Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

I read To Kill A Mockingbird over Labor Day holidays for the first time.

It was not the story I thought it was from all the Atticus Finch quotes around the internet. I expected an uplifting courtroom drama; I got a bittersweet coming-of-age story about a young girl growing up in Depression-era small-town Alabama. The bitter: good guys didn't win; the innocent man died instead of going free, and the town is full of racist assholes for whom Justice is another "Whites Only" thing. The sweet: the protagonist learned not to judge people based on gossip, and that not everyone was a racist asshole.

Alas, at my age, "coming-of-age" stories have all the appeal of a soggy dog biscuit. I outgrew them long ago. The stark portrayal of the racism and the unwritten codes of how the races were permitted to interact was interesting--as were the exceptions: the rich landowner who lived with his black wife and mixed-race children and didn't give a damn what people thought of him. Even he pretended to be a drunkard to provide an excuse for his relationship, to protect his family.

"Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett is a fantasy novel about Ankh-Morpork's moribund postal service and the semaphore company competing against it. It's also a prescient view of what happened to Boeing Corporation. Just change the names from Boeing to Grand Trunk, and Dave Calhoun to Reacher Gilt, it's the same story.

Horror can stop working as horror if the reader has a sufficiently different cultural background from the author, because what horrified the author may be mundane to the reader. Alternatively, what the author accepts as good and right may horrify the reader in ways the author never intended. This can happen over time as well as across borders.

I recently read Arthur Machen's The White People. Not only couldn't I find any horror in it (beyond the mundane horror of how badly Machen treats female character in general), I had trouble finding any plot or even what the hell was going on. I can't say I agree with H.P. