This chapter is a sneak peek into my five-year obsession, the rest of which will only appear in print. I am in the final stretch of editing The Luckfell before querying literary agents. I hope you enjoy this opening of my dark fantasy novel, and consider following along on the road to publication!

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	     Death stalks you. 
	     Death stalks me. 
	     We know not when,
	     Until the sudden clack of jaws plunges us into black.
	     We know only then.

	     Except Pyotr Rōvlah. He watched Death approach—step by step, day after day—lusting for him. Pyotr was meant to die. He didn’t know how or by whom, but he knew when. 
	     Down to the very day.
	     Yes, yes, I tried to kill Pyotr. And all I gained for my treachery is the incessant itch of this amputated leg. No amount of wine can drown out the itching nor these nightmares. Perhaps the terrors would fade if only you, my rather vocal townsfolk, would stop feeding the ever-growing rumors threatening to overrun our home. These walls of my imprisonment are rather thin, you know, and I hear every bit of your jabbering.
	     So, enough. Enough of these rumors borne by wool-spinners and wood-cutters.
	     This is my testament to the suffering courage of Pyotr and to the stench of my cowardice. It was Pyotr who saved me. Not my life. Me. 
	     It’s arrogant to think I can capture this man—The Luckfell—in ink. He who was a shield for cowards and a pawn of monsters. He who became prophet, and in turn, our champion. You and I will suffer the truth together. 
	     See the truth: Pyotr was and always will be counted among the Luckfell. The Luckfell—those disdained and hungry and dying people—so crushed by accumulated misfortune that mere passing contact with them can infect even the most fortunate. The contagiously unlucky, of whom Pyotr might be considered foremost, each waiting for the lightning strike of undeniable luck to rescue them from lifelong misery.
	     You know him as the Godmarked. But we knew him as Barrenborn, the only child to an aged, barren couple from whom he stole the earned tranquility of old age. Still, they loved him well, that very love blinding him to his misfortune as Luckfell. Even if he could have, he wouldn’t have improved his mother’s watery cabbage vayētsa. Nor would he have swapped the tough muskox liver, deer heart, and elk tongue for the meat his father sold to the few customers desperate enough to associate with them. Even after the food was eaten and his stomach still rumbled, Pyotr never complained. By some last dredge of luck, we guessed, from his da’s former renown as an eagle-eyed archer they narrowly escaped starvation.
	     Like so many, Pyotr remained joyfully ignorant of his dire circumstances for many years. Like you and I, he lived a lie. A lie that began to slip away in his seventh year when he met a girl.
	     Long, long before he spoke face-to-face with Death.

