Under the Cover: How a squiddy obsession became J.R. McConvey’s False Bodies

I. SQUID

At night, in the black ocean around the South Korean island of Jeju-do, the water is studded with thousands of white bulbs that fishermen string on their boats to attract squid. They are bright enough to be visible from the International Space Station, sparkling like constellations around the darkened sun of the volcanic island. Flying at night into Jeju City, where I lived for two years, I would look down at the lights and marvel at their number, wondering how many squid could possibly be lurking below the surface of the sea.

Squid are everywhere in Jeju: hanging to dry in the sun into chewy ojingo, cheerfully waving from the signs of restaurants serving them in spicy sauce, laid out in the markets in glistening rows to whisper of the deeps from which they came. Once, I wore a dried squid as a mask and paraded through the city streets as part of a traditional wedding ritual. The island’s iconic haenyeo (sea women) dive without tanks to harvest conch, abalone and other sea vittles. In Jeju, the ocean literally surrounds you like a great coiled tentacle, salty and reeking of kelp and shell and the must of darkness at depth.

By the time I returned to Canada from Jeju in 2008, the obsession had begun to curl its tendrils around my heart. I had become entangled in the slithering arms of Cephalopoda—the bigger the better—and have been ever since.

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The first inklings of False Bodies came in the wake of that, when a friend who knew about my squid thing sent me an article that blew my mind. On his blog The Skulls and the Stars, Gregory J. Gbur introduced me to one of the weirdest stories in the history of Canada, and maybe anywhere. It concerns the Reverend Moses Harvey, a clergyman, writer and amateur naturalist who, in 1873, acquired under odd circumstances the first physical specimen proving the material existence of the giant squid, which had until then still been feared as the devilish kraken of myth.

The story—which shifts its shape like ink in water depending on who tells it—says that one day a boy showed up at the reverend’s house at Devon Row, with strange goods to sell. In his wheelbarrow was a length of tentacle, purported to have been hacked off by a fisherman, Theophilus Picot, defending himself against an unprovoked attack by a genuine sea monster. Old Moses, a polymath who published hundreds of articles in his lifetime covering topics from nature to human progress, knew the value of what he was looking at. He quickly agreed to purchase the tentacle, understanding that he had acquired, for a bargain, the first physical proof of the existence of the giant squid—the arm of the Kraken itself.

The tale of Moses Harvey only gets more odd, with twists and turns that involve Harvard University, Barnum & Bailey, and a most astonishing photograph:

What you see above is the tentacled half of a SECOND giant squid specimen, captured mere days later in Logy Bay, hung from the bar of Harvey’s sponge bath and displayed in his parlor, looking like nothing less than a wailing, crucified god.

I knew within hours of reading this story that I would one day turn it into a book. The sections of False Bodies made up of Moses Kane’s diary are fictional, but they trace a parallel path to the one taken by the real reverend, and the writing was done with careful reference to Moses Harvey’s unique style, tone and outlook (resources for which I consulted with help from the archivists at Memorial University.)

If you, like me, become enchanted by the great plate-sized eye of Architeuthis and wish to learn more, here are some key texts that I looked to when researching the novel. I especially recommend Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost.

II. YETI

False Bodies includes a glossary of all the cryptids mentioned in the book. Cryptids are fun and come with great stories. But they are also iconic of the hope that we may not, in our human arrogance, have found a way to gnash through every natural mystery just yet. A thing I love about giant squid is that we know it exists but have not really learned to hunt it. The depths Archuteuthis haunts are not places humans can understand or control.

According to the WWF, Earth has seen an average 68 percent drop in mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations since 1970. Life is not in infinite supply, although men have always treated it as such. For every cryptid there are multiples of real creatures who could soon see their last standing member fall to earth. In his brilliant book The Once and Future World, J.B McKinnon writes that “extinction wipes out, point by point, the clues to the code of existence.” We will only ever know ourselves truly by looking at nature. Everything else is a false body. 

