Simon Clark's "Blood Crazy" and the daemonic unconscious

[mgcardin]

Is anybody here familiar with British horror novelist Simon Clark? He has written a number of best-selling books, but I didn't read any of them until I met him at the 2001 World Horror Convention in Seattle.

Then I bought and read his 1995 novel Blood Crazy in its 2001 reprint edition. And while it adolescent-ish overall tone and style, not to mention some patently ludicrous scenes, weren't my normal horror cup of tea -- I'm drawn to literary and philosophical stuff in a weird fiction vein, as in Lovecraft, Ligotti, Machen, Ted Klein, Algernon Blackwood, Laird Barron, (some of) Michael Shea, etc. -- it did eventually end up generating a nice apocalyptic tone. I think there's no doubt that its depiction of an England overtaken by apocalyptic disaster in the form of a zombie-like horde was both an expression and an influencer of thing like the movie 28 Days Later and its ilk.

The premise is that one day every human being over 19 is possessed by a sudden and irresistible urge to kill everybody younger. These adults are transformed into a hive-mind horde of zombies, and the grue and carnage are plentiful. Some young people survive and band together to try and figure out how to live and build a new world, even as the raving adults still try to stamp out the rest of them.

The single most interesting thing I remember about the novel (and this is a spoiler, so be warned) is that Clark built the whole thing around a surprisingly profound seed idea. Specifically, he posits that the monstrous transformation of the world's adults is the result of a danger inherent in the inbuilt division of the human psyche into ego and unconscious. The transformation of adults into young-a-cidal monsters is the action of an unexpected evolutionary development brought on by overcivilization and occurring in the unconscious mind. Basically, adults suddenly mutate into a collective-minded new species and immediately begin seeing their young as a separate species competing for space and resources.

The young, for their part, don't yet have their conscious and unconscious mind shut off from each other as completely as the adults, so the change doesn't "take" in them. But then they have to learn to access the resources of their own unconscious minds in order to compete and survive.

As I think back on the book, I'm reminded of many striking resemblances between what it narrates and Tony's daemon/eidolon dyad. For example, there's a scene in which the young protagonist, Nick, has begun to learn about all of this psychological stuff, and about the way the unconscious mind was deified in ancient human thought, with its "voice" being framed as the voice of a god. He decides to rely on it to see if it will actually help him, and in fact it does, helping to elude murderous adults and accomplish other things, even making leaps of intuitive knowledge by leading him to find items that have been misplaced. Again, Tony's gathered accounts in The Daemon of people finding themselves behaving in ways they haven't consciously chosen, only to find their lives saved or otherwise benefited by these spontaneous behaviors, comes to mind.

I just now found an interview with Simon (available only through the Google cache) in which he talks about his thought process:

When I set out to write "Blood Crazy" I didn't intend to explain the adults' madness; however, as I wrote it something clicked in my head - and all that I'd read about psychology and Jung supplied the answer. It's generally accepted by psychologists as fact that we do have two minds inside our heads. The conscious mind, with which we think, makes decisions about what to eat for lunch, whether or not to watch Ray Cokes on MTV and so on. Then there is a second mysterious mind hidden in the unconscious. I thought this was a fascinating idea and I ended up trying to explore what might happen if this mysterious second mind should rebel against the conscious mind."

Who knows, some of you who like Tony's books might like this novel. Now that I've written about it, I'm possessed (daemonically?) by an urge to reread it with these things in mind. I think it may rank as his most popular book. I know it has a cult following. I find this especially interesting given is daemon-esque premise.

[simonclark]

My name is Simon Clark, author of Blood Crazy.

I was delighted to see Matt Cardin's posting about the book, and it confirms to me that Blood Crazy appears to not only have a life of its own but seems to be forging its own career as a cult work. And I must confess I never expected that when I sat down some seventeen winters ago to write the story of a disparate group of survivors. Blood Crazy[i] brings me far more mail than all my other books put together, and my guess is that one of the reasons for this is that the central idea involves the notion that that we have an 'other inner-self.' And that notion fires the reader's imagination in an extraordinary way.

