Treasure Photo
Everything is getting kinda dystopian and my house is depressing and writing is my only creative outlet and I'm finally sharing a bit of my novel and yes this is a Resident Evil 7 reference.
This is the opening of my novel, Mommy Complex:
Jennifer's house is full of anomalies: The wedding photo hanging on stairwell is crooked. The peace lily beside the bay window has a brown spot. The anniversary clock on the mantle is dead. According to the clock on the bottom right corner the CNN news ticker, it’s just after 6 A.M. She fell asleep in front of the TV again. It isn't really an anomaly but it's still something that a person who stumbled in might judge her for. Jennifer's family has repeatedly called her crazy for considering all of these supposedly normal things anomalies, but Jennifer always relents.
She needs to be believed.
My house often feels like it’s more anomaly than not.1 There’s so much clutter. There’s a lot of dust. There are boxes and piles of things I haven’t been able to confront. There are stacks of boxes full of things that still need to be donated to the thrift store. They’re normal things, really, but a subconscious part of me treats them like they’re anomalies because they don’t look like the “sad beige quartz counter farmhouse pantry door DIY accent wall everyday bottled household products decanted into minimalist glass vessels so they don’t look like tacky gross everyday household products left out for people to see” kinda house that shows up on my Instagram feed.
As much as I like to quote Nathan Fielder when I stare at my dirty kitchen counter, I still imagine all the ways a visitor might judge me for the portions of my house that look like blocked-off areas of a Resident Evil map.
Sometimes I walk through my house an imagine all the garbage excuses I’d used to explain to people who’d judge me for living like this:
It’s too heavy to move.
It’s covered with tape that can’t be removed by hand.
It’s locked from the other side.
I often spend more time watching the news than I do actually fixing the problems with my house. Sometimes I’ll jam the headphones in and listen to the news while addressing the anomalies. It’s not exactly the most stress-free way of dealing with them, but at least my dread and frustration and rage goes into doing something practical, making it look like I’m actually doing something.
Rising from the couch, she opens the blinds. A Toyota Corolla's parked on the cul-de-sac with no driver inside. It's red. Older. Late 90s with a dent on the rear bumper and rust on the hood. Technically, it's an anomaly, something Jennifer would mention to the H.O.A. if Heather were still at the helm. It's parked in front of the colonial McMansion that Heather used to live in…
I feel like I need current events to inspire me. Back in 2017, it was the prevalence of Alex Jones that inspired me to write my werewolf conspiracy theory story called “When It Happens”, which follows Kate and Michael, a childless couple living in a reality where werewolves exist. Michael wants to start a family, but Kate has been hesitant since Michael started watching InfoCrusaders, a conspiracy theorist network that has convinced Michael that the moon isn’t real, which means that werewolves can’t be real. But then Michael is attacked by a werewolf while hiking, a situation with forces Kate to face her biggest fear…
“When It Happens” was first published in an issue of Dark Moon Digest in 2020, but is once again available in the new Were Wolf anthology from Flame Tree Press, so please go and get yourself a copy if the story interests you. I’m still awaiting my contributor copy in the mail, but the book sure looks pretty, and I’ve been wanting to be in one of these gothic fiction anthologies for a while. Being included in the werewolf edition was a pretty cool thing to check off my bucket list.
Jennifer squints at the car through the window. She mouths the license plate number and imagines writing it down, imagines calling Heather and having her fears validated.
Heather was the only person who ever truly understood the things Jennifer was afraid of, but then the pandemic happened, and Jennifer became afraid of everything while Heather was afraid of nothing. Now, Jennifer is alive and Heather is not.
My novel in progress, Mommy Complex was born around the time I read Anybody Home? by Michael Seidlinger. The book is told in the second person as a faceless narrator guiding a person through the process of calculated home invasion. It’s creepy and unsettling. It was a thrilling read in a way that I found difficult to explain. I might not be into cruel violence as a shock factor, but I can appreciate transgressive violence for its absurdist factor. Anybody Home? explores the home invasion genre in a way that forces you to diagnose the absurdist empty soulless reality of the family from the outside. Like you kind of see the nothingburger that suburban life essentially is.
