Howdy, folks! I'm Scott M. Roberts, author of 'Out of the Deep Have I Howled Unto Thee.'
Werewolves > vampires, for the record.
I suppose I should note that the above holds true if the "werewolves" and "vampires" we're talking about are framed in the classic mode. I like the dilemma of the werewolf-- the struggle of the man against the beast, writ with horrible consequences if he can't (or won't) tame it. The vampire has already ceded his or her humanity; the werewolf, supposedly, has a chance. The exercise of that element of agency, whether it's extreme self-discipline like Clark, or a voluntary three-night stay in iron bars and a cage ala Oz from Buffy, is what excites me most about werewolf stories.
And sure, it's all metaphorical. Maybe.
Out of the Deep is my most-revised story. I finished it back in 2006. Back then, Clark was fighting against the wolf in order to be worthy of the family he'd once had. Here's a LONG excerpt from the original draft. This occurs just after the wolf has been pushed into the motorcycle.
Clark dialed Gillian’s phone number. He stumbled over it a couple times, then finally got it right. Let Gillian answer. If it was Gillian that answered, he could hold himself together.
The phone rang three, four times, then picked up. “Peakson’s.”
It was her. Clark had to blink back tears. Her voice was so beautiful and this was the first time in a long time that he was hearing it with his ears, his own ears, and no wolf at all between the sound of her and him.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
Clark spoke up, his voice catching a bit. “Hello, Gillian. It’s—it’s Clark.”
“Clark. Oh… oh.” There was the sound of something being set down, heavily. A child squealed in the background, a young child. It was a happy sound. “What do you want?”
I want to tell you everything. I want to hold you again, and love you like I did once. I want to be your husband again. But Clark said, “I just called to talk a bit.”
Her voice was savage and rough when she spoke again. “You cannot see him, Clark. Don’t ask, I’m not going to put Terry through that. Not again.”
“I’m not going to ask that, Gillian. I just wanted to talk a bit, is all.” But now that she’d said that he couldn’t ask to see Terry, that was the only thing that he could think to talk about. So he was quiet, listening the child’s babbling in the background. He could hear a kid’s television program running, too, a squeaky, merry cacophony.
Gillian said, “Well? Where are you living now?”
Too far away from you. “Arizona. Middle of nowhere, really.”
She sighed, and sounded a bit relieved. He knew why—it was safer that way. Safer in Arizona, because it was far away from South Carolina where she and Terry and her new husband lived; safer in the middle of nowhere, because he was far away from everyone else.
“Do you need anything? Money?”
She always asked him that. “No. I pick up a bit of work, here and there.” When they were first separated, he’d called her up often, begging for some money. Begging for other things, too. A chance to see Terry, a chance to see her. “I get by.”
“Good.” A pause. “So. What kind of work?”
“Construction, mostly. I’ve been working in the library, too. Some.” He cleared his throat. “How is he?”
Gillian sighed. The child in the background had fallen silent. “Why do you do this to yourself, Clark?”
“Terry’s my son, Gillian.” As if that was an answer.
“He’s fine.”
“That’s it?”
She sounded exasperated. “What do you want to know, Clark?”
Everything. But he just said, “He’s still my son.” Even though it had been eight years since she’d sent him a picture, ten since he’d held Terry. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you two. I miss you.”
“Oh, Clark.” A long pause. “He’s got a girlfriend. He doesn’t know that I know.”
“Who is it?”
“A girl from church. She’s thirteen.”
“She’s too young.”
“Richard and I are going to talk to him tonight.” She trailed off.
Richard. The man who’d taken Clark’s place. Taken his family. Clark bit his lip. He’d given up his family to Richard Peakson. Gillian and Terry had taken Richard’s name, replaced Trost with Peakson.
“Do you ever talk to Terry about me?” Clark asked.
“He remembers you, some.”
“That’s not what I asked, Gillian.”
“No. Clark, it’s…painful. And it’s a long way in the past for both of us.”
“Both of us?”
“Terry and me, I mean.”
For them. The us he wasn’t a part of any longer.
“Clark? You still there?” Gillian sounded concerned.
“Yes. How’s he doing in school?”
“Fair. He goes to vocational ed for half the day.”
“Vocational ed?”
“Don’t take that tone, Clark. He’s just not… bookish. He hates sitting still.”
“What tone? I don’t have a tone.”
“You do, too. It’s the one you always have when you call, the one that says, ‘Gillian you could be doing better.’”
The concern had melted away. She sounded angry again. Clark said, “I don’t have a tone. I just want to know why you and Richard don’t try to convince him to do better in regular school.”
“Because we’ve seen how he hates it there, Clark! Ugh, this is stupid! You’re gone from our lives for, what, ten years now, you only call once or twice a year, and you actually think you have the right to care about us?”
“Caring about you isn’t a… a right, Gillian, it’s natural. He’s my son, and you’re my wife, and I’m just supposed to forget about you?”
“Was. I was your wife.”
“I know that.”
“You said ‘you’re my wife.’”
“You know what I meant,” Clark said after a second.
“You said what you meant. It’s been ten years, Clark. You’ve got to get over us.”
Familiar territory. Like offering him money every time he called. That didn’t make it hurt any less. He knew he couldn’t see Terry again, and even the idea of talking to his son made him shake and his heart stutter. But to be cut off from them like this was worse. “I can’t,” he said.
Gillian sucked in a breath. “You can’t. You can’t. Well, this is a familiar line of conversation. Clark, he still has nightmares. He still wets the bed. Fifteen years old, he still wets the bed. Because you—“
“I know what I did, Gillian.”
“No you don’t. If you knew, you’d never dream of calling him again.”
“I called you.”
“He keeps a picture of that stupid dog beneath his pillow. I don’t even think he realizes why he does it anymore, but every time he wakes up screaming from one of his nightmares, he’s holding the picture of that dumb mutt you murdered.”
Clark whimpered. “Don’t Gillian.”
“Why not, Clark? Ten years, you still can’t live up to the fact that you mutilated Terry’s dog? Right in front of him?”
Not me, the wolf, the wolf…
She was crying now, and the child he’d heard before was whimpering too, whimpering “Mama, mama,” and it sounded so much like Terry, Clark felt his heart breaking.
“Stop calling us, Clark,” Gillian said. She was sobbing and her voice was fierce and rushed. “Just…forget us. Leave us alone. That’s the best thing, and you know it. It would be better if he didn’t love you, that’s why you have to stay away, Clark. Don’t call us again, please.”
“You always say that,” he said, but she had already hung up.
He pressed redial, but the tone rang busy. Clark put the phone back on the hook, and realized that his other hand was tracing the motorcycle’s outline on the window pane. He moved away and stuck his hand in his pocket.
Terry’s fifteenth birthday was two months ago. Clark had gone into town to buy him a birthday card, but they’d all seemed too babyish. Steam-trains and airplanes whirring around balloons of insipid verse. Clark had settled on a postcard of the Grand Canyon, but in the end, couldn’t manage to write even a single word. He’d sent it unsigned.
He shouldn’t be afraid of his son, of what he’d done ten years ago. The wolf was trapped in the Sport Scout, wasn’t it? He was cured.
I submitted the original to Shimmer. Elise Tobler worked with me for a while to see if we could come to an agreement about how the story was supposed to go-- she felt that Clark's family was extraneous to the story. I saw them as a motivating factor for Clark. We wound up not being able to come to a compromise that worked for both of us, and I moved on.
After a while, Elise's advice kind of sunk in, and I came around to her way of thinking. I rewrote the story, editing out Clark's family, and the result was a much more lean and thematically malleable piece. Around the time that I finished the rewrite, William Morris and Theric Jepson of Motley Vision (a Mormon literature site) had put out calls for Mormon-centric speculative fiction stories. William had read the initial version, and liked the revised version enough to recommend it to Theric. I added some additional Christian imagery and a little more Mormon flavor, and they accepted it for their huge anthology, Monsters and Mormons.
And that's version you heard.
