⚖ Fifty Shades of Morally Grey
Moral ambiguity and the vampires...
Greetings from Newcastle.
First of all, I must clarify, as most of my readers are US-based, in the UK, we spell the colour (color) grey, rather than gray. Hopefully, if you’ve been reading my work, you’ll know I’m not a terribly sloppy typist, and that all my stories feature UK spellings.
Doctor Blessing’s Curse was born in a difficult time. I can’t share the bulk of the details, as that wouldn’t be fair to other people around me back then, but it’s safe to say I was in a dark headspace. More accurately, I was on the upswing from that darker time. My creative energy, depleted for a while, was on the rise.
While reading The Victorian House1, by Judith Flanders2, I was triggered to write the story. The book gives a wonderful walkthrough of a middle-class Victorian home, structured around life’s experiences starting with birth (the nursery), through to death (out onto the street), taking us through all the rooms and rituals in between. When I read about the negative attitude of doctors towards midwifery, the initial seed was planted. I imagined a doctor and midwife clashing during the difficult delivery of a child. Back in the 19th century, doctors served several generations of a single family, for if he was your mother’s doctor, he may have delivered you, then tended to you throughout your childhood and adolescence. He may have then continued to treat your children later in his career. So the idea that, of all things, a woman! might disrupt this system, was unthinkable.
And somehow, from that short passage in a book about Victorian homes, The Victorian Vampire Chronicles were born.
But let’s think about that little piece of history for a moment. Was it wrong for doctors to want to preserve a living from their trade? Was it wrong for women to step into medical territory?
Doctors certainly meant to preserve the health of as many people as they could, and had trained in their field…no need for them to starve while they worked. A similar argument plays out in the UK today, where junior doctors recently took industrial action over pay and conditions. Some see it as holding the NHS to ransom. Some see it as fair game - not everyone can perform a doctor’s duties, after all - and saddled with years of student debt, shouldn’t they be rewarded for their commitment to saving lives? And of course, midwives are a crucial part of the health service in our time, so we know it was not wrong for woman to perform that duty in the 19th century, for who knows women’s bodies better than women? And women’s bodies are still politicised - particularly in the US, where reproductive rights are hotly contested, and over which religious ideology and women’s rights play a sort of moral tug-of-war.
What are we Prepared to Tolerate for a Net Gain?
In all things, we tend to feel one way or the other, but fiction invites us to play in the grey areas. Sometimes it tricks us into thinking things we wouldn’t normally if we just looked at a headline. If a man kills another man, we’d say that was wrong, we’d say the killer is a bad guy. But if a man kills another man to protect a secret that will save hundreds or thousands of lives, it starts to get a little less clear. That moral ambiguity kicks in and we start to question what if?
How many animals have suffered and died while products and medicines were tested? How many humans - how many babies and children - would have suffered and died if the animals hadn’t?
Big Pharma rakes in billions of dollars from slinging medicine, including opioids that turned regular working people into junkies - thanks, Big Pharma. But HIV and AIDS are not the death sentence they once were - thanks, Big Pharma! And should they make so much money off it? Well, if investors couldn’t profit, they wouldn’t invest, so who would make the cures then?
We see these morally grey situations play out every day, and back in 2010, when I first wrote Doctor Blessing’s Curse, there were different scenarios playing out across the news, but they were just as grey. Regime-change wars…well, it was a nasty regime with a horrible dictator…but the country was stable…Wikileaks (yay, Freedom of Speech… but oh shit, military personnel are at greater risk)…Bank bailouts (yay, the economy hasn’t completely collapsed…but oh shit, all these people have lost their jobs and homes, and the banks who caused it all and just got bailed out snapped up those properties)… And on and on it went, and still goes.
Written in a morally ambiguous time, even the title Doctor Blessing’s Curse is a juxtaposition of good and ill, so that’s a hint right away that we’re heading into the grey. And if that wasn’t enough, the tagline asks: From a monster, a miracle? What are we prepared to tolerate for a net gain? Who or what is the monster? And who decides? Who should decide?
And just as the whole series was spawned by a single innocuous historical factoid, the moral ambiguity of Doctor Blessing’s Curse expanded out into a series populated by characters riddled with internal conflicts. You see, vampires are an evil bunch, murdering people left, right, and centre for their own survival…but what if you could harness their healing abilities? What if you could confer the benefits of vampirism onto the needy? You might have to crack a few eggs along the way, though… What are you prepared to tolerate—prepared to do—for a net gain? Could you turn the monstrous into the miraculous?
Join me in the Grey
Fourteen years after its initial launch, I’ve revamped Doctor Blessing’s Curse, and like Scattered Ashes, and The Seance before it, the story is getting the Limited Edition paperback treatment. 100 copies will be produced, and bundled together with a matching bookmark and postcard. To secure your copy, back the Kickstarter campaign now. The campaign ends on 11th December 2024, so it’s best to…
I was so impressed with her book, that I took the name Judith Flanders and split it across two characters: Francis Flanders and Judith Cloonan.