I accidentally wrote a philosophical novel.
I realize that probably sounds kind of pretentious. I can hear you already: “Look at this guy!” you’re probably saying. “He thinks he’s some sort of friggin’ philosopher! Why don’t you give yourself a big pat on the back, René-friggin’-Descartes?”
Now to be honest, I think it’s a little early in our relationship for you to be bringing up French mathematicians, but let me be clear here: I’m not claiming that I’m particularly deep/smart/whatever. At least, not necessarily. No, all I really mean by “philosophical novel” is “novel about philosophy,” in the same way that all “science fiction” means is “fiction about science.” There’s dumb sci-fi and there’s smart sci-fi, and there are dumb philosophical novels and smart philosophical novels. I hope Ophelia, Alive (A Ghost Story) is the latter, but given its high quotient of grisly murders and dick jokes, maybe it’s not.
And honestly, I’m okay with that too.
Like I said, I didn’t set out to write something particularly deep. I got the idea for Ophelia a number of years ago, back when I was languishing in obscurity as a writer.
“I need to write a novel!” I told myself. “If I write a novel, then everyone will see how great I am!” (You may recognize this as the same stupid thing every stupid young writer tells himself.) Fortunately, I somehow managed to get one of those flashes of inspiration that every serious writer will tell you you should never wait around for.
What if there was this college student who was desperate for cash and agreed to try an experimental weight-loss pill? And what if then she started hallucinating, recovering creepy memories, seeing ghosts? And then she started finding dead bodies in her closet?
Boom.
It seemed like a can’t-miss idea. The grisly premise would grab casual readers, and the stream-of-consciousness approach would let me show off my mad prose skills to whoever cared about that sort of thing (nerds, probably). Plus the plot would basically write itself! I’d start now, and be famous within six months!
Haha, no.
This is probably obvious to everyone but me, but it turns out there’s a fundamental difference between writing a short story (which I’d done before) and writing a novel (which I hadn’t). Readers will put up with almost anything for ten or twenty pages, but writing something that people will stick with chapter after chapter requires you to build genuine suspense — something above and beyond garden-variety “Don’t go in there!”-type stuff. Your reader needs to be wondering not just “Will she survive the night?” but also “Will she overcome her demons? Will she do the right thing? Is there a right thing?”
I eventually managed to get Ophelia, Alive to that point, but not without taking a massive detour through philosophy and religion, which in retrospect I probably should have done sooner.
The true terror of the psychological thriller genre comes from prodding the reader into questioning the very nature of reality, and there’s no way to do that honestly without brushing up against profound philosophical questions about consciousness, morality, God, and the self. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to dive deep — and maybe look at questions I might not have considered as carefully before.
For instance: Is reality primarily physical or spiritual? Obviously, both answers present difficulties. If reality is purely physical, then consciousness and free will might be illusory — your mind nothing more than matter following the laws of physics and chemistry, with consciousness emerging out the process incidentally. If reality is purely spiritual, then consciousness is no less compromised — the mind itself is real enough, but the physical reality it projects doesn’t actually exist. In the first case, the specialness of consciousness is demystified by the fact that, at bottom, it’s nothing more than (as Bertrand Russell put it) random collocations of atoms. In the second case, despite the mind’s insistence that it’s a reliable representational engine, what it’s built for you is a solipsistic wonderland.
And in either case, the stakes presented within the context of a horror novel seem surprisingly low: if your character dies, the life being snuffed out is essentially imaginary, anyway.
I think this is why, as I edited the novel, my lone “spiritual” character changed religions so many times, migrating from Buddhism in my earliest draft to Christianity in my later attempts. In my final draft, she’s a convert to Catholicism — a religious tradition that’s been remarkably consistent through the centuries in its resistance of both materialist and idealist worldviews. I didn’t make the change for any particular conscious reason, but once I was able to hang the narrative on an intellectual tradition that could account for both the material and spiritual aspects of the self, everything else fell into place — the plot, the scares, the dialogues.
At a certain point in the revision process, I found that I could no longer keep my own questions about the nature of reality out of the book. The dialogue scenes, instead of the dream sequences and murders, became the heart and soul of the narrative, with my characters trading witticisms about the theology of Augustine and Calvin, the literature of Shakespeare and Poe, the psychology of Hobson and Freud, and the mysticism of Isaiah and Vyasa. Instead of a novel about ghosts, I had written a novel about ideas.
“Well, crap,” I said. But then I published the thing anyway.
And again, none of this is to say I think that I, or my book, are particularly deep. That sort of thing is for the reader to decide. But, like Spielberg when he started filming Jaws, I thought I’d just be creating a quick blood-and-gore-fest full of cheap, easy thrills — and like Spielberg, I accidentally made something a bit more cerebral, almost entirely out of necessity. (His shark broke; my plot broke.) And if you pick up my book looking for only a parade of ghosts, murder, madness, and jokes about Peewee Herman, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
But if you pick it up looking to join me on a journey into the remotest regions of the human mind? Then welcome aboard, friend. Let’s see if we can find out what to be or not to be really means.
Luke T. Harrington’s debut novel, OPHELIA, ALIVE (A GHOST STORY) is available now from Post Mortem Press. Elsewhere, his work has appeared at Cracked and BuzzFeed, and he writes the biweekly column “Dumb Moments in Church History” for Christianity Today. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook, if you want.
Editor’s Note: At Arc, we’re big fans of Luke’s work. And we want to get the word out about his book. So we’d like to give away a copy of OPHELIA, ALIVE (A GHOST STORY) to the first three readers who share this article on either Twitter or Facebook and then email us a screenshot. Send it to contact@thearcmag.com, along with your address, and if you’re one of the first three, we’ll send the book out to you by mail.