	     It was the day the lilac pears ripened. 
	     The free food beckoned the Luckfell. As the waters of the River Umal rushed south, a weaving line of people left Pevyatá to climb north, deeper into the Valley. Harvest passed quickly with every family carrying as many pears as their pockets and sacks could fit. Not a child or hobbling grand-da left the orchard unsatisfied. Of the children, few had a more perpetual grin than Pyotr. He clutched a fruit in each hand, fending off the urge to stuff his face every few paces. The shallow teeth marks he left on each pear helped avoid any confusion between his and those his ma and da picked. Back down wooded hollows, across the bridge above white rapids, and through the Rivergate they wound. Pyotr skipped at the heels of his parents, who clasped hands and joined in the spontaneous lullaby being sung.
	     It was crisp and bright—the kind of day that followed a storm—perfect weather for reclining on one’s doorstep. There, Pyotr watched the titanic clouds envelop the Valley’s mountain peaks. 
	     Long anticipated, Pyotr took his first bite. He knocked his knobby knees together at the sweetness that ran down his throat. Inside, his ma whistled. The smell of her baked pear stew wafted through the open door and filled Pyotr’s nose. 
	     A half-eaten pear in hand, its lavender stickiness down to the elbow, Pyotr took another bite and smacked his lips. He looked back at the clouds.
	     A black dot appeared in the sky. Pyotr squinted, blinked, and—
	     The dot smacked his forehead and stuck there.
	     Across the street, a girl howled with laughter. 
	     Lothi sat atop her roof, propped up on an elbow. She dug out another seed from her fruit and threw it. 
	     The projectile missed Pyotr, ricocheted off the step, and skittered into his home. Slack-jawed, Pyotr watched the older girl toss her honey-colored hair. She smirked down and pitched another seed. 
	     Finally understanding the threat to his hearth and home, Pyotr leapt up and struck back—hurling his entire half-eaten fruit. The pear sailed clear over Lothi into the street beyond. Pyotr scowled. She had made him lose half his meal. Yet by unlucky chance and a wet splat, someone in the street over gave a startled cry. The outraged yells sent Pyotr and Lothi screaming in laughter. 
	     Lothi dropped to the muddy street in front of Pyotr and dashed down the road. From the alley came the heavy bootsteps of his pear-smeared victim. Pyotr yelped and chased after the girl. 
	     Love is a swift sunrise for the young. So, naturally, by day’s end, Pyotr knew he would marry Lothi. What was three years age difference? But Lothi roared in laughter when he said so.
	     “I’m gonna ascend.” Lothi beamed as she boosted Pyotr onto her roof. “Leave my Luckfell name behind. Marry a rich man. Live in a big house with a bedroom and a kitchen right in the middle of town square!”
	     Pyotr frowned. But they lived so close to the woods; why move further into town? And what was so bad about living across from him? Pyotr liked it here. He liked his name…
	     Pyotr scrunched his face. “Then I’ll get rich.”
	     Lothi giggled, then became lost in the sunset dipping below the westerly mountains. “Soon. Luck’ll find me soon.” 
	     Months tumbled by.
	     They laughed among a ring of newly-bloomed birch. Knee-deep in the river, Lothi showed Pyotr the perfect place to find and skip rocks across the Umal. As leaves fell, Pyotr taught Lothi where to find and how to climb his favorite cedar. They talked, hidden in the tunnels dug beneath the deep snow.
	     Years rolled happily along. 
	     Bobbing high in his cedar, Pyotr pointed out a bushy shadow—a leaflynx in the next tree over. The forest-green feline shimmered in the speckled sunlight as it prowled above a white hare. Lothi smiled through her yawn and reclined against a branch. On days like today, her mischievousness sometimes melted away in the sleepy heat of the day. It had today.
	     “Maybe…” Lothi whispered.
	     “Maybe, what?” Pyotr swung his legs, idly.
	     She looked in his eyes with none of her usual playfulness—only warmth. “Maybe I will be your wife.”
	     Pyotr nearly tipped off the branch. It was a moment he had waited for. It was a moment he would come to mourn. 
	     Only weeks later, Lothi awoke with nightfever. Knowing little, Pyotr worried little. Each day after his morning and afternoon chores, he visited Lothi fully expecting to find her darning in the chair her da crafted before his untimely death, before her and her ma’s luck fall. But each day, Pyotr rushed across the dirt lane, poked his head into her door, and—there she lay on her stacked quilts. Her breaths were shallow, but she still smiled at his arrival. He would kneel beside her, lay pale meadowflowers atop her blanket, and rock side to side. 
	     One terrible day, Pyotr’s ma woke him and sent him to sit with Lothi. No chores. That was why, when he opened Lothi’s door, he knew she’d be bedridden. He sat beside her on the dirty floor as rain pattered the wood-slat roof. Talking pained her, so, he kept quiet, and he didn’t want to wake her when she fell asleep. And sleep, she did. But Pyotr sat patient, and moved only to fidget or feed the dying fire in the wood-burning stove.
	     Sometime in the afternoon, her green eyes snapped open.
	     Her fevered, spotted face quivered. She noticed Pyotr and reached for him. As if fearing her body might sink to a grave below the floorboards, Lothi squeezed his hand, eyes clamped shut. Her touch was damp and hot, but Pyotr held her hand between his, willing her to feel better. 
	     Captive tears escaped down her face. “I thought I died.” Her whisper was barely audible through cracked lips. “I felt you beside me. There was something I wanted to tell you… I can’t remember what. But I couldn’t. I told my eyes to open, but they wouldn’t. I tried to lift my arm, but it didn’t hear me. I… was trapped.”
	     “I have nightmares too.” Pyotr swallowed his fear. “You’ll feel better soon. So soon.”
	     Lothi squeezed his hand and smiled—a fragile, beautiful thing.
	     “Had we more time, we would have been happy toge—” She coughed up blood.
	     And together, they wept.
	     After Lothi fell back into a fitful slumber, Pyotr walked home in a daze. He crumpled onto his makeshift cot of stacked-quilts and lay with his back to his ma, silent. Evening came, and with it his da from a fruitless hunt. Pyotr’s da, Otric Rōvlah, wormed his way out of his sopping muskox flannel and kissed ma on the cheek.
	     Pyotr refused dinner to lay in bed. Paces away, his parents sat on the floor at their low table, whispering. His ma pled for something; his da listened in his reticent manner. Pyotr stared at the wall’s filthy slats, lulled to sleep by the incessant rain.
	     Eventually, Pyotr awoke, threw his blanket off, and slipped his boots on. But before he could slip out, his da stood with a grunt, and said, “You and me. We’re going.” 
	     “But…” Pyotr looked to his ma. She nodded and smiled weakly. 
	     His da lifted his half-dried flannel from its hook next to the crackling stove and yanked it over his grizzled beard, then shoved his feet back into his muddy boots. “I’ll be wet and cold too, so wrap up and don’t complain. C’mon. Hup!”
	     Pyotr left behind the few comforts of home for the soggy dimness of the streets. He had always seen their town of Pevyatá as a fireplace, either it lived and danced in brilliance or else looked like a graveyard of charred wood and filth. In this rain, Pyotr knew nothing filthier existed in the whole world. The deluge turned their unpaved roads in the outer quarters of Pevyatá into mud pits fit only for swine. Pyotr slopped behind his da, ragged clothes soaked. A step and a shiver, all the way across town. He bit back his questions. They shivered through the haphazard lanes of the gray Luckfell neighborhoods into the wide cobblestone roads nearer the town square. Massive buildings rose up—some high as two-stories—their paneling blue, red, and yellow dull in the downpour.
	     In the town square, Pyotr fell behind his da, for the window of the codexika glowed a flickering orange. Its mysteries, those dusty books and odorous brews, prickled Pyotr’s skin. But no mystery drew Pyotr’s gaze as much as the codexika’s dweller and caretaker, silhouetted in the fogged orange of the window.
	     The Mudryyac.
	     Wiseman.
     	     Otric Rōvlah stopped before a monstrous two-story structure and sighed before he trudged up its porch steps. Eager for dry ground, Pyotr leapt up the steps and ducked under the rain-catch. His da knocked on the door as Pyotr took in the building’s seamless yellow planks and its dark blue trim. Beside the entrance, a wide, fogged window radiated light and laughter.
	     An old woman opened the door. Pyotr hurried to his da’s side and smiled up at her. The woman scowled, snapping something at his da, though Pyotr didn’t catch it. She spat at their feet and slammed the door. Pyotr laughed as his da bent down to wipe the gob off his small boot. His da’s obsession with cleaning spittle off him never failed to amuse Pyotr—only one of a string of funny habits his da had.
	     “But the rain, da. It’ll wash off.”
	     “Doesn’t matter.”
	     His da straightened and whipped his soaked hair from his face. He huffed, then approached the huge window. With all the gingerliness of a poor man touching something precious, his da tapped on the foggy glass. Then, he shouted. “Gavric! Can we speak? Just for a moment or two.”
	     Pyotr gawked at his da. Ma was the loud one…
	     Inside, the laughter ceased. Chairs squeaked. Unseen eyes peered at him. Right then, Pyotr realized he wanted to leave. But Otric stayed, so Pyotr did as well.
	     His da yelled again. “A little girl, no more than fourteen years. She’s sick, Gavric. Dying.”
	     Lothi? 
	     Pyotr looked to his da, confused. Their eyes met, and his da smiled an encouragement. With that, Pyotr’s hope returned and he smiled back. Emboldened, his da tapped again. “I know… Well, I know we haven’t spoken in some years. But this girl. She needs help. If we could talk for—”
	     The door snapped open. 
	     Under its frame stood a man Otric had warned Pyotr to avoid many times.
	     His uncle, Gavric Halvor, had a trim, square build and a beard to match, shaped to granite-perfection. His not-yet-white hair flopped nicely to the side, greased and styled. His leather lounge coat gleamed in the house’s smoky light, its bronze buttons like hot embers.
	     Pyotr had never hated Uncle Gavric, even if he feared him a little. Yes, he disliked that Gavric had told lies about his ma and da. Yes, those lies resulted in his parents’ luck fall at his untimely birth. But was being Luckfell so bad? Pyotr didn’t mind the inversion of his surname; anyways, he felt more like a Rōvlah than a Halvor. Pyotr liked their home. The woods were close. He supposed he did get really hungry sometimes. But hunger never killed anyone, not anyone he knew. 
	     “Gavric…” Otric’s face had blanched. Pyotr took his da’s hand and felt it tremble.
	     His uncle’s nostrils flared.
	     “I’m sorry. For” —Otric gestured to nothing and everything, his hands lost in the air— “this. There’s a girl. A friend of my son’s. She has nightfever, but with aid…”
	     “You’re worried? For a child?” Words colder than the rain.
	     “Only her mother lives,” Otric said. “She works tirelessly.”
	     Gavric shook his head. “I ca—” 
	     But Otric stuttered on, almost incoherent. “One visit! Just one. The apothecarian has—”
	     “I will not—”
	     Still his da rambled. Pyotr rocked from foot to foot. To Pyotr, his da had never felt so small, so afraid. And that frightened Pyotr. His da hunted bears and crimson elk. Otric Rōvlah was supposed to be strong. Fearless.
	     Gavric looked down his proud nose at Otric, full lips curled, letting his brother stammer. Eventually, his da lost the words altogether. Pyotr sniffled and wiped away tears.
	     “A decade has passed, Otric, with not a word spoken between us.” Gavric stood tall, taller than his older brother. “But I guess peace can only last a season.”
	     His da opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Gavric raised his eyebrows, allowing Otric another attempt. But Otric’s tongue seemed stuck. Gavric sighed, deep exhaustion carving lines in his face. “So. Nothing has changed. Even now, you can’t face me.” Gavric closed his eyes and let his face relax into something deeper than exhaustion. “Leave me be.”
	     “But the girl,” his da spat out.
	     “I don’t believe you.” Gavric’s reply was flat and calm.
	     From behind Gavric peeked a blond boy. His brown eyes, his square face—they looked like Pyotr’s. He clutched a knife to his chest, but a knife of wood, carved and painted. Pyotr gaped at the oddity. How could his uncle live in this house but be unable to provide his youngest son, Pyotr’s cousin, a real knife? Even Pyotr had his own. His da had given it to him years before to help with butchering. 
	     Otric put his hand on Pyotr’s shoulder. It squeezed, firm and frustrated. His da wouldn’t give up trying to help Lothi, and neither would he. Pyotr breathed in the courage. 
	     “Her name’s Lothi.” Pyotr wished his voice was deeper. When his uncle met his gaze, his voice shook worse. So instead, he looked at his blond cousin, Lōgav, and said, “She lives across the way and her hair’s gold—like yours—and she’s sick.”
	     Lōgav blinked at having been addressed, looked to Gavric, and then dashed back down the hall. Pyotr forced his eyes back to his tall uncle. “Please help, Jhun Halvor.” Pyotr bowed his head and glanced to the side, hoping for a smile from his da to tell him he had used the honorific Jhun correctly.
	     Gavric leveled a hard look at his brother, a hand in his lounge coat, the other braced against the doorframe. “You recall my promise, do you not? The oath I swore thirty years ago, in which I bound all my luck?” Emotion sparked in Gavric’s voice and rose into a blaze. “I cannot, I will not ever aid you. If the raising of a single finger eased your suffering, still I wouldn’t lift mine! And yet you’ve” —his throat constricted for a moment— “you’ve brought a child to buy my sympathy! Is there no end to the irony?”
	     But Gavric’s cold-hearted rebuke melted under the sudden fury of Pyotr’s da. It radiated like a storm of heat.
	     “Idiot! Yana thought if you saw him…”
	     “Don’t speak of her. My old friend was a fool to wed you.” Gavric gestured wildly to the street. “Even if this sick girl does exist, you wouldn’t see to her betterment. You’d only see your reflection in a drunkard’s tankard. Now,” Gavric seized the door and began to close it, “let me alone.” 
	     Pyotr’s da threw his shoulder into the closing door and shoved his way inside. Anger, a true anger Pyotr had never seen—the least of all in his da—took hold of Otric. The hallway’s floor and walls trembled from it. The brothers shouted, hands shoving, bodies jostling.
	     Terrified and confused, Pyotr followed his da. He shrank before their violence.
	     “You bitter man—”
	     “What in the heelspit do you think you’re—”
	     “Stop cowering and listen!”
	     Men swept into the hallway from the adjacent sitting room, each possessed by an insanity greater than the last. Their shouts cracked louder than the thunder outside, their movements animalistic. 
	     To Pyotr, they were madmen. 
	     He ran, but his feet left the ground as an enormous fist seized the back of his shirt. Pyotr screamed, the distinction between floor and ceiling lost to him as the man jerked him about. 
	     As a flood, the mob carried Pyotr outside like driftwood.
	     Hot tears ran down Pyotr’s face, his lips quivering in mute confusion. A band of dark giants surrounded him under the rain-catch—Gavric nowhere to be seen—their eyes all stabbing and chests all heaving. Two of them squeezed his arms like vices, one old and one young. The younger of them—a red-haired man with a nose like a troll—pinched Pyotr’s neck to thrust his head forward till his raven hair hung over his eyes. 
	     What had he done? 
	     He didn’t know. So, through the pain, Pyotr whimpered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But the red-haired troll’s fingernails only dug deeper. At the edge of Pyotr’s tear-filled vision, a huge shadow stood nose-to-nose with his da. “Bold today, eh, Luckfell?” breathed the shadow. His da said nothing. Nor did he move. Pyotr stammered—his da hung limp, held upright by men gripping him under the arms.
	     “Da! What’s wro—” The claws about Pyotr’s neck constricted and forced his head further down. The sting of fingernails contorted Pyotr’s face and choked his voice into a high-pitched squeal. Pyotr gasped when the cruel hand relented. He flinched—but it was only his tormentor’s ghostly plume of breath evaporating over his shoulder. Pyotr shivered like never before—cold, everywhere, his blood hardening into ice with each passing moment.
	     The shadow in front of his da reared—
	     Crack! 
	     Blood splattered Pyotr’s shoes. 
	     Crack! 
	     Otric’s head wrenched back.
	     Crack! 
	     Pyotr blinked through tears, nausea on his tongue. 
	     The men released his da so that he slid down the porch’s steps, a crumpled mass of limbs on the cobblestone road—one of his legs still propped up on the steps. 
	     The red-haired man released Pyotr and stomped after his da. As if dead, his da lay in the downpour. The red-haired troll crouched over him like some territorial beast and bared his teeth. It was a scowl of a child whose game had ended prematurely. Like someone had stolen his plaything.
	     So, the red-haired man’s shadowed eyes came to rest on Pyotr, instead. 
	     Thunder crashed. Light bathed everything in a momentary starkness of whites and blacks. Pyotr shook in fright and the man refused to look away.
	     “Brex. What are you doing?” one of the men called.
	     But Pyotr heard nothing through the predatory stare that froze him in ice. When the echoes of the thunder blast dispersed down the Valley, the red man finally released Pyotr and looked at Otric. The red-haired man shrugged and climbed a single stair. But instead of returning to the house, he jumped off the step, twisted in the air with a knee brought high, and crushed his boot’s wooden heel into his da’s leg—the leg still propped on the steps.
	     A hollow snap bent Otric’s leg to the road, while his knee, calf, and boot stuck crooked into the air for all the men on the porch to see, Pyotr among them.
	     Pyotr shrieked.
	     His left hand whipped back and jerked his captor’s beard. The old man swore, then screamed as Pyotr pulled him close enough to bite his ear.
	     Still shrieking, hands lifted Pyotr and hurled him off the porch.
	     Pyotr wheeled across stone. His body was numb. He couldn’t breathe. His chest and neck convulsed for air. Droplets fell from the gray expanse, finding their end on Pyotr’s face. He flinched as they struck. In a rush, air flooded his lungs. He gasped and dropped his head to the side. 
	     His da lay paces away. 
	     Scarlet rivers traced his da’s weathered face and darkened his mustache. Blood was among the hardest stains to remove—so Pyotr was reminded each time his da brought him on hunts. But this was his da’s blood.
	     Pyotr pushed his small body up and crawled to his da’s side, crying. The sound burnt in his throat. It rose to a wail as he looked helplessly upon the brutal bend in his da’s leg. Pyotr hardly breathed through his groans and sobs. His da wasn’t responding. And no help came. The men had gone. Talk and shouts flowed through the fogged glass. Yet no help came. 
	     At the soft glow in the window, some unnameable thing inside Pyotr shifted. Fear to fury. He dug his fingers into the street, picking, straining, yanking out a cobblestone. 
	     He stood and flung the stone. It banged uselessly against the window and fell to the porch. Pyotr dropped to his knees and dug free another stone. He was crying again, but it burned harsher and hotter than before.
	     Nothing could pierce his anger.
	     Not the voice.
	     Not the touch.
	     Only the music.
	     At first, it was only a deep resonance in his chest. Then, the hummed notes overcame his cries. Pyotr knew the song. It was of the fishermen, the hymn they sang as they trudged home with empty baskets.
	     This song had always excited him. Its odd rhythms crashed and tumbled, its sharp melodies sticking him like needles. Vibration smothered Pyotr. The song rattled in his ears, warmed his nose, melted on his tongue.
	     Pyotr looked back, breathing hard. A massive man stood behind him, hand flat against Pyotr’s back.
	     The Mudryyac. 
	     Wiseman.
	     Heat blazed from the mountainous man’s hand. Pyotr gasped—his spine, his ribs set afire. White flames coursed up his neck, then ravaged his mind. 
	     His white knuckles went a calm pink as his anger seeped back up his veins, sucked out like poison. The song cut him, its fiery blade carving him up. Like a snowflake on a warm day snuffs itself out before one’s eyes, so Pyotr’s anger ceased. There one moment, gone the next. 
	     Pyotr blinked free a tear. He stood before his uncle’s manor without pain or anger.
	     The Mudryyac—round in the belly and broader-shouldered than everyone else Pyotr knew—winked at him and continued humming. As the last notes fell, his huge eyes narrowed like a wolf’s. He formed a white-fleshed fist. As he rose to his feet, his beaver-cloak fell heavy and wet around his shoulders, smile replaced by a gritted snarl. He took an enormous step towards Gavric’s house—so big Pyotr thought his thighs ought to shake the street.
	     But the Mudryyac stopped.
	     He turned back to Pyotr with closed eyes, and exhaled, deep and long. 
	     “Come on, boy,” the Mudryyac boomed. “Let’s get you both home.”
	     Pyotr bent over his da. Raindrops made his da’s face twitch, but other than that, he looked dead. But… he had to be fine. He was fine. If the Rōvlahs could do anything, they could survive. 
	     They always had. 
	     The Mudryyac pulled his da up so that his broken leg didn’t touch ground. Without asking the way, the wiseman led Pyotr away through the rain, bearing his father’s broken body.
	     As they walked, Pyotr looked back. Through the rain, above the porch, and in the window a tall silhouette looked back. There, Gavric towered in his comfort. At Pyotr’s sight, his uncle drew nearer to the windowpane, features cutting through the fogged glass: that upraised chin, that full face, and those dead eyes all set on Pyotr. He put a forearm on the window and leaned, watching, ensuring that Pyotr left.
	     Across cobblestones, into mud, they approached home. Pyotr should have felt thankful. They were alive; they had been helped. Instead, he glared into the dark clouds above.
	     Lothi died the next day. 
	     She departed our Valley surrounded by only Pyotr and his parents, and her widowed, now childless mother.
	     Otric Rōvlah’s leg never fully healed. He limped forever after. 
	     Yet with pained practice, Pyotr drew his da’s bowstring by spring. He alone staved off starvation, week after grueling week, bringing home hares and squirrels and leaflynx and even his first crimson elk. 
	     Years dragged on and on and on.
	     Always Pyotr remembered that day.
	     Yes, Lothi’s honey-hair and crooked smile faded from his memory, despite how tightly he clung to them. Yes, after a decade, Pyotr wept upon realizing he could no longer recall Lothi’s face.
	     But still his memory held true of that day. Of his da’s bloodied face and the gentle kindness of the Mudryyac. 
	     Above all, Pyotr remembered Gavric’s eyes, dark behind fogged glass. For those were the eyes, and that was the day that taught Pyotr what it was to be Luckfell.

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Share The Illuminating Dark

Once upon a time, a professor peered with yellowed eyes from his ivory tower upon the valleys, mountains, deserts, and prairielands of western literature. And finding none to challenge him, he enthroned himself above all literature as final arbiter. Thus, he cursed everyone under his tyranny who crafted stories of sci-fi, mystery, and fantasy, forbidding them from writing in such genres. Bold beyond warrant, he then boasted of his ban with a public declaration he named “against genre.”

This despotic essay has taken up the better part of a month for Zack and me to understand and rebut in this three-part article. In Part One, we challenged this literary professor’s many assumptions. In Part Two, we laid out five distinct advantages that genre fiction (particularly sci-fi/fantasy) provides the writer. In this, our essay’s third and final part, we look at the accusations laid against genre fiction, deliver one last killing blow, and demonstrate how everyone—even a literary professor—can foster a better, healthier perspective on genre.

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ADDRESSING THE CRITICISM

{Cairn}

Clearly, genre fiction has its critics. The punches come from every angle. By golly, even my mother-in-law, who almost exclusively reads self-help books, once scoffed in my face, “I don’t have time for that nonsense,” as if forgetting that I write such “nonsense.”

Here’s a hard truth many fans of genre don’t like to consider: what if some criticisms are valid? Our literary professor points out three: 1) excessive worldbuilding that wastes time, especially within short stories, 2) flat, colorless characters recycled from overused tropes, and 3) escapism from the difficulties of our world as evidenced by withdrawal from human-to-human interactions.

First, let’s talk about worldbuilding. The criticism goes something like this: lots of space in fantasy and sci-fi novels is taken up by exposition of the fictional world, a luxury short fiction cannot generally afford. This is solid argumentation… if not for Poe, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Dick, Le Guin, and Gaiman, who expose that the real lesson to be learned is economic worldbuilding. As tired (and sometimes unhelpful) as the advice show, don’t tell is, speculative fiction authors would be wise to heed its wisdom regarding worldbuilding. Worldbuilding sets the scene, but it is not the scene. Worldbuilding anchors the story, but it is not the story. Worldbuilding enables the act of writing, but it is not writing. It’s not uncommon for fantasy/sci-fi authors to miss this. What’s the solution? I’d wager a full-on ban of genre fiction is rather like lopping off a limping leg—an overreaction, if ever there was one.

