(Necessary spoilers for Terrible Gifts, The Silmarillion, a little for The Death of Ivan Ilyich.)

I was trying to do a lot of different things in this story. I was also trying very hard not to do certain things. Sometimes the latter can be more difficult and more important than the former.

It begins with an image which is high on the level of repellence -- the central figure of the epic, Beren, who is a secondary character in this story, is reflecting on the taste of the blood which has splattered over his face from the fellow-prisoner who is being tortured to death next to him. Readers' insistence on an R-rating for this story is, I suppose, understandable; though I have read worse in Poe, things much more nightmare inducing and skin-crawling, at least for me. (Though I am possibly not sufficiently distant to be able to judge.)

The nameless protagonist of the story is, in the context of the Ardaverse, not merely a hero, but a martyred saint. The context of defying the Enemy is not simply one of liberty vs. tyranny, in a political sense: the ideology of evil in Tolkien's mythos encompasses totalitarianism and repression, but as part of an ethic of nihilism: the Dark Lord wishes to rule the planet, bend it to his sense of what is orderly, and will tolerate no disobedience or denial - but if he cannot have it his own way, and to wound his rival demiurges, he would prefer to have it destroyed. The heroes, disguised as Orcs, are caught because they cannot make the renewed pledge of fealty that the Dark Lord's field commander (one Sauron, an Immortal necromancer who favours the form of a giant Wolf) demands of them, suspicious of their identity. These vows of obedience include a curse of all that is good, all life, all creatures great and small, and a looking-forward to the ultimate entropic destruction of the cosmos - a sort of combined incense-burning and cross-trampling at once, which "no true Elf" or Elf-friend could ever consent to.

Because of this, they are discovered and arrested and threatened with torture and death, one by one, unless they reveal what mission they are on and their specific identities; as they naturally refuse, the threat is carried out, in a manner strikingly similar to modern psychological methods employed by modern intelligence agencies (sensory deprivation, suspense, encouraging betrayal) though the storyline goes back to the 1920s and 30s. Gifts opens with this backstory, in the prison where they are awaiting another execution.

The interesting thing is that none of the companions present are sinless, all of them are there because of the Fall of the Elves, but in the scale of things their offense was really small. They are caught up in the Doom that awaits all of those who go off to fight the Enemy by his own means (you cannot fight the Dark Side with anger and hate) - but unlike the ringleaders of the rebellion, these took no part in the murders and family treacheries that brought down the Doom upon them. The worst that they have been guilty of is a hubristic willingness to rush in, so to speak, of youthful stupidity and arrogance in a good cause. And their current situation is the result of good actions, not of evil - of keeping a promise to an old friend, of taking care of someone to whom they owed a life-debt, and of refusing to take the easy way out with everyone else.

There isn't much in the way of visuals, not for most of the story, which makes for lot of writing challenges. The complete and utter blackness of the prison, something emphasized in the source texts, was particularly important for me and to my advantage in avoiding the prurient. That the characters are all naked is a given: laid bare and cast into a pit. This is stated and set aside, not in prudery, but because it is not something to focus on. The meaning of this nakedness is not eroticism, but something far different - depersonalization, enslavement, reduction. What matters is that these brave, noble, ancient and heroic warriors have been put in a situation where they are nothing more than dogmeat. Because of the darkness, the emphasis falls necessarily not on visuals - beautiful naked bodies - but on sensations - the cold, the hardness of the stone, the lack of any shelter, no matter how symbolic, against outside forces. It is internal, not voyeuristic, in intent. There is only one brief moment when the protagonist's flesh is revealed visibly - and that is in the glow of the demon-wolf's eyes, and from his own perspective - the purpose of the sequence is not titillation but horror, an attempt to make the reader identify, putting herself into the prisoner's own - not shoes, but chains.

