Continued...
Eat me up, Scotty
But the pattern certainly doesn’t stop there. It turns out that our culture is brimming with mutated forms of the transformative plague, and to find some of its most interesting incarnations we must ascend from the hot blood and soil of the horror genre into the cold, inhuman voids of the science fiction tale.
The myth is replicated in its most chilling cultivar in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, where it is the tendrils of an alien plant rather than the fangs of a beast that rob the helpless human of his or her most intimate essence, and release an evil double to steal the unsuspecting shapes of its family and friends in turn.
This same ghastly theme is ruthlessly assimilated by the Borg in the Star Trek Universe. Whole planets are infested with an artificial, technological virus that subsumes the infected into a super-consciousness without pity, and lonely holdouts are often confronted by technologically disfigured partners and relatives whose inhuman mission is to convince them that their “resistance is futile”.
Whatever else occurs in the Star Trek universe, for me, the spectre of the Borg looms, often silent but always large against the cold blackness of space: an ever growing, oceanic consciousness of heartless evil that stands poised to one day swallow the last lonely and terrified island of humanoid emotional warmth like a giant, sightless skull bursting a grape between the dry, crushing headstones of its relentless teeth.
All of these vile monsters understand our weaknesses to perfection because they used to be us, and yet they are no longer constrained by the human feelings that might temper the seething hunger that simmers in their immortal veins. This is what makes them evil beyond our imaginations.
Dwelling on these most terrible things is a horror some of us can barely resist: a cliff edge over which we must peek. And in the swirling terror of that abyss roils the hundred million years of madness that lurks like some cold blooded beast beneath the soft veneer of our civilised skins. Freedom, power, and immortality await us. All we need to do is endure a painful death and cease to be everything that we might be proud to call ourselves…
The Next Generation
When I wrote the
Shadow of Death, I needed to explore this deep, inner dread of superhuman, parasitic mimicry in a different way.
What if the very forces that create the heavens and the earth could take an interest in us, seek us and hunt us through the people we trust and love? What if a being so old and so cunning that to us it would seem to be none other than the Devil Himself could wage war against us through the stolen flesh of our closest friends? I wanted the reader to experience the malevolent, dark and hungry intelligence of a creature that could spin the fabric of the world itself into evil men and women within a fiendish plan to manipulate a single human life to its own savage, unknowable ends.
I wanted to show how when a human being tries to fight back against such a toxic force, he becomes entangled in the claws of the beast, poisoned by the venom that drips from their cunning blades and begins to change until one day he cannot recognise himself as any different from the monsters that he hates with all of his ferocious and now inhuman power.
He himself is now the dealer in black secrets, the taker of life and the servant of death. In this way, man, ascended from the animal kingdom to become a civilised being, evolves anew to become a predator again, in a terrible realm where the safety and boredom of the everyday world is like a distant, fondly remembered dream.
In this expanded vision of creation, he is able to see both sides of the coin: he is the hunter and the hunted, the killer and the quarry, the corpse and the phage that bloats it from within. As the old, sheltered existence he longs for crumbles beneath his feet, he is forced to remake his own melting flesh and shattering bones with desperate hands into a shape whose sole purpose is to survive by violent murder.
By ripping away the living essence of other warm beings, he slowly learns what it means to become the ending of his own world. He comes to understand the very meaning and preciousness of life.
And it is a gift he would give anything forget.
This is the purpose of that book: to take the agony of my foulest dreams and use it to force open a doorway into the more vast and terrifying, unconscious land that lies all around us, just beyond the sight of our human eyes. I wanted to animate the cadaver that rots beneath the boards upon which we tread throughout our waking lives, and hint at the ghastly truth that haunts so many of our sleepless nights: that we live in a tiny island of illumination in an ocean of perpetual night.
And the darkness is coming for us, one by one.
Sweet dreams,
Peter