On to the second criticism: flat characters. In Part Two’s section on tropes/archetypes, I acknowledged this, saying,

[…] many books do fail to present characters of interest and depth, relying on underbaked personalities based on cookie-cutter tropes with microwaveable arcs.

But what prevents the fans of genre fiction from responding the same way our literary professor did when he critiqued his own genre for sometimes churning out plotless books of self-reflection that is stereotypical of MFA debuts? He simply said, “I can’t stand that type of literary fiction.” Fair enough! No genre (including literary fiction) is without its fair share of bad, boring, bloated novels. On that basis, we should agree the presence of poor novels, whether by flat characters or the absence of plot, doesn’t discredit an entire genre. We can all love the good and work to counteract the bad in our respective genres—what more can be done?

So what about the third critique on escapism and disconnection? Our literary professor may be surprised to hear that I agree with his identification of a genuine societal cancer. But answer this, reader: Are escapism and disconnection inherent to genre fiction, or are they attributable to the motivations of writers and readers? I believe it to be the latter. Leaving aside the plausible argument that certain types of escapism are healthy (see Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories), let’s interrogate this idea further.

Imagine this stark picture: In a great tragedy, I lose my wife. Unable to move forward, I forsake my responsibilities and friendships, throwing myself into tennis, stamp collecting, and reading every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Who or what is at fault for my escapism and disconnection? Tennis? Those poor stamps? Or what of the Pulitzer Prize literature? Imagine blaming those novels for my tendency to pull “away from the world,” and for my “instinct toward isolation and sequestration,” in the words of our professor. The deeply unhealthy aspect of this fictional scenario is neither the items nor my actions, but my motivation and intention to use those avenues of exercise, joy, and reading as a distraction from my sorrowful reality.

Any good thing can be used as a source of escapism. Food. Art. Family. Sleep.

So too with genre fiction.

So too with literary fiction.

Our literary professor ought to be challenging his students to question how they approach art and why they write fiction, not dropping nuclear bombs on genre fiction as if it’s the culprit for bad fiction.

I have met authors who exclusively write short fiction for the stated reason—and I’m not making this up—that “it’s easier than writing a novel.” Yet I would be ridiculous to blame short stories for making authors lazy or accuse short fiction of being a shallow imitation of real novel-length literature. How might our professor react if a colleague banned their students from reading and writing short fiction? After all, it’s his colleague’s responsibility to stretch his students, not make them comfortable. I can already hear him scoffing at such a scenario—as he should. Short fiction cannot be blamed for the worst impulses of its writers and readers.

So too with genre fiction.

Even If All Genre Fiction Sucked…

Let’s play make-believe.

Suppose Zack and I hadn’t demonstrated the incisive capabilities of fantasy and sci-fi in Part Two, and suppose, for the sake of the argument, our professor’s worst fears were true: that all of genre fiction was shallow entertainment written for the singular purpose of offering escape from reality. It’s the greasy junk-food in our literary pantry.

If horror, fantasy, and sci-fi have potential, it’s yet to be realized in this hypothetical. But looking back through history, every art form had a beginning where its full potential had not been achieved. Photography, jazz, cinema, and even our beloved novel were once saplings among Giant Sequoias. If their humble beginnings weren’t enough, what’s worse is that each of these art forms was doubted and reviled from the start.

So too with genre fiction.

What is needed is time to grow, and guidance on how to grow healthily. Elements perhaps ideally provided in a classroom of students, ready to be stretched.

By disregarding genre personally and prohibiting it professionally, our literary professor inadvertently supports the prevalence of what he dislikes: junk-food genre fiction. The truth is, fantasy and sci-fi will still be written. They’re too deeply embedded in our imaginations and lives, and the clock can’t be turned back to undo this. So when stories of future technologies or black-hearted sorcerers are inevitably written, they’ll not be written by the skilled graduates he helped develop into highly trained artists.

{Zack}

To outright ban genre work from your classroom is to sentence your students to busy work at best, and at worst, it means you have blinded yourself. You have lost the ability to see. If you inspire anything at all, it will most likely be someone who produces a great work in spite of you. You want that as your legacy?

But what do I know? I’m just a knuckle-dragging caveman staring at the pretty pictures on the wall, wondering if I got what it takes to add my own mark. My picture of a woolly mammoth may be bigger and scarier than yours, but there’s enough space on this wall for both of us to draw. You just keep insisting that there isn’t.

{Cairn}

I’m confident the literary professor would reject our framing in favor of his own, which he’s already detailed: “[…] when you come to college, part of what you are coming for is explicitly to have the things you’re used to questioned and challenged.” Zack and I couldn’t agree more. Our contention is that he is not questioning and challenging his students in a helpful way. Rather than equipping them to push the boundaries of genre fiction to make it the best it can be, he has simply dismissed and banned genre fiction. This ban doesn’t pry his students away from inherently worse literature; it forces conformity to his personal literary preference—preference dressed up in self-righteousness. It’s a scenario equivalent to a philosophy professor refusing to address moral relativism or moral objectivism, theism or atheism, all because of prejudice.

Our literary professor’s prejudice goes by the name…

CHRONOCENTRISM

Art speaks in different tones and volumes to different people. Our literary professor may have genuine reasons for disliking fantasy; that is his business. Taste is not (and shouldn’t be) universal. The trouble is his dogmatism and proselytizing of his taste.

This dogmatism is a cancerous growth, sprung from chronocentrism. There’s a five-dollar word for you! By chronocentrism, I mean he judges all literature against his own time-bound subculture. He implies he fully comprehends the end goal of all literature across all time, writing:

[…] people are, for better or worse, more interesting than they have ever been. This is, or should be, an imaginative boom period for writers. There are so many ways of being, in particular so many ways of being bad—so many ways of fucking around and finding out, a Russian novel in the text messages of virtually every phone you see people typing away on.

These preferences are revealing. They reveal his modernized and institutionalized view of what kinds of literature do and don’t have value. Never in his essay does he stop and wonder if every story should be a character study or a Russian drama. Literary critic Henry Seidel Canby traces the long history of literary professors who deride each new iteration of storytelling:

And in all this the college professor is profoundly justified by tradition, if not always by common sense. To him belongs that custody of the classical in literature which his profession inherited from the monasteries, and more remotely from the rhetoricians of Rome. And there is small place for fiction, and none at all for the novel and the short story as we know them, in what has been preserved of classic literature. The early Renaissance, with its Sidney for spokesman, attacked the rising Elizabethan drama because it was unclassical. The later Renaissance, by the pen of Addison (who would have made an admirable college professor), sneered at pure fiction, directly and by implication, because it was unclassical. To-day we have lost our veneration for Latin and Greek as languages, we no longer deprecate an English work because it happens to be in English; nevertheless the tradition still grips us, especially if we happen to be Brahmanic [an English professor]. Our college professors, and many less excusable, still doubt the artistic validity of work in a form never dignified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed, like much of English literature besides, by a long line of native productions adapting classic forms to new ages and a new speech…

He goes on to say,

The important inference is rather that American readers who do pretend to take the novel seriously are moved not so much by the fiction in their narratives as by the sociology, philosophy, or politics imaginatively portrayed. They respect a story with such a content because it comes as near as the novel can to not being fiction at all.1

Had our literary professor lived during the time of the Romans, the Assyrians, or the Mesopotamians, they would have all laughed him out of town for romanticizing the worthless commoners’ lives. “Stories are meant for great deeds and battles,” they would have scoffed. “Tales are meant for the origin and the end of all things.”

Are these literary goals worthless? Our literary professor implies as much via chronocentrism. He knows the purpose of stories, apparently; those poor folk who lived prior to the twentieth century did not.

The ancients expose how modernity’s view of storytelling has shifted over time. But this is to be expected if we hold to a correct understanding of stories. You see, stories are vehicles of exploration. People have woven tales since time immemorial to answer questions and solve curiosities. In many ways, stories are what ground us as individuals, families, communities, nations, and as one humanity. Who are we? What is our nature? Where are we going? How did we get here? Why do I exist at all? With the sweep of time comes a natural change in the questions humanity explores—even if the fundamental questions remain the bedrock upon which the currents of new questions sway.

Our professor doesn’t seem to share this perspective. To him, stories have achieved their final form in the modern literary fiction movement. But we don’t have to look to civilizations thousands of years in the past to spotlight this chronocentrism, for as recently as the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even part of the nineteenth centuries, the novel and sometimes prose itself was maligned as an art form, viewed as fundamentally lesser than poetry. Henry Seidel Canby wrote on this as well: “But the novel was given a bad name in its youth that has overshadowed its successful maturity. Our ancestors are much to blame. For centuries they held the novel suspect as a kind of bastard literature, probably immoral, and certainly dangerous to intellectual health.”2 The people of previous centuries could not see the merits of stories told through prose, for the strengths of poetry and the weaknesses of novels loomed large in their eyes.

The war over the legitimacy of the novel raged for hundreds of years; and had our literary professor held a professorship during that time, all evidence suggests he would have commanded his pupils to abandon the ridiculous pursuit of “artistic novels” in favor of the serious art of the poem, stage, or (at the very least) essay—just as those past literary professors did, according to Henry Seidel Canby. Of course, I’m sure he would object, seeing himself as an ardent supporter of prose and the novel. Yet as there’s far less of a gap between genre fiction and literary fiction than between poetry and prose, why shouldn’t we assume that he’d stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his colleagues in discrediting the novel altogether?

Our literary professor is not ultimately pursuing the improvement of literature. If he were, then he should readily acknowledge a simple fact: “Since popular genres, like all genres, are historical and mutable, they may be used in ways that span from the tiredly formulaic to the inspiringly revolutionary.”3 He ought to encourage his students to strive towards the inspiringly revolutionary in their respective genres, rather than remaining irrationally, chronocentrically hellbent on the supremacy of literary fiction.

Literary fiction has its own occasional flaws—something already recognized by our professor. Yet he permits the genre and tries to weed out the flaws. This perspective is absent when it comes to the genres he dislikes, revealing his core hypocrisy: in sci-fi and fantasy, he points out the occasional flaws and by them justifies a total ban on genre fiction. But if a flaw outlaws a genre, then he’d be out of a job.

I want you to keep your job, literary professors of the world, but I want you to perform it with honesty and consistency. Keep your tastes. You’re permitted them. But enough with the dogmatism; you’re only following in the shameful tradition of humiliated professors who once mocked our beloved art.

The classroom is where students learn to see. To look past their assumptions, delve deeper into literature, and find treasures they couldn’t possibly have imagined before. What our literary professor is doing is enforcing blindness, and as an ancient rabbi once said, “if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”4

CONCLUSION

{Zack}

So, all genre fiction is trash, huh?

This argument is dumb. It’s a non-issue. Stop making it one.

All writers start as readers first. Nobody learns it the other way. The stories that engage our imaginations hook us like a gateway drug, showing us what is possible by revealing the paths already traveled. Not all of those paths are paved. Some lead into fairytale forests, and others wind through the darkness between the stars. Stop laying down pavement and putting up handrails.

I have a story about two astronauts on a deep-space exploration. The tether between them is cut by a shattered fragment of a comet that hurtled across space and time to meet them at exactly the wrong moment. The two drift apart, and one floats beneath the cold gaze of the God’s Eye Nebula.

I never graduated from community college. I failed a chemistry night class because I was too tired from working construction to care anymore, and I never went back. I don’t pay my bills by telling other people how to write, but I’ll tell you: this story of mine isn’t really about space.

I could tell you what it’s really about.

But then… I’d be doing your job for you.

He banned genre fiction.

Then with unblinking brazenness, that same literary professor published an essay called “against genre” in which he publicized and defended his classroom ban. It is that essay Zack and I have undertaken to eviscerate.

In Part One, we dismantled the many assumptions this professor’s arguments were founded upon, proving his definition of “literary fiction” (which he implies is the only literature worth writing) to be woefully inaccurate. Additionally, we demonstrated that the border between literary fiction and genre fiction is both porous and only recently demarcated.

Part Two is perhaps my favorite in this series. In combat, it’s not sufficient to show the weaknesses in an opponent’s armor; one’s blade must also be sharp enough to deliver victory. And in Part Two, we argue genre fiction is among an author’s most incisive tools.

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GENRE STRENGTHS

Tropes & Archetypes

{Zack}

“Tropes?” the distinguished literary professor might gasp. “Zack and Cairn, you fools! Tropes are the very issue distinguished gentlemen such as I take issue with. We prefer mimesis, minimalism, and modern-postmodernist-postism!” He tugs at his man-bun and adjusts his tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. “We prefer our metaphors to be as soft as our beards.” He scoffs and shoves a tobacco pipe in his mouth, puffing gently as he slowly rides away on a bicycle that was built to go fast.

See how tropes can be found anywhere? Even in our literary professor’s rejections of what he believes is beneath him.

{Cairn}

Tropes are the beaten paths before every writer. They are the established conventions and familiar stories we know “work.” Archetypes, however, are deeper than tropes. They are patterns of being, baked into our social imagination, seen across cultural and national lines, going back millennia. The stouthearted hero, the wicked stepmother, the oppressed girl with the potential of a princess. These are archetypes, ingrained so deeply in our subconsciouses we can hardly fathom how deep they go. If you look for them in stories, you’ll begin to realize our very concepts of the hero, traitor, and villain are rooted in archetypes.

Our literary professor critiqued genre fiction’s reliance upon tropes, a critique I’m more than happy to accept, for many books do fail to present characters of interest and depth, relying on underbaked personalities based on cookie cutter tropes with microwaveable arcs. These books contribute to the very worst of literature, and I’m unashamed to say so. I’m hungry to read of realistic, complex characters. But not exclusively. Tropes and archetypes also play a necessary role in stories, particularly archetypes, as they have immense presence and importance in the social psyche.

