Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Cass Khaw’s latest Rupert Wong novella has just been published by Solaris, and sees the cannibal chef crossing the continents. Here, the author talks about one of the reasons behind the quite visceral nature of her stories…

I’m terrified of water.

No, not that terrified. I shower with neurotic consistency, and my favorite beverage remains a nice, cool bottle of clean water. But as friends at water parks have discovered, I will lose my shit if you dunk me in the pool. Similarly, the idea of submerging myself in a bath is – well, it’s not nice*.

The reason for that, I suppose, is an obvious one: I’ve almost drowned.

Twice.

I suppose the first time wasn’t quite “drowning,” per se, but more of a simple suffocation. My mind doesn’t agree, but we won’t go into the dynamics of that today. Anyway. Before we get into my inaugural experience, we’ll talk about the second time it happened. Just because we can. I was in an absolutely colossal wave pool and had, purely by accident, allowed myself to drift too far. It wasn’t a great idea, although it did end hilariously, with my ex-boyfriend drifting up to me as I broke the surface for a desperate gasp of air, and asking, “What are you doing?”

“Drowning, I think.”

That was the second time.

The first time was worse. The first time I happened, I was nine years old and on dry land, clutched in my parents’ arms as they fought to get me to a doctor. I remember thinking, with a clarity likely uncommon in a child so young, that I was going to die screaming in my own head and no one would hear.

But let’s rewind for the sake of context. So, the whole ordeal began two weeks before that particular incident. My father, who had made a vow to never gamble, bought lottery tickets on my insistence. Two days after that, I fell in. Dangerously ill. I was so sick that I couldn’t even hold down a sip of water. By day three, I was in the hospital, with the doctors panicking over what my reports even meant.

A few days after that, I got inexplicably better and the doctors sent me home.

That wasn’t the best idea.

I remember the night with flinching clarity. I was sitting on a sofa with my mother when my breath began to hitch. A hiccup, I wondered, before realizing that it didn’t felt right and that – oops, I’d slipped off the cushions onto the ground. I couldn’t stop shaking. Every sip of air was growing more precious, and each convulsion ground my ribs into my lungs.

My parents went nuts.

After an abortive attempt at communication, they hauled tail, my dad squeezing me to his chest, begging me to tell him how I was. I remember trying to tell them to hold my tighter, that the pressure allowed me to breathe. But the words wouldn’t come. (Fortunately, panic makes parents hold on tighter. I wonder if I’d be alive if they induced the opposite reaction.)

The rest of the night was a blur of city lights and my parents, once so unbreakable, almost in tears. They took me to a clinic first, but the nurse refused to put us at the front of the line. A little girl that was slowly turning blue would not take priority over the system. Then, I was rushed to a hospital. I don’t remember what happened after the nurses finally took hold of me. There was a needle jammed into my forearm. I remember that. But nothing that followed.

However, I do remember what came before my parents plunged through the doors to the emergency ward. I remember the humid chill of the night air, the smell of the city, and the haze of my vision. I remember thinking how strange it was that my thoughts were getting clearer. Like so many other people, I expected death to be a clamor, to be a chaos of things happening.

Not this perfect lucidity.

Not this clear, cold-eyed certainty that built with the pain.

Not this understanding that I was dying.

That no one would understand I was dying.

That I’d die screaming in the confines of my own head, unable to breathe, and no one would hear me go.

I was nine.

Shit like that messes you up.

In a weird way, I suspect that the experience would inform a lot of my fiction. I have a fascination with the way people die. I am endlessly, morbidly curious about the diversity of that final experience, how some deaths are better than others, how others can feel like forever.

People don’t think about dying enough.

Hollywood idolizes the showmanship of a violent death, exulting in the splatter and the drip, the grungy horror of watching as someone struggles beneath the surface of the water. Visual media rarely conveys the enormity of the experience, how much dying can hurt and how much it can be welcomed, which is why, perhaps, there’s as much detail to the violence in my Rupert Wong books.

I need people to pause.

I need people to blink and breathe and think on the implications of the gunshot, the way a bullet can turn the brain into a slurry of tissue within the skull. I need people to feel the whumph of an explosion, the crack of ribs when someone hits a wall. I need that imagery to stick. Because otherwise, it is incredibly easy to ignore news reports, to shrug off words like ‘death’ and ‘casualties,’ to reel off words like ‘kill yourself’ and ‘I hope someone shoots you.’

I want people to think about dying because sometimes, that’s the only way to get them to care about the living.

Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth is out now from Solaris in the US and the UK