Based on suggestions in the source texts, the conceit of the story is that the loyal followers of the Elf-king Finrod Felagund choose to be put to death before their leader and the mortal he is sworn to protect, explaining how it is that those two are the last remaining alive. It is an act of self-sacrifice; but by the time it is underway, the brutality of it has desecrated the deed, the raw ugliness is overwhelming anything noble or beautiful about it. This was tricky to pull off, because of the need to walk a fine line between making something that was so purely grotesque and nauseating that the reader is stopped short and cannot think about anything else or get past that, and being either so flower or so coy as to be dishonest about the brutality. Still less did I want to objectify the protagonist - which is paradoxical given that that is exactly what is happening to him. Complicated directorial decisions were made here on a lot of levels.

Firstly, the choice to render it from the victim's own viewpoint. This itself is not enough to avoid objectification: Anne Rice routinely does both; but the presentation not only of his physical sensations and emotions, but his thoughts and motivations, was meant to make him an active participant, not merely a passive sufferer, regardless of his physical status.

Secondly, the style used throughout the story: a modified stream-of-consciousness, inspired a great deal by Kafka and Dostoyevski, moving seamlessly between inner and outer experience, using a vocabulary somewhat lyric, but fairly plain and simple, with the complexity created by turns of phrase and abrupt shifts of perspective, both of which are drawn from Slavic literature. I can only read a very small amount of Russian, and am mostly familiar with eastern European lit through translation, but the economy of Slavic languages, like that of Latin, using no a, an, the, leaving out unnecessary words which were already encompassed in the verb or the sense of the paragraph, this was something that I found extremely jarring at first, along with the differing use of prepositions - and then came to find very attractive. The elisions can make for a staccato flow, or alternately
allow you to run phrases together poetically, and then force the reader to go back and think about the meaning of the phrase as the next one turns it around. --It's challenging to read. It's challenging to write. I wish it weren't, either one, but I don't know how to do this any differently -- this is my "arty camera technique" so to speak, and it doesn't work for everybody, I know. I don't claim it as superiority, it just is the textural language I have developed, the style I work in, which allows me to say what I'm trying to say without going off track.

Thirdly, the choice of what to "show" and what not to show, in detail. This is the nitty-gritty, and where the hardest work was. In the story, the protagonist is initially determined to resist both physically and mentally to the last in an active way, despite indications that this might not be a prudent thing to do. This is, as it becomes clear, a very selfish choice, even though on the surface it looks very "heroic." If he had just kept his head down like a prior victim, he might have been killed quickly, the equivalent of a shot in the back of the neck, (but then there would be no story) so instead he has to challenge the goon -- or rather, I wrote him as someone who has to challenge the goon who comes to kill him, and ends up getting a much worse going-over as a result. (No passive-voice authorial shirking of responsiblity.)

The demonic minion is barely slowed down by his resistance, and simply puts a stop to it by breaking both his legs. I chose not to focus on this pain, for several reasons: it would be out of character for the protagonist, a seasoned, centuries-old warrior who had survived several epic ordeals (the Crossing of the Ice, the Battle of Sudden Flame) in the canonical backdrop before this; and it would be a distraction from the major events of the story. Instead I chose to focus on the physical sensations of growing terror, as the protagonist realizes how completely helpless he is, and how bad it is going to get, drawing not only on my own personal recollections of terror, of frightening experiences, but also of those recorded first-hand by soldiers in modern warfare, under shelling or aerial bombardment.

There is of course an erotic aspect to the relative positioning of protagonist and antagonist as the ordeal progresses, with the chained, nude victim lying supine under the (contextually) clothed, armed aggressor, the closest I come to writing BDSM fiction. But since I utterly reject the identification of sex with violence, or with domination, or with abuse, as something natural and normal, (regardless of the respective gender of those involved) I did nothing to enhance this aspect; it is there, in that one can see a parallel between the protagonist's predicament, and rape, because sexual abuse is so inescapable a component of human rights abuses, throughout history, and regardless of culture, or of the victim's gender. But it is not focused on, precisely because I wanted to avoid any glamorization of the events. No Liebestod here, no swooning conflicted emotionality, this is the reality of cement walls and nightsticks, electrodes and sensory deprivation, of the personal reality of impersonal government policy versus the isolated individual person.