Archetypes help orient and guide us through life, giving us models to strive towards and signs of danger to avoid. None of us can help but live within this paradigm. Without archetypes, there would be no such thing as a character sui generis (of its own kind), for a totally unique person is unique only in so far as they stand in contrast to an established norm, namely, archetypes. Without archetypes, it’s impossible to imagine how horrific society would become in the absence of concepts like heroes and villains.

In literature, tropes and archetypes are like any other tool. They can be used to good or poor effect. Sometimes tropes are the best tool. Sometimes a story is better served by an entirely unique character. When The Lord of the Rings presents an already realized protagonist in Aragorn, what the reader witnesses is not the psychological realism of a conflicted man, but the conceptual ideals of masculinity, rulership, and the good burden of responsibility—ideals humanity can strive toward. Tolkien was never trying to capture gritty realism in his fiction, but something more akin to platonic ideals. The fact that Tolkien’s goals differed from our literary professor’s does not mean Tolkien failed to write serious literature, a conclusion which would require us to mistake psychological depth for the only depth worth exploring. This is a patently false claim, given the testimony of nearly every mythology and epic poem. Yet such a claim seems to be another of the underlying assumptions of our professor. Perhaps what this demonstrates is not the insufficiency of genre as a mode of literature but the insufficiency of his curiosity. Ethics, metaphysics, law, health, and interpersonal relationships are only a few of the realities worth writing about, and sometimes archetypal characters are the perfect agents for such stories.

Symbolism

Our cosmos is a cosmos of symbols. They infuse every part of our lives, giving sense and purpose to every object and person we interact with. Our worlds, both internal and external, are brought into union by use of symbols. Every book in every genre of fiction uses them whether they mean to or not, for they are the meaning-makers that give stories weight.

Sometimes symbols draw attention to themselves like a conch shell or the One Ring, but more often than not they remain invisible to the reader and taken for granted by the author, such as when “higher” symbolizes the good or powerful in our minds (e.g., mountaintop, heaven, stars, sun, birds, wind, light, knowledge, authority, order) and when “lower” represents the bad or enslaved (e.g., dirt valleys, hell, deep waters, sea monsters, caverns, darkness, ignorance, blindness, chaos). But make no mistake: an invisible symbol is no less powerful than a concealed car engine.

Images in the best of speculative fiction are not randomized fantasies invented to whisk readers away from the troubles of real life; symbols reveal truths hard to see. It is for good reason that Olympus is on a mountain, from which Zeus casts bolts of light from the heavens. These symbols provide, in part, a unique look at the unseen hands of fate, doling out fortune and misfortune to unsuspecting mortals.

Tolkien’s One Ring works so effectively as a symbol of allure, pride, and the desire to become more than oneself because of its depiction as a precious metal, a metal that shines in the eye of its beholder and heightens the strengths of its wielder (i.e., Hobbits are made even less noticeable and Sauron’s domination is strengthened). In this way, jewelry becomes a perfect image of our deepest, deadliest desires.

Fantasy is fertile soil for the seeds of symbolism to grow because symbols are indigenous to the fantastical, where entire cosmologies of symbols can cascade down into depths unsearchable. In fantasy, symbolism can tease out or subvert the order and chaos of any given object, person, relationship, or system, or bind any number of these together in a manner literary fiction realism would be hard-pressed to match.

Literalized Metaphor

While anyone who picks up a pen has equal access to metaphor, genre writers (particularly of fantasy and magical realism) are uniquely able to utilize literalized metaphor. In the behemoth series The Stormlight Archive [spoilers following through the end of this paragraph], the protagonist Kaladin bears a slave brand on his forehead. Despite his magical ability to heal the deepest wounds and oldest scars, his slave brand refuses to heal. His guilt over his younger brother’s death haunts him, refusing him psychological rest or peace of mind with his limitations. He is a slave to the guilt of his past—a metaphor made concrete in a slave brand. Only after releasing guilt and recognizing his limitations do the words, “I accept that there will be those I cannot protect!” pierce through his depression and heal his slave brand.

Since I am currently reading fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, I will briefly utilize it as another example [minor spoilers following]. The book deals with many themes, two of which are colonization and memory. Two empires smash into a peninsula from each side and compete to lay claim to its peoples and lands. In the ensuing conquest, one of the emperors curses the people of a city-state called Tigana, psychologically ripping the name out of the minds of all non-natives, effectively eradicating the cultural identity of the Tiganians. The reader witnesses the horror of cultural erasure with fresh eyes through this use of literalized metaphor. This tool is native to genre fiction, and those who deprive writers of such a sharp knife leave them less capable of telling great stories.

{Zack}

Here’s a story idea: a woman trapped in suburban life, repressed by a violent and controlling husband, finally lashes out at her community. She hurts her friends and neighbors because she has been harmed, violated, burdened by the men in her life and all of the modern expectations the world forces on women. Sound familiar?

That’s because it was a critically acclaimed issue of The Saga of the Swamp Thing Vol. 2 #40. The issue is about a woman who turns into a werewolf as a result of her controlling, domineering husband. The cycle of the moon is symbolic of her menstrual cycle–the inherited burden that comes with being a woman, and all of those harsh expectations. The werewolf is a perfect metaphor.

One doesn’t typically open comic books expecting their entire worldview to be changed. Imagine being a young boy who encounters this comic and thinks to himself, What happened to that woman wasn’t right. Maybe I should be nicer to my mother. She goes through things I don’t understand. This kind of influence on younger generations would not happen if authors were restricted to writing only literary fiction. Thank God Alan Moore is legally a wizard and not an MFA student.

The issue is renowned and praised for its pro-feminist, anti-patriarchal, anti-misogynistic messaging, and it’s a goddamned comic book. It was written for a dominantly young male audience a full 36 years before Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch hit the shelves, a literary work of fiction that deals with the exact same theme (minus the carnage).

Any literary professor that says they are tired of reading genre fiction about goblins, zombies, and werewolves has forgotten how to see the artistic power that lies in metaphor. Things are not what they are, they are what they seem. What they feel like. If a professor intended to teach students to realize their potential, why would they immediately limit their ability to reach it if the reach they needed was literalized metaphor?

A goblin is not always a goblin, my friend. Sometimes the troll under the bridge is not really a troll, it might just be the trauma from your overbearing mother. Or something.

{Cairn}

Alteration of Reality

Manipulation is the fiction author’s weapon of choice. We use words to incite emotions in our readers through the invention of peoples we throw into torturous scenarios. This invention of reality, of peoples, places, and things, is inherent to fiction. In realism, a cap is placed on the writer’s ability to invent. Not so in fantasy.

Literalized metaphor and altering the rules of reality may look identical, but only if one squints. While they may occasionally overlap, each accomplishes something unique. Recall that literalized metaphor takes a turn of phrase (e.g., “you’re a slave to your past”) or fact of life (e.g., cultural erasure) and makes it a concrete reality within a story, such as in a slave brand that refuses to heal or in a curse that strips the very memory of a nation from a peninsula overnight. But alteration of reality is a broader category, within which literalized metaphor sits.

Authors are not constrained to manipulating the rules of reality in order to fit a metaphor or one-for-one parallelism. Anything can be changed for any reason—though ideally to benefit the story somehow.

As an example, I shamelessly present my own debut, The Luckfell, wherein an individual’s capacity for emotion can be stripped away by its transference to another person. Grounded in the theory of emotion, four core emotions are subject to manipulation: fear, anger, sadness, and gladness. Throughout my manuscript a multi-generational drama is splayed out before the reader’s eyes, detailing the effects of trauma, manipulation, and recovery in a fictional reality where emotions themselves are the playthings of abusers. It allows a traumatized child to be incapable of feeling fear and a typically courageous man to have a two-fold capacity for that same emotion. By altering the rules of reality, I ask the questions, How are emotions used by manipulators? Why does fear cripple a person and, surprisingly, equip that very same person to experience beauty? What role does grief play in healing? How ought fear to be viewed and handled?

The utility of altering reality within a story has near-infinite potential. Magical realism already knows this; but like all genres, even magical realism has limitations. A robust “magic system” like in my fantasy novel allows the reader to see the nature of human emotion in a new light that a magical realism novel could not accomplish to the same effect.

Cognitive Disarmament & Estrangement

If an author pens a novel anchored in the “real” world full of divisive topics (e.g., the need for prison reform, the cultural friction caused by religious pluralism, etc.) that is picked up by readers who don’t share those perspectives, then unbidden, mental barriers are liable to restrict the readers’ full engagement with the novel. These mental dispositions are armor, turning aside foreign ideas like arrows. Therein lies one weakness of mimetic literary fiction, giving fantasy another chance to flex its muscles.

A fictional world offers the unfamiliar, which the reader immerses themselves into to understand the setting and story. The unfamiliarity acts, not as mere escapism (as our literary professor assumes), but as a subversive crowbar that pries open the armor of the reader. This is what we can call cognitive disarmament, which C.S. Lewis describes more playfully with the words, “Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?”1 The mere divergence between the real and invented worlds lowers the reader’s cognitive barriers, allowing them to more objectively parse through images and ideas without the easily-triggered political, ethical, religious, or societal baggage that would otherwise hinder them.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune [spoilers following], the reader is dropped into uncharted waters (or uncharted deserts), where they encounter a tribal, warrior people called the Fremen. Who are these people, what is their history, and what do they want? The reader doesn’t know, and how could they, considering they have no preconceptions to draw from.

Through this cognitive disarmament, the reader witnesses the Fremen eagerly await a messiah figure called the Lisan al–Gaib, who would lead their oppressed and hardened people to paradise—a salvific hope that had been carefully planted by a cult-like organization to control the masses. When Paul Atreides rises to the role, manipulating the warring society to fight his battles, the reader is confronted with difficult topics—some that are brutally difficult to address in mimetic fiction—like warring religions and the manipulation of the masses. Yet these topics are made ripe for consideration with a little defamiliarization and lowering of the reader’s defenses.

Viktor Shklovsky drew close to the idea of cognitive disarmament with his concept of defamiliarization. J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of recovery in On Fairy-Stories very nearly touched it. We see scholar Darko Suvin doing the same in his seminal defense of sci-fi, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction by identifying and naming a similar literary effect he called cognitive estrangement. Simona Bartolotta describes cognitive estrangement as “the effect generated when the imaginative world… triggers and stimulates a critical juxtaposition with the world of the author.”2 What Suvin pinpointed was the felt impact a speculative world has on the reader—a realization, a shock that this fictional world is unlike their own for specific reasons, which prompts them to contrast this strange new world with their own to find where the differences lie. Now, while Suvin’s goal stemmed from a revolutionary impulse, intended to stir people to action and social change, that is not inherent to his concept of estrangement. Ironically, Suvin was a fervent opponent of fantasy; yet even in this, Suvin’s bias against fantasy is not inherent to his concept of estrangement—making it as relevant to fantasy as it is to sci-fi, as was recognized by Simona Bartolotta.3

It was this very same Simona Bartolotta who took Suvin’s cognitive estrangement to a new level by infusing it with affordance theory, a literary theory that identifies how much affordance (options, choices, interpretations, etc.) a novel gives a reader. Together, cognitive estrangement and affordance theory “extend the semantic, connotative, and meaning-making reach of the text itself.”4 Boiled down, Bartolotta argues that fictional worlds are by nature more ambiguous to readers. For example, when you read “America,” there are numerous ideas and feelings that bubble up; thus any story based in America will inevitably hold connotations neither you nor I can escape. But when you read, “Hithra,” there is no baggage. A story based in the fictional Hithra possesses more ambiguity in its societies, cities, and peoples, allowing the reader to come to varied readings and interpretations, which can be either good or bad—but the point to take away is genre fiction’s potential depth, not guaranteed depth. Returning to Dune, we can see affordance theory exemplified in the varied interpretations of the manipulative-messianic figure. Is it a critique of religious messiahs? Or just the charismatic leader? Could it be a portrayal of a leader committing justified evils for a greater purpose?

In summation, cognitive disarmament allows new ideas to bypass mental barriers. Cognitive estrangement enables fresh perspective of our world. And affordance theory showcases the potential depth of varied interpretations from fantasy and sci-fi stories.

Those who believe genre fiction to be a blunt instrument of the unthinking masses have not honestly evaluated the issue. Only a caricature or uncharitable glance at genre would give the impression of a caveman’s cudgel. As this essay has argued, tropes/archetypes, symbolism, literalized metaphor, the alteration of reality, and cognitive disarmament and estrangement prove genre fiction to be a literary tool that can cut as deep as any other.

Continued in Part Three, which delivers a final devastating blow to our literary professor’s ban.

“I’m sorry you don’t get it.”

That’s my tongue-in-cheek response to those who confess a distaste for the fantasy genre. They laugh, I laugh, and we move on. As a fantasy reader and writer, I’m well acquainted with—and unbothered by—those who dislike what I love. After all, personal preference is a mysterious reality, woven by the hands of exposure and choice (yes, choice influences taste).

However, what I am not immune to is dogmatizing personal preference, and worse, the dogmatism of a literary professor who trains future generations of writers. In a recent essay, a certain professor of creative writing defended his classroom ban on all genre fiction, by which he limits his students to what he calls “literary fiction.” That said, we hope this will reach far more than those who read the original essay, which is why we’ve written it to appeal to a wider audience that may not be aware of this professor’s argumentation. He makes several arguments to justify this class-wide ban, considering it his duty to restrict students in this capacity.

Zack and I feel we also have a duty. One that compels us to speak the truth for the betterment of literature, which can, in turn, better humanity. Genre fiction is good for literature, and by extension, humanity. Over this three-part essay, we aim to dismantle this literary professor’s assumptions of both literary and genre fiction, argue the strengths of genre, and, last of all, perform an autopsy on his argument’s fatal flaw and demonstrate how to foster a healthy relationship with imperfect genres.

You’re up, Zack!

{Zack}

THE ART OF SEEING

The curtains were black to symbolize death, the absence of light—yadda yadda.

Mr. Rino was trying to prove a point. “Everything in the story matters, every image is a symbol, with a deeper hidden meaning.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But do you really think he intended that, or was he just like, ‘The curtains need a color, so let’s go with black?’”

“Can you see past the details?” Mr. Rino asked.

I was seventeen in that advanced literature class in high school. I was an asshole. Mr. Rino was patient. I can’t remember what story we were studying; I only remember the argument. I think of it whenever I write a setting that includes curtains.

Mr. Rino was trying to teach us how to “see” past the details to unveil the deeper, hidden themes and meanings buried in the work. It was the responsibility of the reader to find and interpret what it meant. It was the role of the literary professor to teach his students how to see. Everything has a meaning, even the color of the curtains.

To further understand this we must cross mediums to the visual arts. In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards writes that the main aspect of learning how to draw deals more with perception than mastery of fine motor skills. The key to drawing, and drawing well, is learning how to actually look at an object and see what it is composed of. Looking past the details to see that a tree is a series of connected cylinders. Drawing the negative space around a stool. The role of the art teacher is not to teach someone mark-making, but how to look at an object relative to the space around it.

To draw well, you must see well. The same goes for reading. Genre is a canvas with no borders. It is simply another medium upon which an image, a theme, a lesson, is transferred from my brain to yours. Can we see the meaning even if a goblin stands in our way?

Pick up a rock. Throw it high in any direction.

It will land upon an essay asserting that the Dead Marshes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are symbolic of the mud-filled artillery shell holes found in France during WWI. Throw another rock. It will hit an essay interpreting the Martians in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds as the existential dread of an impending global war. Another person will argue the Martians are about a fear of technology. Something deeper is occurring in these novels than what the surface reading implies. Science fiction is rarely about aliens.

Look at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It isn’t really about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, is it? It’s about raising a son to be a good man in a world that has lost all sight of morality and hope.

“But The Road isn’t science fiction!” our literary professor might object.

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? How do we define, distinguish, and value genres? If a deeper meaning excludes a book from being genre fiction, then, by that metric, a great many books by Stephen King can’t be considered horror.

To ban works of genre from a classroom implies that such writing is without literary merit, that it is “beneath” a distinguished literary professor to even entertain. The ban implies genre cannot be taken seriously because goblins are too distracting, because starships are too much of an adolescent fantasy to be meaningful.

This argument against genre needs to die, and Cairn and I are here to kill it. A shot has been fired across our bow, so now we must hoist the Jolly Roger.

The professor’s core mistake is an assumption, an assumption that the borders between genres are impassably wide and that literary quality resides only on one side. Problem is, that’s a myth.

Go get ‘em, Cairn.

{Cairn}

THE MYTH OF THE CLEANLY DEMARCATED GENRE

Insufficient Definitions

Contrary to how our literary professor treats them, genre fiction and literary fiction are not objective categories; rather, they are useful inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 While it may be convenient for some to evaluate all of literature through a stark lens of garbage genre fiction and praiseworthy literary fiction, the reality is far messier. The differences between literary fiction and genre fiction are subtle. Not only is the gap between them smaller than our professor guesses, but the categories frequently overlap.

He defines literary fiction as “a particular genre of fiction that attempts to describe and dramatize the ‘real world,’” a definition as clear as a muddy puddle. It has two flaws. First, any philosopher worth his salt would pounce, asking what the “real world” is. But overlooking this first flaw and the philosophical bramble that sprouts from it—of ghosts, spirits, transcendence, morals, objective truths, gods, or demons—I must poke at the second flaw: should romance, mysteries, or legal thrillers be considered outside the “real world”? Hardly.

Thus, we already see genres bleeding through the borders of our professor’s definition. What then is literary fiction? Is it the fiction that describes and dramatizes the everyday experiences of everyday people? Is it the fiction that heavily features ambiguity and character interiority?

Enter the classics.

These time-tested masterpieces will prove to be a thorn in our literary professor’s side if he retains his irrational attribution of quality only to literary fiction, for the classics force him into a dilemma.

Horn No. 1: If our literary professor claims these masterpieces as literary fiction (anachronistically), he pierces himself on the dilemma’s first horn. Works like The Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Beowulf, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Frankenstein, and Dracula all feature prominent supernatural/fantastical elements as well as stark cosmologies and/or a focus on narrative exteriority, breaking away from every feature we’ve so far attributed to literary fiction. If enveloped into literary fiction, the classics would dismantle his definition entirely and thus fundamentally call into question his understanding of his own genre.

Horn No. 2: But if our literary professor casts himself upon the dilemma’s second horn by rightly recognizing the classics as belonging outside of literary fiction, then he concedes his point, proving that no genre (including literary fiction) has a monopoly on literary quality. Either horn of this dilemma leaves his argument bloodied and battered.

No genre can lay claim to the early classics. Because, for a long period, novels of varied styles, flavors, and story types were categorized differently than they are today. Henry James points out and critiques these outdated labels, writing, “The novel and the romance... these separations appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience.”2 So, if we desire to use our terms accurately, we cannot call Frankenstein “sci-fi” or Dracula “horror” or A Tale of Two Cities “literary fiction” at all. Utilizing those terms would be anachronistic, because those genres didn’t strictly exist yet. If anything, we might call them proto-fantasy or proto-sci-fi, but even so, we must be cautious when categorizing novels the authors and their contemporary audiences would not have recognized. As a result, we can conclude that our literary professor’s definition of literary fiction is neither accurate nor helpful in identifying where quality literature may be found.

The Promise(s) of Each Genre

Every genre promises something. That something is usually what sells people on the book. It signals to the potential buyer, “this book is like other books you’ve enjoyed.” Horror promises some scares; romance, romance; and mysteries, mysteries. Science fiction promises a theoretical departure from what is currently known, whether that departure is regarding technology, timeframe, or a first-encounter. And fantasy guarantees some sort of fantastical twist to the rules of reality.

“Hold on there one second,” our literary professor could object. “Fantasy requires [and I quote] ‘a world of huge swaths of wilderness, of creatures living peaceably with each other, of clear hierarchies and—more importantly—of meritocracies, and of clearly delineated evil getting met by clearly delineated good…’ right?”

Wrong.

I sincerely wonder if The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings were the last fantasy novels he’s read, because that’s the impression his statement leaves. Huge swaths of wilderness? Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’s alternative London or Perdido Street Station’s filthy New Crobuzon beg to differ. Creatures living peaceably with each other? I’m not sure even the works of Tolkien or Lewis qualify for this, where even trees can be treacherous. How about clear hierarchies and meritocracies? Erikson and Esslemont’s Malazan Empire cuts that accusation off at the knees—quite bloodily, I might add. What of clearly delineated good and evil? Well… few fantasy books truly depict such a dichotomy. Complex morality and gray characters have been all the rage since the nineties and were present before then as well. Fantasy merely promises some shift in how reality operates, whether that change be subtle or mythic in scale.

Now what does literary fiction promise? This is precisely what our professor attempted to answer with his demonstrably inadequate description.

The truth is, literary fiction is a strange and modern animal, birthed in the hallowed halls of American universities which attempted “to adapt modernist principles of writing, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries well outside the academy,”3 and now this new animal roams the literary plains roaring its supremacy. Yet what does it promise? As evidenced by the classics, I’m unpersuaded that it promises capital-L “Literature,” as some suggest. Even the academic heavyweight Mark McGurl doesn’t recognize literary fiction as “Literature” or even as a unified whole, but as an umbrella term for three distinctly postwar subgenres formed in the contexts of newly invented American MFA programs.4

I propose that literary fiction is broadly composed of two promises: an aim and an attitude. Its aim is to be unadulterated and challenging fiction of the highest caliber; its attitude, to be unlike commercial fiction. With one hand outstretched towards an ideal and another pushing back against genre, literary fiction suspends itself in a liminal space wherein any story can be told, though we ought to pity the author who pens a story that feels too commercial. He’ll surely be eaten alive by his peers and professors.

Though literary fiction’s aim is laudable and its attitude is permissible (everyone’s entitled to preferences), one does wonder at what point the dodging of tropes becomes, in itself, a trope. In this capacity, literary fiction is a reactionary genre, a genre that is at its roots determined to avoid identification with genre fiction. It is a genre that’s attempted to put lightning in a bottle and then prescribe that to students. And it has created some wonderful art!

But here’s the kicker: authors of literary fiction disagree on what constitutes identification with genre fiction. As a result, many authors happily borrow genre conventions. In his book Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction, Jeremy Rosen details the rich interplay between literary and genre fiction, reporting,

“[…] writers like Atwood, Lee, Mitchell, McCarthy, and Whitehead, as well as Ling Ma, Carmen Maria Machado, Emily St. John Mandel, Helen Oyeyemi, Viet Nguyen, Karen Russell, Charles Yu, and dozens of others, have launched or built their careers adopting and creatively innovating popular genres—but within the field of literary fiction.”5

Our literary professor would like to frame literary and genre fiction as a battlefield with a no-man’s land between the two trenches. But as has been demonstrated, the trenches of these literary traditions are not so obvious or contested as he suggests. Regular visitation and trade come and go from both sides, and in my view, will only increase over time.

{Zack}

Animal Farm by George Orwell, considered a “classic” of literature, isn’t really about talking animals.

“It’s an allegory, you uncultured swine!” some might scream.

Sure. But allegorical fable or not, talking animals remains a fantastical idea.

Fantastical ideas can communicate deeper truths. Just as zombie elves in stagnant pools, Martian tripod death machines, and literal totalitarian pigs illustrate their authors’ points with more vividness than the color of the curtains. Readers and teachers must come to realize that fantastical and futuristic imagery accomplishes something beyond the mere aesthetic.

Joe Haldeman is a hard science fiction writer who served as a combat engineer in Vietnam. His book The Forever War is about fighting aliens on a jungle planet so far away that when the protagonist finally returns to Earth, society has changed so radically that he doesn’t fit in. Hundreds of years have passed, but due to time dilation and relativity, he has barely aged. He feels that he is an obsolete person alienated from the very society he was trying to protect. Do you think that maybe—just maybe—he’s speaking about a very vulnerable, very human experience, in a metaphorical way that cuts through the numbness of a hard reality?

Something tells me Tim O’Brien, also a Vietnam vet and author of the acclaimed The Things They Carried, would hesitate to tell Joe what he could or couldn’t write. Both books address the same political climates, and the same human condition and challenges. One just does it with mech suits.

And my high school teacher, Mr. Rino, would like to know, “Can you see past the details?”

To be continued in Part Two, which argues a positive case for genre fiction, drawing on the tradition’s many unique strengths.

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Education.

Leisure.

Career.

Travel.

Retirement.

These are all pursuits of individuals. They are goals a person cultivates for their advancement, pleasure, or security. Every human who has ever existed has experienced life through the lens of first-person subjectivity: I want this. I work for that. I have, I hope, I hate. All of which is the weight of consciousness. Its mystery allows you to step outside of instinct and evaluate your first-person perspective, for not only can you think, but you can also think about your thinking. You wake up and go to sleep seeing exclusively through your own eyes, day after day, decade after decade. From the time you were a child to this very moment, life has been a playground of potential—all for you.

You are the main character.

Only, you’re not. And neither am I. To say otherwise would be to expose our Goliath-sized egos to the well-deserved criticism of others. And life is filled with plenty of slings and stones more than capable of cracking open the skulls of our arrogance. For me, one such stone was a 7 lb. 13 oz. baby boy.

Leeland announced his arrival 40 50 60 70 80 days ago with a scream. Never have I become so endeared to a pooping, cross-eyed gremlin. I was smitten—I still am—struck by an ego-shattering stone. Leeland needs me; I don’t need him. He takes from me; I give to him. This world is his playground of potential, and it’s my job to help him turn that potential into actuation.

I am not the main character.

I already knew this. But I didn’t consistently act out that knowledge. His intrusion into my life has helped that stone-hard reality sink a little deeper into my thick skull. While my ego hasn’t crashed to the ground just yet, it sure is wobbling. My son will grow up feeling every bit as much a “main character” as I did and do. To him, I won’t be the worker, the novelist, the thinker, the friend, the love of his life, or the man. I’ll simply be dad. A background character, though a prominent one initially, in his life.

I am not the main character.

Obviously, life isn’t about Leeland or me or you. Life is just as much about us as it is the 80-something-year-old Indonesian woman lying on her deathbed on the other side of the world. To me, my son has been a living reminder that we originate, not from thin air or into a world that sprung into existence for our particular pleasure, but from an unbroken lineage of mother to mother to mother and on and on and on, from ages to millennia to epochs. Family is the prerequisite for human existence, the training ground for every relationship at every social level, and the only way future persons will live.

FAMILIES IN REALITY AND FICTION

Imagine an alien. Her name is Blorp, she’s without limbs and as translucent as a soft leftvent anglerfish, and has a knack for physics that would make Einstein’s hair go limp. Blorp and her species are utterly different from humanity: physiologically, developmentally, and socially. For centuries, she’s endured the crossing of the deep nothingness of space to observe us. With a technologically advanced bleep-bloop-doop, both she and her ship become invisible. She lands in New York City’s Central Park and spends the next week exploring humanity within city limits.