What I had in mind, as I wrote the book is that the 'other self' rebels in adults and the result is everyone over the age of 19 becoming a homicidal maniac. Younger people remain unaffected, and the hero, teenager Nick Aten, finds himself on a kind of Jungian Night Journey where eventually it is revealed to him that the 'inner-self' is in fact a long-neglected component of the mind that acts as friend and guardian. What he must do is learn to form a relationship with the other personality. This will result in elevating consciousness and make him better suited to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, where adults are hellbent on destroying their own young.

One element that many the readers have picked up on isn't the dramatic action but a long discussion between Nick Aten and an enlightened character. She explains the 'two minds in one head' idea and suggests that the hidden inner-self communicates via dreams. I believe many readers have taken this to heart, and it has set them on journeys of self-discovery. And that gives me a great deal of personal satisfaction. Of course, what occurs to me is that when someone reads a book like [i]Blood Crazy, or by Jung, or Colin Wilson or Anthony Peake, the other inner-self is reading along, too. And might the inner-self be pulling certain psychological strings?

I've been fascinated by Anthony Peake's FORUM here and discussions about the Deamon - all this suggests to me that we, as a species, might be close to making an astonishing discovery about the landscape of the mind.

If you do want to read the novel, it's still in print in the USA as paperback. For readers elsewhere it should be easy to track down via the Amazon and B&N US sites.

[Anthony Peake]

Simon,

Welcome to the FORUM. I am both delighted and honoured that you have joined the ever-growing number of professional writers who have decided to join in the discussions and debates found in our litle part of cyberspace.

I am absolutely sure that fiction writers such as yourself, and the other FORUM writers, are writing fictions sourced from the deeper (daemonic) parts of human psychology.

I am keen to pursue this with you guys should you wish to open up a discussion on here.

I am hopeful that we will manage to meet up soon and discuss some of these issues over a coffee or beer.

Tony

[mgcardin]

Great to see you here, Simon. I'm a newcomer myself, and this is indeed a fascinating corner of the Internet.

(Btw, I was very new in the horror field back in 2001, and as I recall we haven't crossed paths again since then, so if you don't remember me I'll quite understand.)

From your comments it sounds like you and Tony really are resonating on the same wavelength. Fascinating to see.

As you know, Tony, I'm pursuing an ongoing examination of the daemon/daimon/muse/genius as it relates to writing and artistic creation over at Demon Muse. I may start courting some thoughts about those posts here in the appropriate subforum.

As for getting together for coffee and a beer, oh, how I wish. But there's that pesky body of water known as the Atlantic separating me from your shores. World Horror 2010 just happened in Brighton, and there were horror writers galore. If I had attended -- which, much to my regret, I was unable to do -- I would have looked you up.

[simonclark]

I'm sure I do remember you, Matt. I'm pleased that Blood Crazy has become something of a calling card across the world.

[simonclark]

Tony, thanks for having me aboard.

I imagine in music, painting, fiction writing, and so on, there is much happening below the surface. There's the old Blues legend, of course, where the so-so guitarist goes down to the crossroads at midnight to do a deal with the Devil. Then suddenly the once fumbling amateur begins to play the guitar with such amazing verve and skill. Perhaps this legend is really a metaphor for connecting with some hidden element of the mind, which causes a latent talent to flower.

When I was in my late teens, and very much struggling to write something half-decent I remember a single astonishing moment when it seemed as if some machine fired up inside my head. As I worked, I even scribbled in the margin, 'I'm either having a break down or a break through!' And suddenly my writing was transformed half way down the page; ideas rushed out in a torrent and my prose became so much more vivid and powerful. That was my eureka moment. I still wonder to this day if some psychological software became activated in such a dramatic and (for me) exciting, yet frightening, way. For the rest of the day my heart was palpitating.

I hasten to add it was nothing to do with meeting that dark, fiery-eyed stranger at the midnight crossroads.

[Anthony Peake]

Simon,

Great to have you here.

What a great analogy ..... as I recall the whole crossroads thing was the blues guitar legend Robert Johnson ...... I really think that the whole "pact with the devil for creative skills" is wonderfully "Daemonic" and really goes to the heart of where exactly does creativity come from.