The unpleasantness of the brief sequence where the werewolf teasingly threatens to castrate the protagonist is one of the more repellent and ugly moments in Gifts. It is crude. There's nothing at all noble about the situation. It is the story's equivalent of a jailer or cop's casual kick to the groin of a handcuffed suspect - shaming as well as brutal, the act of someone lost to humanity, able to objectify another person without even trying. For that reason I intended to include it, and for that reason I left it in when I started to wonder if it was too much humiliation for my wretched protagonist. Not to indulge in character torture, but to honour those who have been brutalized in such circumstances. We do not only allow their personalization, their worth, so long as we avoid thinking about them in obscene situations; we must, as we are persons ourselves, allow to victims of torture that same intrinsic dignity that we ourselves would ask. Thus, though such things ordinarily would be and should be obscene, if used for entertainment, casually, here it is necessary. Thus I say that violence in art is subjective and case-specific in its consideration.

The teasing however does not last long, for characters or reader, because again this is not intended to be an emotional angst-wallow. Hardcore violence in the form of permanent disfiguring damage follows, and follows, and follows.

I cheat a little, for reasons which may or may not be acceptable. There has long been, in fantasy, an idea of substituionary suffering, as in the fairy-tale of the faithful servant who becomes stone to save his friend and his friend's family; of magical interlocks, such as the object owned by someone and now carrying some part of that person's essence, revealing the danger that a distant lover or relative is experiencing to those left behind. That, and the nuanced variations of telepathy and "spirit-walking" that are present in the Ardaverse, I took as warrant to posit a psychic bond allowing such a deliberate gesture of substitution, of taking on another's pain, to mitigate the inevitable.

Why? A couple reasons. It is a reflection of the real and true selfless generosity that has been shown by people in desperate situations of survival and destruction, the giving of one's own medical supplies to another more gravely injured, the life-jacket, the flying into enemy fire to try to pick up the wounded - these things are as real as our inhumanity to each other. The theme of sacrifice may be exploited for propaganda, but the thing is real nonetheless, as real as loyalty or betrayal, opposite poles of decision.

It could have been no more than a pathos thing, very easily, if I had chosen to focus on this element in more detail; though I hope that it does not come off as such. On the simplest level, it allowed two different simultaneous things to happen in the narrative. One is that background awareness of companionship and loyalty and trust, of what (or who)  is at stake, beyond abstractions, if the protagonist gives in. The other is to allow mental space for interior action, for a level of rational thought and deliberation, analagous to that provided by anaesthetic in trauma situations.

One thing which is true, and not something most people like to think about, is that painkillers don't always work, and when they do, they can only help so much. Depending on the nature of the cause and the individual biochemstry of the sufferer, some treatments are ineffective, or have strongly negative side-effects - one pain substituted for another. And at best, the removal or reduction of pain still does not alter the situation, and so while it can provide clarity of thought, and a lessening of physical stress which does to an extent reduce mental stress, it does not cure or even ease the emotions in states of terminal illness or injury or situations which are touch-and-go. The ordeal remains, for the patient, and for those who must witness and cannot pretend to themselves that it is not really that bad.

It also serves, briefly, to blur the experience of the attack, as depicted only through the experiences of the character. I wanted it to be unclear what was happening, so that the reader would only realize at the same time as the protagonist, and the empathic reaction would ideally accompany the revelation that the choice had been made to disembowel him, something which milhist students know as a particularly lingering and horrific death.

The violence and grisly explicitness reaches a crescendo here, and then I back off -- deliberately. The point of the story isn't physical pain or gruesome injury. It's the state of being helpless, of being locked in a dilemma with no good ending, where both choices are unacceptable, and one has to be chosen. What would you do? What would I do? This is the underlying question of Terrible Gifts.