What would Blorp conclude from the abundance of career-centric businesspeople and self-expression-obsessed artists? Amid humanity’s hustling, she might notice those odd social units called families along the fringes of society. I suspect Blorp would conclude that the family is optional for human thriving.

I mean no disrespect to those who live in metropolises like New York City. Rather, I want to highlight the ever-decreasing rates of married couples and married couples with children both in and out of major cities. Even in the suburbs, I have numerous friends who have repeatedly expressed antagonism towards marriage and children. No matter where you live, we are all susceptible to a type of Main Character Syndrome that produces an attitude of indifference towards family, an attitude that says family is optional, unnecessary, or even downright undesirable.

This is symptomatic of Western society’s individualism run amok. Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote, “The dark side of individualism is a centering of the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.” While neither Taylor nor I dismiss individualism as evil, we both recognize it has strengths and weaknesses. One such weakness is that within a culture of hyper-individualism, communities are built buffet-style around convenience or mutual interests, and coworkers are as close as many come to having friends. It’s a culture where lovers are welcomed into bedrooms, but not into hearts, then locked out once they cease to please.

For humanity, this is a new way of life. A new form of society. A brave new world, indeed. A world of men and women who behave as if they’re the last generation, for who needs heritage or descendants? This perspective permeates modernity, and every aspect of our society, literature included—literature, especially, given the gravitational pull of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles on authors.

Within modern fantasy books, this is an all-too-common perspective I come across. It’s portrayed so bluntly that some books feel populated by a whole club of enlightened Manhattan singles who were plucked from reality, given dark pasts and a range of magical relics, and then dropped into the secondary world. They drunkenly brood in taverns over the rich one percent and religious institutions, afterwards hooking up with respectable denizens with all the frequency and abandon of a post-contraceptive society. Borrowing a term from historical studies, let’s call these intrusions of modern attitudes and values “presentisms.”

Oh, I can already hear the feverish clacking of keyboards shouting at me with italics, “Authors can create whatever world they’d like; it’s fantasy!”

Too true. Writers are free to write to their heart’s content. Contrary to what you might think, I am not arguing for a return to medieval European-inspired fantasy (though that too has a place in the genre). In fact, I affirm that wonderful stories can take place within modernized secondary worlds! Just look at China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station or Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga. These novels are soaked through with presentisms, yet all to great effect! I am arguing that presentisms aren’t often built into the world intentionally, but intrude accidentally, often reflecting the author’s lack of both cultural and self-awareness.

CASE STUDY

Two years ago, I read and enjoyed Kerstin Hall’s Asunder. Hall is a gifted writer and one whose imagination and depiction of eldritch horrors I hope to emulate in my own work. In the unlikely event Kerstin ever reads this, I loved your book and even used it as a comp for my debut! However, despite my massive respect for Hall and her work, there were two pages that yanked me out of the story. As you read the following passage from chapter four, ask yourself who and what era this sounds like:

No single detail in this passage proves my point. But collectively, I feel I’ve encountered a single, family-less millennial woman living alone in an apartment in a bad part of town who oversleeps, mumbles “fuck” as she wakes, is unashamed of her general distaste for others, bathes or showers as if it’s a daily habit, thinks about apartment rates and maintenance, speaks of dropping off rent, and bemoans not being able to lie in bed all day. Forgive me for belaboring the point, but in this section, Karys sounds indistinguishable from a hungover Los Angeles barista. She is a figure entirely indifferent towards family. I wouldn’t mind so much if the rest of the novel fit this vibe (i.e., if I sensed this presentism was intentionally placed). Alas, it does not. While her family does become relevant later in the novel, it is little more than a few passing chapters that still manage to portray family in a strikingly modern lens (e.g., “divorced” dad, ability to abandon family without much issue, etc.).

We earlier noted Charles Taylor’s evaluation of individualism. To that quotation, Jared Henderson added, “As we become more individualistic, we also narrow our vision.” If this is true—and I’m inclined to believe it is—then it strikes at the very heart of literature. One of literature’s primary effects is to momentarily transcend the reader’s limitations so that they witness life through the eyes of another. This broadening of perspective is the exact opposite effect of individualism narrowing our vision. But if the lives we witness in literature are identical to our own in the most essential ways (particularly in hyper-individualism), then we’ve weakened or perhaps even lost an essential goal of literature. The world needs books of varying perspectives—we should all agree on this—but I sense a spreading pervasiveness of this kind.

Modern life has already devolved into a series of echo chambers. Do we want literature to fall prey to that same bias-confirmation virus that’s already infected politics, social media, and even many friendships? Books that assume the same worldview as our own without fresh perspective or argumentation are about as impactful as yes-men politicians or “share if you agree” Facebook spam.

The curious, infuriating fact is that you—the reader—can more than likely think of books with prominent families, just as I can! But this gets to my deeper impulse: even with books like Mistborn and The Hunger of the Gods which feature familial relationships, something still feels wrong. It itches behind my eyes. It crawls under my skin. I can’t help but squirm at feeling that our view of family is short-sighted and full of cataracts. We write as if we weren’t shaped by our fathers and mothers and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents. We write as if we have no origin and no future—that the here and now is all that matters. That our fleeting goals of happiness and success are the point of Life.

What is this hollow, empty sensation I get from how we talk and what I read?

THE STORIES WE NEED BUT DON’T TELL

In the beginning, there were stories about family.

Kronos and Zeus battling for supremacy. Isis resurrecting her drawn-and-quartered husband, Osiris. Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, and David and his long-awaited heir are the driving narratives within the biblical corpus. Even the archetypal story of the victorious orphan is rooted in family, specifically the impact and detrimental beginnings of being deprived of parents and siblings.

When I look back over the most important stories, I see an emergent pattern: family is a fundamental story of humanity—perhaps the story. This makes sense, even from each of our limited experiences. Family is the great necessity and the great challenge of our species. Home is the great colosseum of life. It is where lives are made or destroyed. Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters—these are the relationships that form society’s bedrock.

The Odyssey, Hamlet, and The Brothers Karamazov are works of art propelled by family. Odysseus has no story if he has no wife or home to return to. The Prince of Denmark has no story if he has no murdered father, treacherous uncle, or victimized mother. And not a page of The Brothers Karamazov would make sense without family.

There is no life without family and there is no family without conflict. But due to the unprecedented freedoms, safety, and prosperity we have in modern times, so many move away or amputate their families, while others neither marry nor have children of their own. In the West, we have found the secret to the life of ease, a life without conflict: simply live without family.

Clearly, I write with some exaggeration, though there is truth within it. Those without close familial ties or a family of their own still encounter the difficulties of life. Since I’m providing qualifications for my overall argument, I may as well ward off some of the largest potential criticisms. I write “largest,” because there are a potentially infinite number of criticisms that could be lobbed my way. But the largest are those that come from a place of deep hurt. Some family members are abusive and need to be cut off. Some people cannot find companionship in marriage. And some couples are unable to conceive. I have no desire to make light of these painful realities or to dismiss those individuals who struggle with them. These situations, and others like them, are valid reasons to live without close familial connections.

That said, I have also encountered a fair few who use words like “toxic,” “abusive,” “co-dependent,” or even “cult-like” to describe normal families with normal flaws. Mothers can dote or give unwanted advice. Fathers can be stubborn or distant. And God knows sibling rivalries exist. And the most reliable human flaw of all: regular self-interested people hurting other regular self-interested people. No one has perfect parents; this we know. Equally true is that no parents have perfect children. The reality is that time draws people together and the tighter the bond, the easier it is to hurt one another, for a tight cord is easier to cut than one held lax.

Family is where great loves and great tragedies occur. Yet so many fantasy books are lacking these deep bonds which make life so meaningful. In their absence, we yearn for these bonds; we instinctively know that deep relationships make deep stories. I can say this with confidence, in part, due to the explosion of the “Found Family” trope, wherein a group of misfits find companionship with each other. Fantasy is oversaturated with this trope and for good reason: we cannot help but crave family. Alas, we don’t crave actual family with its costs and demands and its inability to be curated; we merely want its pleasures. While it is possible for this trope to yield great stories (The Lies of Locke Lamora, The Lord of the Rings, etc.), more often than not it seems to produce groups bonded over shared suffering, a dash of sex appeal, and the silver bullet of the trope: superficial banter and volleyed wit. When suffering, sex, and sarcasm are the basis for a community, the found family proves itself a sorry substitute for the genuine thing.

Do you recall Blorp, our lovely, translucent visitor? Well, she was an alien dropped into our modern world. But within the fantasy genre, often the characters feel like moderns dropped into an alien world. Dropped into agrarian societies and cities without plumbing and political systems without representation—yet these characters act out of place and time. And perhaps the worst quality of these modern characters?

Total disconnection from heritage and family.

This frustrating detail struck me like a revelation. And the book that opened my eyes? My very own. My novel takes place in a continent’s northernmost village, isolated from outside contact for hundreds of years. Pyotr, the main character, is the only son of an elderly couple—and only upon finishing the first draft did I see the idiocy: Pyotr had no grandparents, not even memories of grandparents, no uncles, no aunts, not even a distant cousin. This was idiotic. I was an idiot. If Pyotr’s home is an isolated village, where was his family?

This realization made me rethink and rewrite my story—a total overhaul that turned a relatively strong monster siege story into a thematically intricate monster siege story mirrored in a multigenerational drama exploring the consequences of trauma and sibling rivalry. The first and second drafts are remarkably similar in plot events but so wildly different in their impact.

SO NOW WHAT?

What does this mean for readers and writers? For one, we should think more deeply about family, about origins and legacy. We should ask: Who came before me? We should ask: Who will come after me? There’s no use thinking of families within a story if we spare no thought to families in reality—in fact, it will be nearly impossible to do the first without the second.

Much more than thinking about family, you and I must invest in family. As addressed before, some people cannot do so. In those cases, we must invest in the families of others. Visit parents and grandparents of friends. Spoil the sons and daughters of acquaintances and coworkers. In essence, be a friend to families, not a foe by virtue of apathy towards humanity’s most essential social unit.

But if possible—barring true threats to your body and mind—invest in your own family. Forgive the slights, bear with the frustrations, and find contentment in the disparate opinions sure to exist within its midst. Strive to mend broken bonds and cross divides others are too fearful to attempt. Be the family member you wish your family was to you; better an imperfect family than perfect isolation.

Within literature, pay attention. Don’t be content with the protagonists and antagonists only. Wonder who their parents are. What their lineage is and how they perceive future generations. There is nothing more impactful in a life than the presence or absence of family, so don’t perceive family within literature to be of passing concern. It may be that you, just as I did before, have missed the actual story.

CONCLUSION

There will be readers whose hackles are raised over this essay; I’m prepared for that. But before your conclusions have settled, please hear me out. I’m not arguing that family is the solution to all our troubles in life and literature, and I’m certainly not positing that I have all the answers. But family is one solution and one answer to life’s and literature’s problems.

This essay was born out of a grief and a love. Grief, for the millions, billions of people slowly suffocating under our world’s loneliness epidemic. Grief, that so many have exchanged the deepest community available for a career. Grief, for those delusional with Main Character Syndrome, not realizing it’s their own hyper-individualism that’s ruining them.

Love, too, motivates me. Love for my imperfect parents. Love for my imperfect wife. Love for my newborn son, Leeland, who wakes each morning with a soul-swelling smile just for me. It’s a smile that reminds me of the incomparable preciousness of family. It’s a smile that reminds me that life is not about me.

I am not the main character. There’s a bigger story here than me or you.

In our lives and literature, let’s go find that Story.

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Some books aim to be serious literature, and so think they must shove the reader into relentless muck. Some books want nothing more than to be enjoyable, thus tiptoeing around hardships and encouraging readers to recline in sun-dappled hammocks beside bubbling brooks.

Both overlook a simple fact: suffering makes beauty more precious—particularly those uncut gems of laughter and love that previously went unnoticed. This is the paradox I seek to capture in my fiction and essays. To possess resolute confidence in life’s meaningfulness along with an unflinching reckoning of life’s horrors. I believe…

Death destroys delusions

of grandeur, of apathy, of immortality

&

Darkness heralds illumination

to morality, to purpose, to beauty

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I’m Cairn,

I’m a dark fantasy novelist of the debut: The Luckfell. Over five years and through a full-time job, a master’s degree, the birth of a son, the tremendous support of my gorgeous wife, and several thousand cups of coffee, I’ve reached the final line edits of this uniquely strange novel about a uniquely unlucky man.

Here are a few of my essays:

Stop Writing Trilogies - The title is provocative, but the essay is more reasonable than you might assume. An appeal to make standalones the norm within speculative fiction.

Are We All Orphans? - An exploration of the disappearance of families in our lives and literature.

In Defense of Genre (Pt. 1) - Two genre writers’ open letter to a literary professor who banned genre from his classroom.

What I strive for here:

Sanctuary.

If you crave the slow, intentional pursuit of beauty and profound truth within fantasy and fiction, this is the place for you. There’s enough cynicism out there, and far too much sarcasm to stomach. Here, sincerity is a sanctuary.

Simplicity.

No slop. No guru growth formulas. No newsletter-for-newsletter’s-sake. Just semi-monthly essays exploring the vast landscape of fantasy, wherein we can contemplate human nature and the meaning that binds the cosmos together. That is my simple focus. And here, simplicity is an antidote to the chaos of modernity.

Community.

Invest in this like-minded community that believes fantasy is a map back to reality, not a portal to escape it. Here, our community is fashioned out of respect and genuine investment in each other’s search for truth.

