All YA Novels Need To Succeed)

For readers, what’s worrisome (or at least interesting) is you might feel a flash of recognition. In fact, reading might be one of the most powerful and meaningful forms of entertainment because we get to silently nod our heads in agreement. I’ve had that same thought. A character’s view of how the world works might make you feel less alone in the world.

Nobody needs to know. We see ourselves. But how much do we want to know about the deepest thoughts of the characters on the page?

My writer friend Linda Joffe Hull (The Big Bang and co-author with Keir Graff of The Swing of Things, Drowning with Others, and The Three Mrs. Wrights) puts it this way: If you could walk into a room full of people and instantly know what everyone was thinking, you’d run the other way. And you would run fast.

And you would be screaming.

The writer’s job is to dip in, but how far? It’s one thing to capture real life on the page—at least, the physical life of people and the whole range of activities whether alone or in groups. But what about those thoughts? Are you writing to jolt? Or digging for truth?

And it’s one thing for a character to think something, but will they act on those thoughts?

And here’s another question: What is truly shocking? In a day and age when all manner of truly vile darkness is only a few clicks away, what’s left? Fiction is one thing. One might look at real life every day for fresh examples of troublesome transgressions, too.

If transgressive fiction is your thing, in fact, you can read nothing but lascivious—or carnal, lowbrow, ribald, prurient, hypersexual, violent, or whatever—fiction for the rest of your life.

Beautifully assembled websites celebrate it and probably spark a debate or two. Does Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects belong on the same list as Christa Faust’s Money Shot?

Goodreads has a list of 797 books on its list of Best Transgressive Fiction. That should keep you busy, depending on your definition of shock. Punch in “disturbing books” or “transgressive writing” on YouTube and you’ll have a series of videos suggesting wild, “wrong” reads about a whole smorgasbord of allegedly taboo subjects.

The point is we are post Clockwork Orange. We are post Lolita. We are post Charles Bukowksi, Brett Easton Ellis, Henry Miller, Alissa Nutting, Tama Janowitz, and Tabitha Suzuma. On and on. And this is only a surface-level search of well-published fiction, let alone the rabbit holes that lead us down (always down, that basement thing again) to self-published land or shadowy back alleys on the web.

Which brings me to The Paradise That Lurks in Female Smiles by the late Gary Reilly, being published in September 2022 by Running Meter Press. (I am the co-publisher.) When a good friend read it, she didn’t think it should be published. It was too frank and dated, she said, or words to that effect. Protagonist Charley Quinn, she asserted, was too out of step with today’s times.

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True enough. I’m not sure when it was written, but definitely long before #metoo. Gary Reilly died in 2011 and Paradise That Lurks is one of the 25 novels he left behind. All were unpublished at the time of his death, but Paradise marks the 16^th posthumous title to be released.

Most of the previous 15 novels don’t go anywhere near the territory that Reilly wades into with Paradise That Lurks, but I have a hunch Reilly simply dreamed up a character and set him in motion. And maybe Gary Reilly wanted to get a few ideas off his chest.

The plot has retro, pulp-novel feel. Charley Quinn is a writing teacher at a free university in Denver. In paragraph two of Chapter 1, Charley comes right out and tells us the story is going to be about “the best sex-and-drugs deal a man could ever hope for.”

Says Charley, “I’m not sure who won. How did she come to live in my apartment? Stupidity? Lust? Ulterior motives? I could make a list of the mistakes that lead man to embrace unpredictably bad decisions. Unless, of course, you consider involvement with all women to be prima facie imbecility.”

And we soon meet Linda Hathaway. “When she walked into the classroom, she had a look of desperation beneath the false skin of her face. When I say false skin, I mean the makeup that was so deftly applied that she seemed to have two faces, the surface face that made me think of actors and actresses—faces modified with powder and paint to take advantage of klieg lights and camera lenses—and the face beneath, the foundation upon which the makeup was applied, the real face, the desperation face.”

Ah, two faces. That whole interior versus exterior self. Public versus private. Polite society versus all that muck in the basement.

“She looked at me intently as I spoke, the golden pupils of her eyes moving with the stuttering quality of a lizard’s head. Jerks and tics. She looked at my eyes, my lips, my hairline, as if reading between the wrinkles on my face. I was thirty-nine. Old age was rising like the tide, but I was still young enough to run if I had to.”

Charley doesn’t run. He gets deeply entangled. Charley is aware that he holds thoughts that are “awful truths.” As a teacher of creative writing, he is aware how students are easily rankled by the “truth” that their stories don’t work. And when it comes to the relationships between the sexes, he’s even more blunt.

“As a liberal I had always been sympathetic to the women’s liberation movement, but as I got older I realized how futile it was. As I say, as soon as a girl graduates from high school she starts looking around for the male who will support her lazy ass for the next fifty years. Pardon me if that sounds sexist. The truth always sounds awful. Men want sex and women want security. That is the eternal rule of thumb. My question is as follows: What the hell makes women think they are entitled to security? The answer is obvious: that’s just the way things are. I have no other answer. Kudos to anyone who manages to obtain security. I am not a sexist. I just enjoy pondering awful truths.”

If Gary was still here, we might have had to talk about tweaking a few things. Or maybe not. The rise of #metoo hasn’t put an end to Men Thinking Crudely. The rise of feminism in the mid 20^th century didn’t make a difference, either. Paradise That Lurks in Female Smiles (the title taken from a quote by English writer Thomas De Quincey) gives Charley Quinn many moments to contemplate his own blunt views on sex, relationships, and what women want.

Was this Gary Reilly’s belief? I sincerely doubt it. For the seven years I knew him, he was a gentle and kind man. I think he gave Charley Quinn these thoughts for the sake of the story; that’s all.

I find Charley to be sympathetic—he’s smart and self-effacing. Like all of Gary Reilly’s other protagonists, Charley Quinn is deeply introspective and keenly observant. He’s a people watcher and a ponderer of life.

Is Paradise Lurks transgressive? I’d love to know whether Gary thought so. I know he was proud of the work and proud of the character Charley Quinn. Doesn’t the best art make us all feel a little uncomfortable as we contemplate our own humanity, our own darkness?

Me? I think so.

Final thought from Pete Larkey, the protagonist in Gary Reilly’s The Circumstantial Man: "Everything in Crestmoor is clean and tidy," he thinks, "except the inner lives of people like me."

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