The real struggle now commences - the battle for the protagonist's soul. In keeping with the theme of wounded good guys becoming wraiths, Sauron's canonical role as Necromancer, ruler of "betrayed ghosts", and sundry minions given bodies by evil Immortals, I have the werewolf offer the dying warrior the option of a new lease on life, with two catches. He has to talk, obviously, and betray his comrades, his king, and their mission; and he would become a werewolf too. This is
presented in terms of Nietzchean superiority, as contrasted to the protagonist's present state as a slave, as fodder for the powerful; the protagonist doesn't want this, but can't cope with what is happening to him. The moral strength to resist is gone, but not the desire to have the strength to resist.

There are echoes of Dante's Purgatorio here, half deliberate (I didn't set out to myself, okay, now how can I work in this aspect of the Divine Comedy) in the calling for help which follows. The problem is, in the context of the canonical backstory, there is no supernatural help available. The circumstances have resulted in a situation where the rebel Elves have literally removed themselves from grace, quite physically, and they are stranded in the power of the Dark Side. The protagonist knows this, despairs, and calls out for help anyway, having lost his pride in the realization of his own underestimating the power of the Dark Side. The way he gets it -- and he does get it, which is why I am ambivalent about classing this as "darkfic" -- is poetically and fittingly, from the person he is dying for.

The form this takes is musical, in homage to the themes of the mythology, both Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, and because this reflects a primary world truth: that the power of for inspirational purposes is paramount and has always been, which is why tyrannies have banned patriotic music, and anything that can even be remotely construed as patriotic, in occupied regions. Who isn't moved by the scene - admittedly contrived as it is - in Casablanca where the clash of competing ideologies and earthly powers is embodied, and a faith/hope-statement made, by the playing of La Marsellaise over Mein Vaterland? Songs work on a level which is apart from logical argument, engaging aspects of the body-mind interface that we really don't understand at all, yet, and have real effects on both.

One effect of this is, in the context of the story, to distract by evoking other images, and thus to provide a mental lifeline to a reality beyond that of the momentary and physically-present - an escape, in essence, by dissociation. Again, there are plenty of real-world examples of this coping strategy; it is merely augmented in the story by use of the "magical" atmosphere. It also provides narrative tension and aesthetic complexity for the reader as images of nature, of previous incidents, and other persons in the mythos are introduced for the first time breaking the fixed boundaries of the prison setting.

This outward-moving in time and space is integral to the story, not cut in randomly. The prisoners are there because of past events, there are people outside with whom they have or have had relationships, future events will be impacted by what happens here. All of these are relevant. They also serve to alleviate the claustrophobia of the story, slightly, and to add a visual texture to the narrative as well as a wider context for its events, along with the story's internal eucatastrophe, or redemptive aspect.

It is, if you will, a "naturalistic" miracle: the protagonist is able to hold on - to himself, to his faith, to his duty - by the faith and love of his friend; there is nothing overtly supernatural (in the context of the story, beyond the fantastic elements of psychic powers and telepathy which have been established in the original context of the Ardaverse) in this grace which redeems him. This is deliberate. I don't go in for cheap salvation or easy answers, not any more, not for a long while now. Even when there is something which I have suggested as miraculous, in the strict sense, as in the sequel to Gifts, Betrayals, Renunciations— still a naturalistic explanation is possible for the event (it is possible that there is no cause/event link between Finrod's prayer and the flash of comprehension which follows) as I have written it. And in any case, grace does not mitigate the horrors experienced by characters. No organ chords, no orchestral strings would fit here in a film score for these unfilmable stories.

Even when the protagonist "triumphs" for a given value of triumph, there is no consolation at that point for him or for the reader, and this is deliberate. He doesn't get a quick death because he didn't break faith. He still has to go through the rest of the process of being torn apart, broken down, reduced to mere matter by inches, and there's no "feel good" side to it because of his virtuousness. I deliberately depicted him as a mental and moral wreck, whimpering in pain, out of an angry response to traditional martyr legends with serene saints nobly bearing up under the worst tortures.