Walk through your local bookstore; tell me what you see in the non-fantasy sections. You will see what we in the fantasy community call standalones, shelves and shelves overwhelmingly stocked with standalones. Allow me to reintroduce its other name—a name we have largely neglected: the novel. Our bookshelves are overrun by so many series that we no longer conceive of novels as complete artifacts but as fragments. So much so that we’ve essentially renamed those “strange” books which contain a complete story “standalones.”

Consider the ongoing search for the Great American Novel, rather than the Great American Series. Imagine picking up the five-volume A Tale of Ten Cities, Crime & Punishment: Book 7, or Orwell’s 1989 (#6 in The Big Brother Saga). Multi-book stories have always been a rarity. They’ve existed, but never as the rule. While this doesn’t speak to the quality or legitimacy of the series, we need to understand why fantasy has embraced them as the norm.

The roots of our beloved genre are grounded in serials like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. And dare I say that episodic stories are geared towards reliably deliverable adventures, not conclusive and powerful endings. Mysteries and thrillers are often serialized, much like Tarzan or Conan, and can be read in isolation as complete stories. This is what distinguishes series in fantasy from series in most other genres: modern fantasy is unique because many of its series are continuations of single stories, which cannot be read out of order. Our genre had an explosive rebirth after Tolkien’s famous contributions, and is now largely composed of trilogies, chronicles, and sagas. Authors default to the series; readers are accustomed to the series. So, if neither authors nor readers object to them, shouldn’t that end the discussion? No, it shouldn’t. For while there are legitimate strengths to the series, there are distinct flaws. As for the strengths—well, we tell epics! World-ending catastrophes are our imaginary playthings! As we create a world and spell out its doom and salvation, can anyone blame us for needing more than 75,000 words or 300 pages? However, the strengths of the series don’t erase the weaknesses. In this essay, I highlight three such drawbacks, followed by three principles that would—if adopted—benefit the landscape of fantasy literature.

Three Drawbacks

Series Drawback #1: Unwieldy stories

This is the natural consequence of a single narrative prolonged across thousands of pages. Herein lies my core frustration: the lack of cohesion and direction. It’s difficult enough to write a novel with singular vision, where character, plot, and theme intertwine into a dazzling tapestry. But in a 10-book series? How could an author, not to mention the reader, get their arms about a story of such massive proportions? When a story is a literary ultramarathon, with plot points twisting and winding and characters dispersing and assembling, the reader is unable to recall the story with any sense of clarity—nor are they expected to. If a reader can only recall the few highlights of the plot across seven books, how important were those intermediary events to the story? Could they not have been shortened or removed altogether? Though not always, I frequently encounter stories that could fit into a single novel (or two) had the author only worked to tighten their plot. But when that single story is stretched by default into a trilogy or tetralogy, the story often results in being unwieldy and sloppily plotted. Readers have even named the common experience of being disappointed in the noticeable drop in quality and intrigue of a series’ second book: the sophomore slump or second book syndrome.

A Case Study

Within the truly epic series The Wheel of Time, an incredible story unfolds across fourteen books (and one novella), despite the author’s original pitch to make it a trilogy. Yet the WoT suffers from The Slog—a three-to-four book stretch that even the most dedicated fans consider hardly worth reading due to its boring nature and irrelevance to the overall story. If you allow me a scandalous claim, I will argue that even the best books in the series make the same mistakes as The Slog. Though I love the overall story’s ideas, its execution is far from disciplined. Momentum is continually lost through the books as the elephantine cast of characters is endlessly shuffled into odd pairings, each of which are then forced into side quests. As much as I loved Rand, Egwene, Matt, Nynaeve, and Perrin, they too often felt like Boggle dice, jumbled together to create new scenarios.

Hear this clearly: epic fantasies can be long. I’m not arguing the contrary. Let me repeat myself: epic fantasies can be long. But stories, whether intimate or epic, should ideally be tight and economical. For example, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (considered by many to be the fantasy epic) is not short by any means, being roughly 480,000 words. This compares nicely to the classic Les Misérables, which clocks in at roughly 540,000 words, and the Russian epic War and Peace, sitting high on its pedestal at 580,000 words. Think on that: The Lord of the Rings is shorter than War & Peace by a considerable margin. Contrast all those epics with The Wheel of Time’s whopping 4,400,000-word total. Only Leo Tolstoy’s magnum opus stacked seven and a half times cover-to-cover can match the length of The Wheel of Time. That length is absurd.

The Wheel of Time presents a fascinating case study because its flaws are so wildly obvious and offensive that its most diehard fans don’t deny it. The series is overly long, overly descriptive, overly meandering, and over and over again reminds the audience what’s occurred before (just in case they forgot). Yet it remains a beloved series within our community just the same. The truth is, The Wheel of Time is good, not because it’s flawless, but despite its flaws. While most fantasy series don’t fall as deep into the trap as The Wheel of Time, they’ve fallen into it nonetheless, being overly long, meandering, and unwieldy.

Series Drawback #2: Incomplete stories

To parse out this issue, answer this first: “What is the goal of a novel?” The simple answer is best. A novel tells a story. Presumably then, the goal of a series is the same. Below are three ways a series can fail to deliver the most satisfying version of its own story.

First, a series offers the reader a Frankenstein-story, fragments sewed together. For something akin to a three-act structure is required in each book to avoid altogether pissing off readers. So the authors fashion openings, climaxes, and conclusions across each volume whether or not those elements serve the actual story. And while these books require beginnings, climaxes, and endings, none of the books can deliver the whole of the story. Only one begins the story, others can deliver great climaxes, and only one other can end it—but none can do all three. Fragments, stitched into a whole.

A second manner in which a story is weakened by a series is that of the “sequel-effect.” Pierce Brown wrote a wonderful trilogy called Red Rising. It became a huge hit. Naturally, the trilogy was afterward extended into a seven-book saga. The original trilogy was full of heart and fun. But with the extension of the saga came the inevitable subversion of the original. Every sacrifice is diluted and every victory lessened as new threats are introduced to keep the story going. Imagine classic stories diluted through unasked for sequels: How can Frodo’s bittersweet pilgrimage from the Grey Havens mean anything if an army of orcs follows him into the West to begin anew a war for Arda (i.e., the world of Middle Earth)? Why should I care about Katniss and Peeta’s hard-earned happiness if a shadowy vestige of President Snow’s government hunts them down a decade later? An author who prolongs a story unnecessarily is a film director who cannot bring themselves to say, “That’s a wrap.”

One last tragedy is worth mentioning—one that is well-known. The extreme length of many series has resulted in an odd phenomenon where an author finds themselves unable to finish. As a writer in the throes of editing my debut I can testify to the hardship of writing a novel. No matter how great an author’s initial motivation might be, imagine the agony of being four books deep into a seven-book series. Imagine being an author four times over yet with no claim of having told even one complete story. That’s a brutal reality. Thus, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Gentlemen Bastard series, and The Kingkiller Chronicles have become household names for unfinished stories, to say nothing of the less-known incomplete stories like Clive Barker’s The Art trilogy or Melanie Rawn’s The Exile trilogy. The fantasy community dogpiles these authors or at least grieves the lost stories, but I can’t find fault in the authors. Perhaps more so than their anxious readers, authors of incomplete stories are the true victims of ultramarathon-like expectations. Depression, anxiety, self-doubt, feelings of betrayal—this is the toll on those who realize too late the ultramarathon-like nature of the series.

Series Drawback #3: A high barrier to entry

My wife is a reader… though not of fantasy. It took me five years of subtle maneuvering (i.e., incessant pleading) to convince her to read The Final Empire (Mistborn #1) by Brandon Sanderson. She finished it and thought it was “fine.” The story was a bit of a letdown, particularly after so much praise. “But no,” I wail. “The story isn’t over yet. It gets better!” But book one was already 210,000 words, at least twice the length of the average novel, and it seemed to wrap up well enough for her. You see, other genres don’t typically require picking up another book to finish the story. Most novels have self-contained stories; it’s fantasy that breaks the mold so regularly. Believe it or not, a trilogy is a big pill to swallow for those unaccustomed to fantasy—and many within our community consider the trilogy to be on the smaller side. That pill only grows with the fact that fantasy books are longer than most others, and—my, oh, my—what a horse pill we’ve forced others to swallow!

“But there are fantasy standalones,” you might object. Oh, really? A simple Googling of “Best Standalone Fantasy Books” reveals the utter dominance of urban, low, and often romance-heavy fantasy. These aren’t bad (please don’t hear that); they are simply not epic or high fantasy—the fantasy many of us love. Piranesi, The Night Circus, and Babel are all fine books (with Piranesi being a bona fide masterpiece, in my opinion), but they certainly aren’t representative of the larger body of work in fantasy. For the few epic fantasies that make it onto such lists, precious few would be widely considered the crème de la crème of fantasy. Standouts do exist; I’ve been looking for them. Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels come to mind. But ask yourself the question, What are the absolute best fantasy stories? Chances are, you think of series. The Stormlight Archive, The First Law, Malazan: Book of the Fallen, Broken Earth, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the list goes on. We fantasy writers have saved our best for the series.

Three Principles

Now for solutions I wish upcoming writers and working authors would embrace.

Principle #1: Rediscover the encapsulated beauty of the novel

The novel is unique. It takes the struggles and the beauty we encounter in the world and captures it between covers, revealing what is vast and invisible with conciseness and clarity. To lose these qualities of conciseness and clarity is to lose the essence of the novel. Brevity is a virtue; long-windedness is not. Authors must once again recall that elementary piece of advice they have heard so many times: kill your darlings.

Kill your trilogy that could be carved down to a novel. Kill your weaker plot points, your weaker characters until only the best remain. Kill the impulse to stretch your stories; nurture the urge to refine. Refine and refine and refine. Until every person and scene pulse with tension and theme. Scrape away every dull moment until your story cuts like a blade. Rediscover the singular beauty of the novel.

Principle #2: Treasure enrichment, not simply entertainment

Entertainment fills the senses; enrichment fills the soul. It is no great evil to entertain or be entertained, but it is a great good to enrich and be enriched. One startles, excites, and satisfies our already obvious desires. The other is more provocative, poking at our apathy and assumptions. It makes us contemplate life and death, purpose and value, beauty and truth.

To be sure, entertainment and enrichment are not mutually exclusive. They often go hand-in-hand. However, the landscape of much fantasy literature today is confusion, our lust for entertainment so large it’s eclipsed all other desires. And what we’ve received is more content, not more quality. Even if we changed our practices and wrote more novels rather than series, the change would be worthless if we didn’t turn our eyes, our souls towards enrichment.

Principle #3: Honor the primacy of story

Story is the point. As much as we’re drawn into the world, the characters, or the vibes, these are only parts of the whole. Yes, fantasy worlds are wondrous. Yes, some characters become as dear as friends we hate to say “goodbye” to. And yes—vibe on, fellow humans. Vibe on. But story is primary. Story is first and last. Don’t get lost in a world’s wonder or in fun but inconsequential narratives—if warranted, make those their own stories. Identify your story’s truest, deepest elements, then write, rewrite, and revise into the sharpest story possible. Go write that story.

You might think I dislike the series, but you couldn’t be more wrong. I love a series when it earns its length. What I dislike is when otherwise good stories are diluted by writers and publishers who force them into series. Even J.R.R. Tolkien had no intention of writing a trilogy. He wrote a novel. A novel that was published as a trilogy due to economic constraints. To this day, we recognize The Lord of the Rings as a great story first, and only secondarily as a great trilogy. And why? Because it earns its length. So authors, make your story as short or long as it needs to be. Perhaps your story is so magnificent it needs to be a series. Write that series! But ensure your story is so tremendous, so deserving, so served by its length that its potency remains untainted. Above all, make sure the story—not you—demands it be a series. Honor the primacy of story.

Conclusion

There are great novels you and I will never read—fantasy novels lost in the swamp of bloated series. Their stories, better suited for a novel, have been stretched into trilogies and quartets and quintets. Stretched to absurdity, or worse, boredom. How many great novels have slipped away in the author’s attempt to transform their story into an ultramarathon-length series? I suspect many.

And that saddens me.

Yet I hope.

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Subversion is the Name of the Game

This is not as debatable as one might assume, as the likes of Michael Moorcock, George R.R. Martin, and Joe Abercrombie have all publicly spoken of their reaction and subversion of the work of Tolkien and the copycats who followed. While an incredible tool in the writer’s toolbox, subversion is less so when utilized as a literary engine. Subversion is a fuel of diminishing returns. Eventually, the only remaining element to be subverted is subversion itself! This occurs because subversion only satisfies as a surprise. And as the surprise lessens, so too does satisfaction.

However, it would be inaccurate to suggest grimdark values subversion in general. In other art forms, subversion often manifests in the deconstruction of the craft. In grimdark, subversion has totally different prey; it targets virtue and meaning itself. It asks, “how meaningless can I get away with being?” But what’s the reason for this subversion? What does meaninglessness in a story accomplish?

Well, stories of heroes and hope are unrealistic. These elements introduce a childish fantasy into our beloved genre, diluting the great potential of our literature. At least, that’s what they tell me. I recall the words spoken in an Epic Rap Battle of History where a fictional George R.R. Martin accuses a fictional J.R.R. Tolkien, “All your bad guys die and your good guys survive! We can tell what’s gonna happen by page and age five!”[1] Such optimism is a disease if left unchecked, grimdark asserts, and must be resisted (although many authors of grimdark agree there is room in the kitchen for dishes of all types). The solution to this lack of realism is, according to grimdark author Joe Abercrombie, grit. “The dirt physical and moral. The attention to unpleasant detail. The greyness of the characters. The cynicism of the outlook.”[2] These qualities infuse reality into the fantasy. Or so they insist.

Grimdark authors craft a world marked by violence, vice, and void of objective meaning, look upon their creations, and declare, “It is realistic, now!” Yet let us look more closely at these three core tenets of grimdark.

