Agony, apostasy, and the coke machine

Photo by Nik A. on Unsplash

Much of my childhood was spent stepping over convulsing bodies to ask my mum for change for the coke machine. She usually flipped me a few coins and said we’d leave as soon as Jenny or John or whoever had finished ecstatically convulsing. I’d tiptoe past the writhing, glossolalic bodies on the floor and obtain a cold sugary beverage to offer me reprieve from the blistering Queensland heat. At night I’d have a recurring dream where the devil would take me on a tour of hell, eagerly showing off the various torture methods he’d be employing on me when he finally got the chance.

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My parents took religion very seriously, and I decided at a young age that if I was going to follow in their footsteps I’d have to know what I was getting into, and how much of my life I’d be expected to convulse on a dirty church carpet. I read the bible cover to cover, two times over. Man, were they leaving out the juicy bits in the Sunday sermons! There was more sex and violence in those pages than the entire HBO catalogue, and Revelations was a nightmarish fever dream that put H.P. Lovecraft to shame. As storytelling, it was great. As the foundation for a moral system, I found it aggressively hierarchical and frequently self-contradictory. To this day I find it unfathomable that people devote their entire lives to Christianity without having thoroughly read the single book that’s considered essential reading. Imagine meeting someone who claimed they’d devoted their lives to being a Swiftie but had only listened to 1989 and a couple of tracks from Folklore.

I spent most of my twenties alternating between travelling and working crappy jobs to save up money to travel. Having lost my religion, I’d had to let go of the sweet promise of an afterlife (credit where it’s due, that’s quite the carrot to dangle) but I was left with the more complex problem of figuring out how to atone for wrongdoing. Religion makes it laughably easy. Much like masturbation, prayer is straightforward, free, and can be done from the comfort of your own home. The secular world didn’t have anything as clearcut to offer me, there was no set karmic menu or manual.

Writers are frequently asked “where do you get your ideas from?” and I usually like to tell people that I have a secret place in the woods where I’ve uncovered an ancient stone staircase that leads deep into the belly of the earth, at the base of which lies a goblin who’ll give me story ideas in exchange for a shiny silver penny. The truth is most of my stories are the result of long ruminations on a problem. I invent a character to solve the problem for me, while being too cowardly in real life to do anything about it.

My central protagonist in Rumors of Her Death, Archie Leach, is attempting to figure out how to atone for a very serious transgression. Think of the worst thing you’ve ever done. Be honest, take a moment and really delve into the darkest, most secluded places of your memory where unseen sinister somethings clatter amongst the dark debris of your psyche. Archie’s crime is worse than that. Or maybe not quite as bad. Hard to say definitively, not knowing you. After all, you might be a serial killer, or worse, CEO of a social media company.

After his great transgression, Archie has spent years hiding from the world, denying himself pleasure, actively seeking out danger and misery. None of it’s worked, and then he’s invited to explore the Orrery, a nine-storey hedonistic playground that mirrors Dante’s inferno, that promises answers and redemption on its mysterious ninth level. Archie is searching for atonement, with a little motivation from the people who are hunting and haunting him. There’s a lot of different people who inspired the creation of Archie Leach, but one of them is a scared little boy, stepping over screaming bodies on the way to the vending machine, wondering if he’s destined for salvation or damnation. 

PS I released two books last month, the aforementioned Rumors of Her Death (booktopia \ dymocks \ bookshop.org \ Amazon \ barnes & noble) and the gothic mystery Lenore’s Last Funeral ( booktopia \ Amazon \ barnes & noble ).

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