The enemy, too, in this story is impersonal, deliberately; there is a strand of cruelty, of schadenfreud in the demonic torturer (no need to "demonize" here, the minions of the Dark Lord are demons) but it is, essentially, alien and unconcerned with its victim's personality. Again in counter to the tropes of passion narratives, the werewolf is not impressed by the protagonist's heroic resistance, not awed and humbled, like the torturers in martyr legends, nor inspired to a personal duel of wills as in action movies, but matter-of-factly goes on dispatching him after the offer of an amnesty in return for information is rejected.

(Hating the wolf is not what it's about. The wolf is a pawn. The wolf tries to seduce the protagonist to the Dark Side, because that's it's job; the wolf thinks it's funny to watch his pathetic scrabbling to escape, but this isn't about the wolf, start to finish. The wolf is there for us to be afraid of, because of what it represents - the possibility of choosing the Dark Side, the impersonal ordeal of suffering that we will someday have to go through, the reduction to something disgusting and pitiable and less than ourselves.)

Only in compassion is there redemption - mundane, unglamorous, humble empathy from someone who expects to go through the same thing himself soon enough, and is not afraid to face that fact, as are the other survivors of the fatal lottery. Grace comes not in a heavenly cloud or chord, but in the love of a friend willing to companion the protagonist through, endure the dreary witness of his agony of mind without trying to deny it by platitudes or empty comfort. Some of the inspiration for this comes from Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. There the protagonist, incapacitated by a stupid accident incurred while undertaking a home renovating project, finds redemption and his own humanity through the unselfish compassion of the man who takes care of him, a young peasant who takes his Christian faith as a reason to treat even selfish, miserable, sickly bureaucrats with lovingkindness as he looks after bedpans and such repellent truths of biological life.

This being fantasy, in keeping again with the paradigms established for Middle-earth, there is another trial for the protagonist after death - the hazards and temptations of being a ghost. The hazard is that of falling under the power of the Dark Side, the temptation that of possessing one of his still-living companions, or trying to, in order to avoid the divine justice awaiting those Elves who had fallen, and the consequences of their rebellion. It is only here, as a disembodied spirit, that I finally allowed my protagonist to shine, so to speak - to be a hero in anything like the conventional sense, and this too is a deliberate choice. From the beginning I showed him in the worst possible light: proud, superior towards those he believed weaker, resentful of the sacrifice he was making, morally proud of his virtue in this gestures, and then revealed him as stupid, clueless as to the spiritual danger he was in, mistaken in his assessments of his own strength, and thence by degrees lower and lower into the abyss of despair, as he goes from fear to panic to complete terror to the degraded certainty that he will break under torture, to the pathetic gratitude he feels at being "rescued" (in the sense of moral support of course) in the isolation of his ordeal by the one he considered the weakest and towards whom, as protector/martyr he felt superior, until in the end he no longer has even his own identity left, his mind wrecked by physical damage, and the only alternative to passive suffering available to him is to accept the empathy that is offered to him.

Dead, as a ghost, he paradoxically is somewhat restored, in that his mind is no longer overwhelmed by pain and the fear of being disembodied, he is a powerful spirit, much more so than a mere human mind - but it is not a pleasant state to be in, as no creature born into a material body is designed to exist as an immaterial spirit, by a long universal tradition quite familiar to people who read ghost lore from around the world. Thus the temptation to take over another's living body - even knowing it would be a gravely sinful act to use another person this way, and likely to result in injury to the stolen body as well as damaging or destroying the mind of the victim of possession.