Like you I find that some days I simply cannot write anything of any value and yet others it all seems to flow out of me as if I am channelling it from somewhere outside of me. In my lectures I discuss a handful of examples of this phenomenon as described by writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson and others.

I like your suggestion that it is like a software download. This is very much the pet theory of a regular on this FORUM called EDG. Indeed he was discussing this very thing this lunchtime when a small group of FORUMITES got together for lunch. I am hoping that maybe he will join in this discussion in due course.

We now have a growing band of writers on this FORUM. It would be interesting to see if they to share this channelling sensation.

I am really looking forward to having the chance to read your books. Maybe I will read some of your work and that of Matt (C)'s back-to-back!

Cheers

Tony

[mgcardin]

What a fascinating anecdote, Simon. I'm reminded a bit, not in the content but in the tone, of Ray Bradbury's oft-told moment when he unexpectedly found his own unique authorial voice while writing his short story "The Lake" at age 22. As he describes it, he had pounded out literally hundreds of thousands of words of derivative dreck up until then, having dedicated himself to writing at the age of 12. And then suddenly while he was writing that story everything came together, and he almost magically produced a beautiful, wholly personal, and idiosyncratic piece of work. "I wrote 'The Lake' on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later," he later said. "Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun, with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my neck standing up."

I find it equally fascinating in a Daemonic vein that he chose to end the essay in which he described this event with a description of his childhood fear in suburban Illinois of "THE THING AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS" -- that is, the horrible and always-unglimpsed monster that he feared was waiting for him at the top of the stairs where his family's bathroom was located. He makes a kind of perfect metaphor of this fear, using it to illustrate the writer's relationship to his or her creativity. In the essay's final lines he tells would-be writers, "I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made" [i.e., a list of words that identify personal obsessions, fears, and loves]. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own Thing stands waiting 'way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page . . . Your Thing at the top of your stairs in your own private night . . . may well come down."

If that's not a positively exquisite description of the writer's psychological and spiritual situation that crosses over in electrifying ways with the daemonic theory of consciousness, then I don't know what is.

As for me, the daemonic aspect of my authorial life has made itself manifest not in one of those thunderbolt moments like Bradbury describes, or like you describe, Simon, but in two intertwined factors.

First, I'm gripped by an abiding drive to pursue certain activities -- chiefly, writing, music, and the gathering, assimilating, and synthesizing into new shapes of diverse ideas from all sorts of fields and subjects -- so strong that my innate directions have taken the form of veritable obsessions over which I'm helpless to exercise control. It really feels like the grip of an external force, or perhaps a deep internal one, so deep it's beyond me, literally.

Second, I've experienced repeated instances, so many they're uncountable, of synchronicitous events lining up with startling and undeniable obviousness whenever I've consciously and deliberately given myself over to a given daemonic/daimonic direction that has been pulling at me in regard to a given project. In other words, things that parallel what you have described, Tony, about your experience of writing Is There Life after Death?, although they've mostly been more subtle than spectacular, although no less shocking. In my activities as a music composer, in my years-long pursuit of my eventual graduate degree in religious studies, and in my horror writing, I've seen just the right resource come to my fingertips, or just the right life event or encounter spontaneously happen, or just the perfect circumstance magically arrange itself to aid me in my pursuits, over and over again. I'm talking about things so astonishingly pointed and perfect, things I was looking for and needing, that it's almost enough to make me think about the "law of attraction" explicated in, e.g., The Secret -- if it weren't for the fact that that whole cultural meme is predicated on an utterly false, egocentric, and pernicious version of the truth in question.

Jung's idea of the objectivity of the psyche, with its concomitant idea that synchronicities happen because the psyche is acting objectively to complement the subjective side, would seem to be exactly what we're talking about here.

So would the ITLADian Daemon theory.

[mikegrove4]

When I write or compose, something takes over.
This 'something' likes to smoke - especially when I'm doing music - and gets annoyed if my wife comes up for a kiss or a chat!


Would it annoy you?

Normally I don't smoke at all, and now that I think of it, my craving for a cigarette only comes when I am creating, drinking or fishing
Perhaps those are his passions and not my own?

