ode to paranormal

Holding this particularly episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer up as an example of what made the show transcendent is a bit of a cliché, but I’m going to start my blog post here anyway.  “Surprise.”  It is the episode in the second season wherein Buffy and her vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend Angel have sex.  The unanticipated consequence of which is that Angel loses his soul and becomes evil.  More than any afterschool special or high school health class could possibly hope to accomplish, this episode and the rest of the season manifest a terrible truth for many young women: “I thought he loved me, we had sex, and then he became a monster.”

Women don’t ever say, “I thought he loved me, we had sex, and then he started behaving in a way that made me feel as hurt and betrayed and scared as I would if he had become evil.”  No, they say, “he became a monster.” 

Therein lies the weight of Buffy and all of the best in paranormal/sci-fi/fantasy/magic realism.  By shirking the boundaries set by realism, these genres allow artists to get to the emotional truth of a story and put it forward in a concrete, literal way.  

This is how life feels.

There are a myriad of other brilliant scenes and episodes in Buffy that exemplify such emotional truth, as do any great zombie stories, vampire fiction, Hogwarts escapades, what have you.  (Almost all of my favorite YA is paranormal because everything feels so high stakes and raw when we are young.  The time lends itself perfectly to the literalization of emotion.)  Paranormal fiction is metaphor writ large.  It is emotion made literal.

I am a great lover of John Donne’s poetry and one of my all time favorite lines is from “A Fever.”  Donne writes about the woman he loves being fatally ill and says, “The whole world vapours with thy breath.”  A beautiful and profound statement.  Technically a metaphor but you get the sense for this grief-stricken poet, it is quite literal.

When Villanelle loses her heart to her lover in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, she does so literally.  It is years later that she is strong enough to break into the woman’s home and reclaim her heart from the glass jar in which it has been kept.  Sethe is literally haunted by the ghost of her daughter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  For characters in these hyper-real stories, nothing “feels like,” it only “is.”

My MS, FLIGHT, is the story of a woman who is so unable to accept who she is that she destroys her own happiness and that of the people she loves the most.  It’s a favorite character type for me (Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica, anyone?) and by writing a work of magic realism, I could make the stakes real.  Maria doesn’t just go through a “self destructive phase” after her father dies or a boyfriend breaks her heart, she literally self destructs.

The high stakes makes for great fiction.  But it also, for me at least, feels much more true than any realism I know.