Here, he makes a free choice - and he chooses the good, though it is harder and painful and unfamiliar, but for the right reasons, in full clarity, this time. The point of this? Not certainly to show how much better off he is for having "done the right thing." If anything, beyond the natural flow of the story and its setting, the world in which "naked before the great eye" is a very real danger, in which psychic combat between Good and Evil takes place through very ordinary media [e.g., Frodo at the High Seat], it is to show that this is who he always was, all along - that from the beginning, in his self-confidence and superiority, he was the person who could make such heroic choices not from mere compulsion, nor from psychic bonds of duty and guilt, but to make the generous choice for the sake of another, unselfishly - no less than he was, equally, the person who could have given up and surrendered out of fear and pain, in the shock of confusion at his shattered illusions, or for bitterness at the individual for whose sake he had been brought to this hellish state.

Instead, he chooses to accept the purgatorial fate of the Halls of the Dead, with the judgment on his guilt or innocence in the rebellion, that was the consequence of the Doom which they accepted when they chose to go on to Middle-earth. It is a gloomy sort of escape, from one perspective - but from another perspective it is not that at all. This is the opposite choice of that which Saruman made -- the dead protagonist like the redeemed Panchavatis at the end of the Indian saga Mahabharata, has accepted his life-choices and his responsibility, has acted nobly and selflessly for the good of others, and now goes to a place of healing, pardon and eventual rebirth. Moreover, his new state of liberated perception allows him to regard even his own past failings with understanding and to use his hard-won wisdom to help the main character out of a hyperscrupulous guilt for a minor failing -- because, under the circumstances, swallowing the blood that accidentally hits one's face is hardly cannibalism, even if it is technically.

The blurring of identities in the story is deliberate for several reasons, one of which is to add to the hallucinatory atmosphere, another is to emphasize the "unit cohesiveness," the intimacy of companions in a shared endeavour, particularly a disastrous one; and a third is to play with the idea of the line between Good and Evil going not clearly between this person and that person, but through one's own heart. Until the last, there is always the chance that the protagonist will end up on the side of the Werewolf, rather than on the side of his King - and the triumph, small but real, in our unknown hero's escape from the bonds of illusion and suffering is undercut immediately thereafter by the reinforcement of the fact that his surviving companions are still trapped there, and that each one of them will have to go through this in turn, and there's no escaping that fact. It's a mitigation, no more.

I was trying to keep the story brutal and lyrical at the same time, and to use this moment of suffering to illuminate both the ordeal and the heroism of the Elves who stayed loyal, and to place that episode into a context that showed how it related to the epic adventure, and to the entire mythology, in a consistent metaphysical fashion. I tried to do it without turning the violence into something indulged in for its own sake, and without whitewashing it out of squeamishness. The reader should come away from the story identifying with the protagonist deeply, not overwhelmed with sentimentality for him, and thinking about the problems/questions raised and solutions/connections suggested with an interest in answering them on her own. A true "passion narrative" after all is a story of witness to beliefs, not a story of suffering merely.

First and foremost, from beginning to end, I was trying to tell an exciting if grim story in an aesthetically-unified and attractive way, while at the same time packing in a lot of complicated backstory without disrupting the plot, with a consistent ethical foundation but a lot of moral gray areas acknowledged. As far as I can tell, the effort was successful, at least for most readers. If anyone has found it to be objectionably exploitative, I haven't heard from them.

(There is yet another irony in all this, which I only discovered slowly, writing Gifts and the related stories, as I was working with the source materials, and only after noticing various possible Great War parallels (read the play Journey's End by Sherriff if you haven't, it explains why I saw a WWI connection) and yet it is inescapable once one recognizes it — particularly for Anglo-Saxon poetry maniacs. That is to say, there are definite Christological parallels inherent in the figure of Finrod Felagund, subtly there in the Silmarillion, more explicit in the Lay of Leithian, and almost oppressively-so in the fragmentary writings and glosses on the mythology and general remarks on the nature of Story which Tolkien left behind. Sacrificial figures, corn kings, heroic war-leaders fighting the powers of darkness with a small core group of loyal followers (with or without one who betrays) — in retrospect, paging through the anthologies of Anglo-Saxon verse and lore that are never far from my desk, it's like seeing how all the strange and curious hills form the ruins of a fortification, when seen from the air…the only question is how come it took so long to recognize the patterns.)