The protagonist of False Bodies is Eddie “The Yeti” Gesner (but don’t call him that). Eddie is a cryptozoologist or a monster detective, although his official title is Expert in Unfathomable Things. Eddie appeared, lumbering and damaged, from the literary wilderness that is the horror noir genre, to offer a framing for the historical story of Moses Kane and his devil fish. Eddie has key texts, too. His favourite book is Frankenstein. He has wandered through passages in William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel and tunnels in China Mieville’s Kraken. He inhabits the world of the hard-boiled detective in a morally null universe, but also of cosmic horror and classic science fiction adventure. (In a blurb, the author Pasha Malla described False Bodies as “a season of True Detective co-written by Jules Verne and Peter Benchley,” which I love.) Eddie nods at the world of H.P. Lovecraft, but doesn’t think much of that author’s nihilism. He’s a believer.

Yeti, kraken, dragon, mothman: we love our monsters, and Eddie is both a monster hunter and a monster in himself. If he was born of any writerly principle (and he would disapprove of my suggesting it) it is that the heart of a story is a character you want to spend time with, both for the writer and the reader. Eddie the Yeti is a crazy story, a folktale gone wrong, a hero and a reject, seven feet of pure undiluted ambiguity. He’s for the Creature in all of us.

III. NEWFOUNDLAND

On my first trip to Newfoundland, I landed in Happy Valley/Goose Bay and boarded a convoy of SUVs heading to Gros Morne. It was a documentary film shoot and we were to capture the majesty of the national park in music and art. But the landscape was not easily captured. When it turned on me, I felt the depth of the energies that flow through this gargantuan rock reaching into the Atlantic. The sign in Gros Morne cautions: do not underestimate the mountain.

Later, I visited the Torngat Mountains in Labrador, where every aspect of nature is amplified and huge, bright orange cliffs plunging vertical into the green northern ocean – to quote Seamus Heaney, “water and ground in their extremity.” We slept within a perimeter to keep out polar bears. One night I heard a wind that contained the voices of people and wolves and the land itself, which are all the same voice. One does not simply walk into Tongait, the place of spirits, and expect to leave unchanged.

The Avalon, of course, is softer. St. John’s is merry in a European way. It has colour and music and joy, but also the deepest history of any city in this construction called Canada. St. John’s treasures its stories. It is easy to find traces in the city of Moses Harvey and his contribution to natural science. Look only to The Rooms, which houses a rarity I have spent much time staring at: a whole, preserved giant squid specimen, stretched out in a tank several metres long.

The best story I lived in my time in St. John’s and surrounds involves the relative of that same Theophilus Picot said to have dismembered a meaty tentacle from a beast soon to be baptized with its true taxonomy. My colleague Sam and I drove out to Portugal Cover to see what squidly residue might still grow amid the lichens. Not much of that tale turned up, at first. Although one vista struck me deep enough to lodge there for a while. This is the photo that birthed the Harvey Queen, the doomed offshore rig of False Bodies:

A bit discouraged, we went to the diner for some lunch before heading back to St. John’s. We joked aloud if just asking someone might turn up a clue. When the waitress delivered our order, we asked, meekly, if she knew any Picots around here.

“Well, Gary,” she said, and proceeded to refer us to a particular house up a particular road where we might knock to see if Gary Picot was at home and not out on the water, fishing. Our luck: after a couple reticent knocks on the door, a man opened it, short in stature but tough as iron, with a bushy moustache and twinkling eyes. We explained who we were and why we were here: in a word, Kraken.

From inside the house came a voice: “Who is it, Gary?”

Gary Picot eyed us for just a second and smiled. “Dunno,” he yelled back. “Could be a coupla axe murderers.”

Then Gary Picot, indeed a descendant of the fisherman Theophilus and no stranger to the story of his encounter with big squid, invited us in for tea in his kitchen, where we talked for an hour or more about the tale and about fishing and life, trading stories as one does.

I promised to come back if the book ever got published. Hello, Gary! I’m on my way.

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J.R. McConvey’s stories have been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and the Matrix Lit Pop award. His work has appeared in the Malahat Review, Joyland, EVENT, the Puritan, the New Quarterly, carte blanche, filling Station, and the Feathertale Review. He is the winner of the 2016 Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction.