Torture Porn

By James Oswald

Hi everyone. Russel’s away in Paris for the week, eating too much Wild Boar and slowly turning into Obelix. He asked me to pen a few words to fill the space he left behind.

First the promotional bit. My debut novel, Natural Causes, is coming out on May 9th in the UK, published by Michael Joseph. A lot of people have already read it, though, because I self-published it as an ebook just over a year ago.

The wonderful thing about fairy tales (and I hasten to add Natural Causes is not a fairy tale) is that they do occasionally come true. I had no great hopes for my book being a huge success. If I had a goal at all it was to sell perhaps a thousand copies of it and its sequel, The Book of Souls, over the course of a year. As it happened, through the clever marketing wheeze of giving Natural Causes away for a bit and hoping people would then pay for The Book of Souls, I shifted over three hundred and fifty thousand copies of both books on Amazon alone in the six months before the good people at Michael Joseph made me a very tidy offer for the rights.

This post isn’t so much about that. (Though please excuse the shameless bragging. I am, as you might say, cock-a-hoop.) I mention it only to suggest that many people have read the opening chapter of Natural Causes. Some have read no further. I know this because they have written me one star reviews to that effect, and sent me emails berating me for the sickness of my mind. Just this week I’ve had another one on Amazon, under the title ‘Sick’:

“The graphic detail in the opening chapter made me feel sick, I couldn't read any more of it. A poor choice for me on this occasion.”

They may have a point, even if they are in the minority. You see, the opening chapter, though just a shade over five hundred words long, is a graphic depiction of the gang rape and ritual murder of a young woman, written from the point of view of the victim.

Some of you have judged me already, I can tell. Those of you wondering what the fuss is all about might like to take a moment to go and read the offending piece. You can do so here. I’ll wait until you get back.

When the print edition of the book comes out in May, however, that offending and offensive-to-some chapter won’t be there. We have decided, my editor and I, to remove it to the back of the book, with a little covering note explaining why.

The reasons for doing this are many fold. Perhaps the most obvious and least defensible is that with such a graphic and disturbing opening chapter, the supermarkets may shy off stocking the book. It’s sad but true that supermarkets are where most people buy their books these days, plucked from the shelf at random and thrown in the trolley with the ready-meal horse lasagna and bottle of cheap Australian Chardonnay. Supermarkets can be fickle about what they stock, and not making it into Tesco can be the difference between a bestseller and a flop.

That’s not the only reason for removing it, though. I’ve had my own reservations about the opening for a while. It is an undeniably graphic and horrible description. It was designed to shock, and I think succeeds. It also doesn’t really fit with the tone of the rest of the book.

To understand why it’s there, I need to explain the history behind Natural Causes. I’m a late-comer to crime fiction, some might say something of a charlatan in the genre. I wrote my first attempt, a short story, in 2005 after my good friend Stuart MacBride had suggested I do like him, which was to stop pissing around with fantasy and SF and try my hand at something that might actually get published. He’d been given similar advice by a departing agent, and it seems to have worked out well for him. I wrote a half dozen short stories featuring a detective I’d created for a comic script, pitched unsuccessfully to 2000AD in the early nineties. Natural Causes was, I think, the third one. It was published as a short story by Spinetingler in late 2006. By then I’d already started the process of rewriting it as a novel, and Sandra Ruttan suggested I might submit it for the CWA Debut Dagger.

You only get 3000 words and a synopsis for your Dagger entry, so they need to count. The novel originally opened in the same way as the short story, with DI Tony McLean stumbling upon a crime scene already being investigated by another, more senior detective. I wanted something to grab the judges’ attention, and since the book revolved around a ritual killing from the past, what better way than to describe that killing as it happens?

It must have worked. Natural Causes was short-listed for the Debut Dagger in 2007. It didn’t win, though, and neither did the exposure gain me a publisher or agent. So I put it to one side and got on with writing the next book. When I self-published last year, I thought long and hard about that opening chapter, but decided again to keep it. If nothing else, it would get people talking about the book.

But it still bothered me. Crime fiction by its very nature deals with the nastiness and violence of life. Bloody murder and the worst of human nature are our stock in trade. But there’s a big difference between describing a horrific scene to explore the reactions of your characters, and doing it to impress a set of award judges. Or just to shock your readers into talking about your book.

The opening scene in Natural Causes occurs sixty years before the events that make up the bulk of the book, long before DI McLean and his team are even born. It’s in the present time, when the body is discovered walled up in a basement of a derelict mansion, that we begin to explore the effects of the crime on those investigating it. There are a few other scenes in the book that are quite graphic and unpleasant, but they are necessary to drive the story forward, to motivate the characters and add a sense of peril. The opening scene is gratuitous, for all that I still think it is, technically, a strong bit of writing. And for that reason alone it had to go.

Looking at the books I have written since Natural Causes, I can see what to me looks like a toning down of the visceral shocks; the guts and gore stuff. The latest has a couple of gross moments, but most of the truly horrific I leave to the reader’s imagination, which is far worse than anything I could ever write. More importantly, what is there is relevant to the characters within the book, rather than simply put in to get a reaction from the reader.

The first is good storytelling, whatever the genre. The second is just torture porn.