Planting the Seeds of the Garden of Fiends

Please welcome Mark Matthews for a return guest post. Mark, a gifted, engaging writer shares his journey from addiction to recovery. He is now the author and contributing author of many well-received books, including Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror.

From an early age, books shaped who I was. Writers were heroes to emulate. I wanted to be Thoreau, I wanted to be Mark Twain. I wanted to be Jack Kerouac.

There was something inside me that only stories could reach, music-only literature could play.

A similar reaction occurred when I had my first drink. The warm confidence, the blissful contentment. A union with God. All my curses lifted, all my deficits erased. It was love at first sip. Other drugs soon followed. I said “no” to nothing, “yes” to everything.

The Drinking Days

Pretty soon, I needed it to function. Next, I started drinking alone. Getting shakes. Sweats. I went on drug binges and mixed drinking with cocaine, acid, or crystal meth every chance I could. I needed substances to feel normal, otherwise, I had perpetual flu-like symptoms and was intensely angry and bitter at the world. Finally, I didn’t care if I died. I was quite certain that, due to drugging and drinking, I would die before I was 30 years old. 

Unfortunately, I nearly proved myself right. By 23 years old, I had alcoholic hepatitis of the liver, a swollen pancreas, and my stomach was bleeding. I was shitting blood (sorry, I know that’s gross to read). More than once I went to detox to sober up after the pain got too much. Then I would drink as soon as they released me. When money got tight and I needed $1.89 for a half-pint of vodka, I visited car washes. That was the best place to gather returnable cans.

Crazy thing was, the more disgusting I became, the more I needed to delude myself about who I really was. In my twisted mind, I was some misunderstood genius who society hadn’t found a place for, therefore drinking was my only crutch to live with lesser mortals. Truth was, I was a pathetic lump of flesh.

Finding Recovery

A turning point came when, rather than just detox, I finally succumbed. I went to residential treatment for three weeks. I didn’t want to go, but I had no other options. My body could not take any more liquor in it. My spirit was drenched with despair.

I remember sitting in the treatment center, unable to stop the tears, and looking out the window with plans to leave, but I had no place to go. Instead, I stayed put, endured the pain of living, and found some humility and some courage. Each day sober felt like a miracle. I learned so much about why I was doing what I was doing, and how to stop it. Most importantly, I decided my life was worth saving.

No way in hell did I ever think I would go back to college to help other addicts, but that’s what I did. I got a master’s in counseling, became a certified addictions counselor, and worked in many different treatment centers. My curse had changed to my calling.

And I returned to my desire to write. 

Becoming an Author

Once I got sober, I started writing again. Writing out the darkness I had experienced was incredibly therapeutic, for if you want to tell the truth, best to do so by making up a story.  I wrote one novel, Stray, which was based on a treatment center where I worked that shared a parking lot with an animal shelter. Next, I wrote MILK-BLOOD, which tackled poverty, urban despair, and heroin addiction with a supernatural slant.

Many readers were shocked by the darkness in the book, but the crazy thing is, it was all true (even if it didn’t happen) and much of the darkness in the book was actually understated. After writing the sequel, All Smoke Rises, I decided to reach out to other authors of dark fiction to see how they would tackle the subject of addiction.

The blog post for ‘addiction horror’ received over ten thousand hits. Hundreds of submissions followed, and I had to boil these down to eight pieces, largely of long fiction and novellas. I can’t promise you’ll like this collection, but I can promise it is different. In scope, in length of stories, in content. I’m incredibly proud of what’s inside since addiction and horror seem a perfect fit. It takes a work of horror to fully explore the devastation of addiction.

Addicts and Vampires

Addicts, in a certain sense, are not that different than vampires: they live within society but hide their true nature while they feed off the living, siphoning their money, their sanity, always safest in the shadows. They feel cursed with their affliction but unable to stop the compulsion to suck the blood out of others. 

The blood they suck out is usually their family’s, who suffer as if an evil spirit has taken over their loved one. I can’t help but think of the movie, The Exorcist, perhaps the most terrifying horror movie ever made, as an analogy of a desperate, powerless mother trying to save her daughter from addiction.

My own entry in the Garden of Fiends is the story of such a parent who will do anything it takes to stop his daughter from relapsing. Unfortunately, he goes too far. Soon there are addicts all over the city of Detroit who are trying to trigger his daughter.

Despite the despair of these works, there is some hope. Hope is always there, no matter how many times an addict relapses. NA meetings are full of walking miracles, living proof that while a heart still beats recovery is possible.

But no addict escapes without some with some battle scars. This is the story of some of their battles.

Mark Matthews is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a licensed professional counselor who has worked in behavioral health for over 20 years. He is the author of On the Lips of Children, All Smoke Rises, and Milk-Blood, which has been optioned for a full-length feature film. He is the editor of the anthology Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror with stories by; Kealan Patrick Burke, Jessica McHugh, Max Booth III, Glen Krisch, John FD Taff, Johann Thorsson, Mark Matthews, Jack Ketchum. Matthews has run 13 marathons and has two running based books, The Jade Rabbit and Chasing the Dragon, also available on amazon. He lives near Detroit with his wife and two daughters.