Violence, Vice, and Meaninglessness

One accusation is that traditional or “classic” fantasy/literature does not sufficiently depict violence, although this seems more a qualm with a nonspecific overview of battle typically associated with Tolkien and his copycats than with broader fantasy. But as some readers of fantasy are eager to remind us, Tolkien is not the originator of the genre. Fantasy novels were plentiful before and after The Lord of the Rings; so, at most, Tolkien changed the game and arguably proved there was a market for Fantasy. Violence is abundant in much of the Sword & Sorcery subgenre in addition to literature classic and ancient. Who could accuse Conan the Barbarian, Dracula, Dante’s Inferno, or Beowulf of sanitized violence? Yet none of these books qualify in any sense as Grimdark, despite each of them possessing prominent fantastic/supernatural elements. Violence cannot be the defining quality of grimdark.

What of vice? Might this be grimdark’s key contribution towards traditional fantasy and literature? But no, this too falls short considering that vice is in no short supply. Hubris, greed, lust, and moral weakness of every kind permeate our stories, even within Tolkien’s “childish” novels. Bilbo’s fear and selfishness are crippling, Boromir’s envy results in catastrophe, Frodo is decimated by the power of the Ring—not only physically but morally and emotionally, and Gollum’s oscillation between hope and corruption are the teeter-totter upon which Middle-Earth balances, to say nothing of Saruman’s good intentions in joining Sauron. Anti-heroes and protagonists with moral failings are not constrained to any one genre, exposing that vice cannot be grimdark’s core characteristic.

The crown of grimdark is neither violence nor vice, but the author’s portrayal of life, with all its beauty and brutality, as utterly meaningless.

This genre’s premier publication, Grimdark Magazine, made a bold attempt to define their genre, but the result is laughably vague: “a bleak story with a glimmer of hope told in a hostile setting featuring morally gray characters.”[3] Here, the only quality remotely specific is that of “morally gray characters;” but are we in the literary community willing to anachronistically categorize every novel across time that features “morally gray characters” as grimdark? By the qualifiers “bleak story” and “hostile setting,” they mistakenly define grimdark by its atmosphere, which can only be done at the expense of other literary categories, collapsing most genres into grimdark because their stories feature so-called “grit.” To elevate this reactionary genre so that it encapsulates ancient Greek myths, Norse epics, Gothic literature, and horror old and new would be a blatant attempt at rationalization and self-justification.

Not violence and not vice, but meaninglessness is grimdark’s defining quality. Some object, insisting that grimdark presents complex characters who sometimes strive to persevere or do good despite life’s hopelessness and meaninglessness—but that is neither here nor there, for whatever a character’s impulses or choices are, the rightness or wrongness of an action is still framed by a world bereft of moral truth. This is why grimdark is often critiqued as nihilist—a critique that fails. As grimdark author Mark Lawrence argued, “Grimdark is often called nihilistic, but this misses the idea that you can accept a nihilistic truth and still choose to die for a principle you know is an emotional construct… having been shown there’s no meaning in the world, they still cling to some elements of it. And in those choices they are revealed” (emphasis in original).[4] I agree with Mark Lawrence: grimdark novels are not best categorized as nihilistic, for their characters rarely throw in the towel and live in nihilism. The philosophy both critics and Lawrence are describing is absurdism, famously proposed by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.

“Camus’s understanding of absurdity is best captured in an image, not an argument: of Sisyphus straining to push his rock up the mountain, watching it roll down, then descending after the rock to begin all over, in an endless cycle. Like Sisyphus, humans cannot help but continue to ask after the meaning of life, only to see our answers tumble back down.”[5]

But within absurdism, realizing the cosmos is meaningless is not the end as it is in nihilism. Such a realization is the catalyst for humanity to defy the cosmos by choosing to act as if meaning is attainable. In the words of Camus himself, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”[6]

Absurdity is what marks grimdark as distinct in the literary landscape. Any values or ideals are presented as merely characters shaking their fists at an overcast sky. Often, those same ideals are shown to be futile, counterproductive, or even in conflict with the protagonist’s character—making ideals nothing but mental fictions in grimdark fiction. If there is any doubt that absurdism is the (frozen) heart within grimdark, one must only contrast the genre to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a novel that unequivocally fulfills the lackluster definition of Grimdark Magazine: “a bleak story with a glimmer of hope told in a hostile setting featuring morally gray characters.”

A Case Study: Crime and Punishment

To put it mildly, Crime and Punishment is dark.

The sight and stink of drunkards fill the stifling streets of St. Petersburg where our protagonist, Raskolnikov, escapes from his cramped quarters and the nagging of his landlady to agonize over whether he is capable of murder. Raskolnikov decides he is.

I have included two excerpts of the murder. *Content Warning: Violence*

He unbuttoned his coat and freed the axe from the loop but did not quite take it out yet; he just held it in his right hand under the coat. His hands were terribly weak; he felt them growing more and more numb and stiff every moment. He was afraid he would let go and drop the axe… suddenly his head seemed to spin.

“Look how he’s wrapped it up!” the old woman exclaimed in vexation, and made a move towards him.

He could not waste even one more moment. He took the axe all the way out, swung it with both hands, scarcely aware of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the butt-end down on her head. His own strength seemed to have no part in it. But the moment he brought the axe down, strength was born in him.

The old woman was bareheaded as always. Her thin hair, light and streaked with gray, was thickly greased as usual, plaited into a ratty braid and tucked under a piece of horn comb that stuck up at the back of her head. Because she was short, the blow happened to land right on the crown of her head. She cried out, but very faintly, and her whole body suddenly sank to the floor, though she still managed to raise both hands to her head. In one hand she was still holding the “pledge.” Then he struck her again and yet again with all his strength, both times with the butt-end, both times on the crown of the head. Blood poured out as from an overturned glass, and the body fell backwards. He stepped aside, letting it fall, and immediately bent down to her face; she was already dead. Her eyes bulged as if they were about to pop out, and her forehead and her whole face were contracted and distorted in convulsion.

...

He suddenly fancied that the old woman might still be alive, and might still recover her senses. Abandoning both the keys and the chest of drawers, he ran back to the body, seized the axe and raised it one more time over the old woman, but did not bring it down. There was no doubt that she was dead. Bending over and examining her again more closely, he saw clearly that the skull was shattered and even displaced a little to one side. He was about to feel it with his finger, but jerked his hand back; it was obvious enough without that. Meanwhile a whole pool of blood had already formed.[7]

And again, Raskolnikov brutalizes his victim’s sister after she interrupts his crime:

Lizaveta was standing in the middle of the room, with a big bundle in her hands, frozen, staring at her murdered sister, white as a sheet, and as if unable to utter a cry. Seeing [Raskolnikov] run in, she trembled like a leaf, with a faint quivering, and spasms ran across her whole face; she raised her hand, opened her mouth, yet still did not utter a cry, and began slowly backing away from him into the corner, staring at him fixedly, point-blank, but still not uttering a sound, as if she did not have breath enough to cry out. He rushed at her with the axe; she twisted her lips pitifully, as very small children do when they begin to be afraid of something, stare at the thing that frightens them, and are on the point of crying out. And this wretched Lizaveta was so simple, so downtrodden, and so permanently frightened that she did not even raise a hand to protect her face, though it would have been the most necessary and natural gesture at that moment, because the axe was raised directly over her face. She brought her free left hand up very slightly, nowhere near her face, and slowly stretched it out towards him as if to keep him away. The blow landed directly on the skull, with the sharp edge, and immediately split the whole upper part of the forehead, almost to the crown. She collapsed.[8]

If bleakness, morally gray characters, or brutality qualified a book as grimdark, then it is inarguable that Crime and Punishment ranks among the grimdarkest—not only for the description of these murders, but for the misery that bleeds through the novel’s every page. But if Crime and Punishment is grimdark, then Raskolnikov’s crime ought to be depicted as a mere cold reality of the world, as a brutal but possibly necessary decision that he is pushed towards. Though it is a horrible decision, Raskolnikov possesses genuinely good reasons to commit such a crime. For one, he’s poor and starving. Two, his original victim is a despicable pawnbroker, who takes advantage of her clients and is a wretched abuser of her younger sister. Three, Raskolnikov could use this pawnbroker’s wealth to save his beloved sister from marrying a horrid man. In the end, he might be caught and punished, or else he might escape justice altogether—at least, that is how grimdark would frame it.

Alas, Dostoevsky does not frame it this way. Despite being pursued by an investigator, Raskolnikov is never proven guilty. By all appearances, the killer gets away with it. But nothing could be further from the truth, for the author frames Raskolnikov’s crime as his punishment—a principle foreign to grimdark. Raskolnikov murders these two women, not because he believes himself a villain but because he wonders whether he is an extraordinary human—a human whose world-changing ideas grant amnesty from particular crimes.

“The crimes of these people, naturally, are relative and variegate; for the most part they call, in quite diverse declarations, for the destruction of the present in the name of the better. But if such a one needs, for the sake of his idea, to step even over a dead body, over blood, then within himself, in his conscience, he can, in my opinion, allow himself to step over blood…”[9]

But Raskolnikov is unable to “step over blood.” Across the entire novel, he slips on the women’s blood, unable to find psychological balance or rid himself of the guilt and horror that lay claim to him. His becomes a life of utter distress and disassociation, where he is refused even momentary respite. All of this misery, not because of an external justice that snares him, but because he has broken the law—not the law of humanity—the law of moral truth. As a result, Raskolnikov plummets further into dizzying oblivion, driven mad by his crime.

Only in Sonya, a woman forced by desperation into prostitution, does he find mercy and hope. She is a broken person, a perfect candidate for a grimdark novel who might shake her fist in defiance of the universe’s cruelty and absurdity. Yet Sonya doesn’t accept that the world is meaningless; by her love she proves Raskolnikov wrong. She is the light in his darkness, the selflessness that refutes his moral relativism.

Crime and Punishment is “a bleak story with a glimmer of hope told in a hostile setting featuring morally gray characters,” yet it is in no way grimdark, for it posits a meaningfulness to life and the reality of moral truth. The only identifiable quality that differentiates grimdark from other gritty literature is its philosophical grounding in absurdism.

Self-Defeating Absurdism

At this point, the question naturally arises, So what? If grimdark can produce great novels, shouldn’t that be the end of discussion? Well, no. The crux of the matter is that grimdark authors and readers assume neutrality, insisting that their fiction is simply more realistic. Yes, they can touch upon real issues, such as the abuse of power, the thrownness of human existence, and the presence and problem of evil, but they do so through an absurdist worldview. Whereas these issues are discussed across millennia of literature, grimdark is unique in positing these issues are casual and meaningless.

Ironically, the very experience of reading a novel—even a grimdark one—flies in the face of absurdism. For no matter how prevalent meaninglessness is therein, when a reader picks up a novel, they encounter not randomness or pointlessness but powerfully captivating characters whose lives say, this is a story that matters. And when a reader turns the final page, they experience an end goal, a purpose. The only meaningless aspects of such a novel are those that are meaningfully inserted by its authors. Its characters’ values (or lack thereof) and the brutal trials they undergo reflect the supposed absurdity and pointlessness of life, yet this meaninglessness is only present by virtue of the author’s design and intentionality. By nature of possessing themes and purposes, a grimdark novel fails to exist within its own philosophy. Absurdism is an unlivable, nigh incoherent philosophy—available only within the ivory tower of imagination. For if our world is meaningless, the most reasonable conclusion is not defiance in the face of meaninglessness (i.e., the truth), but nihilism or hedonism—and such conclusions thrust humanity into an endless desert, where flourishing is impossible.

This is the deepest irony of grimdark, perhaps even its fatal flaw. For all its claims, grimdark lacks realism. Where are the cohesive families, the healthy communities, the virtuous—if still imperfect—people? Yes, history is replete with horror, but not so utterly as grimdark would have its readers think. Based on many grimdark descriptions of the world, one might be tempted to believe stable societies or virtuous people were fictions prior to 21^st century enlightened living.

Despite the evil in the world—evil we all struggle to understand—this place where we live and write is bursting with meaning. We assume goodness and mourn injustice. We long for purpose and sacrifice ourselves to find it. We yearn. Hope. Love.

Should authors or readers hesitate to embrace the absurdity of life, the solution is simple. Embrace the reality of truth and morality. Grimdark, though capable of delivering good novels, cannot be the future of literature, for even if grimdark’s greatest strength is taken into consideration—characters who endure horrors and strive for purpose—such endurance is hollow in a world comprised of meaninglessness and subversion. And meaninglessness isn’t realistic or satisfying. It’s only surprising... until it isn’t.

[1] ERB, “J. R. R. Tolkien vs George R. R. Martin. Epic Rap Battles of History,” at 0:28–0:32.

[2] Abercrombie, Joe, “The Value of Grit - Joe Abercrombie,” Joe Abercrombie, February 25, 2013. https://joeabercrombie.com/the-value-of-grit/.

[3] Mauro, John, “Defining Grimdark Fantasy and SF: Moving to an Inclusive Future,” Grimdark Magazine, July 15, 2024. https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/defining-grimdark-fantasy-and-sf-moving-to-an-inclusive-future/.

[4] Lawrence, Mark, “Groping the Elephant by Mark Lawrence,” Grimdark Magazine, May 10, 2023. https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/groping-the-elephant-by-mark-lawrence/.

[5] Aronson, Ronald, “Albert Camus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/camus/.

[6] Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, (Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1955), 123.

[7] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, (Vintage Books, New York: 2021), 80-82.

[8] Ibid., 83-84.

[9] Ibid., 273-274.