There were points when I really had to ask myself why I was enjoying it the way that a suburban mom might read her mommy smut. I kinda liked existing in that void of empathy or caring. It touches on a society that’s so numbed and distracted and that it’ll literally watch people suffer just for the sake of seeing it. I guess for escapism, because what else is there really to do these days when shit gets too real?
It doesn’t take much scrolling through social media that roller coaster of latest drops and dead bodies of children and fashion tips and bombs exploding and celebrity gossip and climate change footage and millennial nostalgia memes and grifting politicians to really see the rot in our society.
I’ll just be scrolling my phone, sitting on the toilet, and then some Republican-faced white girl with influencer voice tells me about the latest Amazon product she’s obsessed with, and it makes me feel both helpless and violent. I back out of the app with a fury.
“Kill me,” I say. “Just fucking kill me. I want to die.”
I don’t actually want to die, but sometimes I can find comfort in the idea of some guy coming into my house and murdering my entire family so I don’t have to fucking think about shit anymore, which is kind of where we’re at, at least in the first world, is seeing all this bad stuff happening and thinking, “Now, let me make this about me.”
That’s basically the premise of Mommy Complex.
It takes place during the 2024 presidential election, starting the day that Joe Biden lost the first debate and ending on the day that Joe Biden dropped out of the election and was replaced with Kamala Harris.
I was still writing that second drafting thinking that Kamala was going to win, and now we’re here, and now it’s all just so dark and now I’m doing these edits and some of these passages have taken on new meaning and now I find myself asking, “Damn, should I keep writing this?” We all joke about not wanting to be here, but I don’t want people getting the wrong idea about what it means. It’s sorta funny how we live in the same world kind of like over and over right? Time is a flat circle. Blah blah blah.
“Kill me,” I say. “Just fucking kill me. I want to die.”
The other day I was doing a relaxing jigsaw puzzle while listening to the farce of modern day America. The juxtaposition of doing a calming activity while the world feels like it’s ending isn’t lost on me.2 Half the memes I come across on my feeds are just people griping about having to live in the world we currently live in. I try to rationalize that if it weren’t for social media, things probably wouldn’t feel so bad. I try to rationalize that I should just try to find some kind of comfort in that. It’s kind of a dark way to look at my current situation but it’s also just kind of the way that it is, right?
I’ve been slowly peeling myself away from social media. I feel more content, more at ease, more confident in myself, more easygoing to change. I like to think that being a better person will allow me to be better able to deal with something should it arise in my little corner of the world.
It remind myself that the writing is all just a coping mechanism, and that it’s okay if I wanna write about a Gen X suburban mother whose sick neurotic state is put on full display when a home intruder stumbles into her unlocked home one night.
Write what you know and all that.
Like I don’t wanna make it all about me, not really. I enjoy writing posts about my depression and my struggles, but I don’t want to be too “influential” about it. At the end of the day, I just want people to read the book when and if I ever publish it, so if you’ve read this far, just know that I appreciate it, and that I do want to keep exploring these themes modern society and how dystopian so much of life is and how we’re all just kind of going along with it while simultaneously wanting to just die already. Writing really is the “coping mechanism” and the “creative outlet” for me to deal with the mess in my house.
That’s the ultimate treasure, I guess, is trying to find the subtle joy in it all.
I love anomaly hunting games. I don’t really play them, though. I like watching other people play them. It’s an interesting form of people-watching that I find helps me write better, seeing people’s reactions. The dread. The hesitation. I like seeing terror build in a safe way.
I wrote a story about doing jigsaw puzzles during the zombie apocalypse once too. Time really does feel like a flat circle.