That 'something' cannot bear distraction and can be quite rude sometimes if interrupted!
It pushes me aside and takes control of my fingers, although, at the time, I am quite aware of myself and do not feel disconnected in any way. It's only when i look back at what I have created/written that I become aware of the feeling of separation from my work. Like - How could I have created such a thing?
That, for me, is the muse, my daemon.

Secretly (or not) I think that we may be indeed in some sort of computer sim.
I am the vessel, the eidolon (not eiderdown or Poseidon - as my spellchecker would have me write!),
and the being up there looking at the panoramic Imax from the outside is my Daemon (already added to the spell checker!)

I love the feeling of flow from my mind to the page, but everything i write is already in there.
It downloads to the page i suppose, but not into my head, like I say, it's already there - I think...
In a separate part of me, perhaps.

[Cochitlehua]

This duality with the Daemon when there is that separation, where the self is at the bottom of the stairs looking up.
Even if the fear is removed, the duality can still persist, until the Daemon and the eidolon are recognized as one, or that the eidolon is merged into the daemon.

This is where the fears represented in movies and books comes from.
The philosophical zombie argument doesn't work when comparing it to movie zombies. They have a consciousness. In George romero movies, and all other zombie movies, Tomb of the dead, 28 days/weeks later, Rabid, and other alien type movies, like invasion of the body snatchers, The faculty, puppet masters. What they have is not 'no consciousness' what they have is unified consciousness.
They have Daemon consciousness, if we see that the Daemon is connected to every other Daemon of an individual.
They are not concerned with their physical, and don't have qualia.
They are just concerned with the unity of the Daemon consciousness and will destory anything that is separate from it.

But that is the fear that colors that and informs the story.
In the movies they would represent the Demon consciousness.
It is the Daemon from the western historical perspective.
Regardless of what is said in the movies, "we don't know what this is"
It is an imagining of hell on earth, demon possesion and final judgement.
It is an inner fear which informed the authors of genesis.
In which the Gnostics did not bow down to. Don't take from the tree of knowledge. The tree of knowledge is the Daemon.
But a demon to those that live with the fear.
The movies show the fear, and what would happen if the fear was valid. It sounds like simon clark's book also does this.
In those scenarios, it is shown in an absolute, all encompassing fashion.
There is the reality that accessing the Daemon without having a full sense of self, self realization, where the self and the daemon merge fully and are in unity, when this has not happened, then there is a split and conflict between the two.
Like what mikegrove described, or edg's son, or in other ways that deal with that collective unconsciousness.
But it is really not unconscious, unless unconsciousness means the self does not have a memory awareness of aspects of the total form.
This is where they talk about finding the totality of the self.

As Daemons are linked with other Daemons, there can be a telepathy of sorts that passes between people that are operating on the same vibrational, social awareness.

I noticed this awhile ago, like on forums, where I could see people that didn't know each other physically, would begin to link up with each other in ways. On the surface, I noticed, they may mispell the same words and other minor things, but also they may ignore anyone not in that collective they were in.
And they may do telepathic experiments and have what appeared to be success, but it was the result of their collective unconscious relationship with Daemon, and as a consequence, they would be unable to do anything telepathic on their own. But it was the very unconscious dictates that informed how they behave in groups.

I have seen some forums, where the unconscious collective switched to a certain resolve, which allowed for anyone in opposition to it to be banned or having to leave.

When a connection with the Daemon is marginal, then that very thing that could free you from the constraints of the world, is the very thing that locks you to the world.

In the horror movies, they like extreme situations.
And that comes from people, and their tendency to imagine extreme situations. Like the New world order will make the entire world a military state, and force people to mindlessly obey or kill them.

They want to access the Daemon, but they are afraid that the fundamentalist thought may be right.

This is why at alot of metaphysical sites, people are locked to the world and social fears and limitations. As well as the so-called 'sceptics' that adamantly try and talk people out of investigating the unknown, by convincing them it is silly illusions.

They want to play around with the Daemon, without actually leaving the safety of the known, regardless of how limited it is.