I am a practicing, orthodox Mormon. I don't enjoy religious fiction-- much of it is pamphletized, you know? "How to Gain Heaven in Four Easy Steps" or some such. In a lot of religious fiction, God is waiting in the wings to save the day, or provide a Rube Goldberg solution to whatever melodrama is happening at the moment. Additionally, much of religious fiction is geared toward conversion and romance. While those are fine themes, they don't particularly interest me. I am interested in struggle.
So of course werewolves are interesting to me.
One other scripture, in addition to the bit in Psalms that the title is taken from is this, from 2nd Corinthians 12: vss 7-9
7 [...]there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.
8 For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.
9 And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness...
The idea that God would allow Paul to suffer rather than curing whatever was afflicting him was pretty tantalizing for me, and shows up a lot in Out of the Deep.
Onto questions and comments!
I often had to deal with the guilt of impure thoughts and actions and I loved how that added another layer to the story.
Yep. I'm glad that in the final revisions, I focused more on Clark's present than in his past. From the POV of the story, it doesn't matter too much what horrible things he's done as a werewolf-- the struggle to overcome the beast is what is essential. I think that lends the reader some power to project onto Clark their own imaginings, their own interpretations, and their own emotions. I'm totally okay with that.
I can't help but think he perished along with the wolf but I love how it is left up to the reader to decide.
I purposefully left the ending ambiguous. Some people like it that way; some less. Glad it worked for you.
Dave's voice was superb on this one and it fit the gritty atmosphere of the story so well that I can't imagine anyone else taking up the role of reader on this one.
I was completely floored by his performance. Excellent work.
The religious aspects were pretty minimal, but they packed a punch. They added to the depth and overall sense of redemption in this story.
For me, it's less about redemption and more about release.
I looked into the anthology where this story came from, Monsters and Mormons. it does have "That Leviathon, Who Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone, which is another excellent story, but many of them look to be sort of silly. Maybe I'm too close to it.
Dan Wells's 'The Mountain of the Lord' is the best story in the volume. It's about a Mormon boy who can turn into a giant stone creature. He fights zombies and witches. Sounds silly, but the execution is brilliant.
I was curious whether the act of taking the temptation to the desert and burying it might have any special symbolism for a Mormon. I saw parallels to the temptations of Christ. But I'm not familiar enough with the Mormon faith to know whether it might have some special meaning for you.
The only specifically Mormon things in the story that I can think of are the mention Clark not drinking coffee, and that 'sacrament' consists of taking bread and water.
I assume the sagebrush-filled desert was somewhere in Utah.
Arizona is where I imagine it to be. But just about any arid land works.
Removing/avoiding the temptation is only part of the repentance process. Restitution also plays a part, so I'd be interested to see how Clark would deal with that, if he is still alive, since there is really no way to make restitution for what you did as a werewolf. Will he be able to get past it and forgive himself?
I'm unsure. Sometimes, I think the 'forgiving yourself' stuff goes a bit too far. Maybe you aren't ever meant to get over what you've done, at least not in this life. Maybe whatever you did was so catastrophic that no amount of repentance can heal you-- maybe you learn to deal with being spiritually maimed until death.
But again-- for me, this is about release, not redemption. My interpretation is not authoritative, however. I'm happy if someone finds any meaning at all in this completely made up and fictional string of consonants and vowels...
Being a man of faith doesn't automatically rid the guy of his werewolf, but it gives him the courage to put in the radical effort it takes to make it happen, to do the impossible.
:nod:
for me, faith pretty much boils down to a howling from the deeps at a visceral level, not for easy fixes but for the strength to live up to my highest ideals in the face of the awful things that will always be part of the fabric of life.
I totally get this. Since I finished writing Out of the Deep, I've had a child be born with a life threatening heart condition (born with half a heart). We also discovered a year and a bit ago, that my wife has a brain tumor. I've howled a lot at God. I feel like He's howled back.
At least there's a conversation taking place (assuming I'm not insane. Or lycanthropic).
Maybe that's where I get my dislike of Christian fiction from...I mean, what I've read of it, it makes having faith, and living one's belief out to be so easy. I don't think it's meant to be easy, or natural even. I think it's meant to be the hardest thing we ever do.