The Lesbian Vampire Killers.

Talking yesterday, on a rooftop at Lamma, about Brisbane's 1989 Lesbian Vampire Killers and was shocked that, while such a huge international outrage back in their day - there was even a reference to them in that ultimately unsatisfying novel - and very unsatisfying film - The Shipping News. - they are so completely forgotten today.

Keith thinks forgetting they ever existed is great but that's because he always thinks murderers should always be forgotten forever.  Also, he has this big thing about never saying the name of anyone who murders, especially if it's a political assassination or a particularly brutal killing, because he thinks it gives the murder/s a power they don't deserve; that only people who create should have their names spoken aloud and never those who destroy.

Nonetheless, and with the greatest respect for his views, I must tell you I found this Vampire Killers story extremely compelling at the time, followed it avidly, and still recall all of it today.

There were several reasons I found it so memorable, the main one being that it happened on the very day the population of the world reached statistical stasis; the day chosen to represent that the number of people now living was equal to the number who had ever died.

The papers had been full of this for weeks and it had me pondering the idea of Reincarnation and what would happen once there were more bodies than souls to go around and if they'd now be folks born without souls and wondering if and how they'd be different from everyone else.

So back in '89, out of these musings, I was writing a Goth novel based on the idea: a dark and gory tale about a bunch of soulless lesbian vampires who go around killing folk in order to steal their souls ... only to keep discovering that their victims don't have one. "Such a useless waste of our time and trouble!" they'd all say after a particularly nasty and wolfish 'take-down'.

But then, while I was still pondering on how my vampires would decide on who to kill while ensured beforehand that this particular victim indeed had a soul, AND on the very day designated as Population Stasis, my fictional Lesbian Vampire Killers appeared in the flesh and killed a man on the banks of the Brisbane River ... so naturally it completely freaked me out and the novel was tossed aside with great vehemence and, out of deep feelings of guilt, never finished!

This happens to writers all the time, you realise.  Our fictional imaginings constantly manifest out in the world and we are left with horrible, guilty "Did I make this happen?" feelings. My mum was writing a novel that included race riots in Little Rock, Arkansas when those riots actually started happening for real.  Naturally, it rocked her world and she immediately stopped writing anything fictional. And Keith was writing a film script - a comedy - about a fellow who thinks he's John Lennon and is so outraged that the real John Lennon still exists, sets off to kill him ... and then, right when Keith's half-way through writing that hunt-down and stalk part, that disgusting fellow (who must not be named out of respect for Keith's views) killed John Lennon for real and, needless to say, it left Keith reeling!  Yet another half-finished text tossed aside with great vehemence.

And isn't there a book written about Herge and how he was constantly being investigated as a spy because he was always so spot on about everything BEFORE things happened? Like, it was noticed by the power-that-be how frequently Herge's drawings would suddenly appear as real-life photos on the front page of newspapers.  And how he was forever creating Tintin adventures that actually, later, happened to someone for real. And, in yet another example, didn't Tintin encounter a problem in his "Destination Moon" comic that, when stumbled across by accident by some NASA scientist, had him calling an immediate meeting because he suddenly realised that it was a genuine problem they hadn't taken into account - hadn't even realised would be a problem - and which NASA eventually solved the exact way Tintin did? 

And Jules Verne? Wasn't he another writer who constantly did this type of prescient thing?  And isn't there a novel of his that he refused to have published that is said to pretty well accurately map-out the main events of the 20th century?

Anyway, over the years, I've met so many writers who have had these strange prescient-writing experiences, I'm surprised there aren't a great many novels written about it.  

Oh, and here's another particularly strange thing:  over the years I have actually met other writers - and, in some cases, avidly read their pieces - who, back in 1989, also read about Soul Stasis Day and who also responded by writing stories about soul-stealing vampires and who were also shocked reading about the Brisbane Lesbian Vampire Killers and who also were rocked by horrible "Did I make this happen?" feelings.

Seems I was only one of many.

But how is it possible for writers to forever write about things before they occur?

Back when I was a child and the Little Rock race riots thing happened to mum, and later when John Lennon thing happened to Keith, we talked about this: Do writers actually make things happen?

Mum's thoughts on the subject were that there was something in the Hindu philosophy of The Eternal Now, wherein Time is an illusion and everything is always happening somewhere, sometime within The Now, and that there are sensitive souls who can pick up on happenings in a different and only-perceived-as-future Now and sometimes they incorporate this into their fiction.  For me, this is as good an explanation as any so I argue this one ...

... whereas Keith's position is that when you create something in your imagination and put it down in black-and-white, it feeds into the Collective Unconscious and becomes a possibility.  I don't like his explanation because it means the writer is indeed guilty and I can't feel comfortable about that.

Of course, it could be completely chance.  On the same principle as "a hundred monkeys typing for one hundred years.", maybe with so many writers writing, some of them will, totally by chance, hit on something which actually comes to pass.

BUT ... I once met a German guy who'd just, a day earlier, written a scene about something that happens in the Paris Metro and he had just come from there and seen that exact scene for real. And, when I met him, he was definitely freaking out about it.  And there was also the time my friend Sylvia was writing a story set in the Greek Islands where she was trying to exactly describe the sound of a tempest on a Greek tiled roof and was making it all up, and then, a year later, while in the Greek Islands herself, was hit by a tempest and heard how it hit the roof and was frightened at how accurate she'd got it and so was having odd thoughts about time-bends.

However, to get back to that events on the banks of Brisbane River, on Soul Stasis Day, maybe that's the explanation. Perhaps those Lesbian Vampire Killers were simply responding to the exact thing all we writers were.  Maybe scientists and statisticians choosing a Soul Stasis Day meant that particularly weak-minded non-writers felt what we felt and decided to act it out for real.

Who knows!  Of course, thinking all this does make it worrying that so many folk born after 1989 are so into vampires and soul-stealing ... maybe there is something in this Reincarnation idea after all.

Now THAT'S a really big Who Knows! and I have to say I really don't have any answers!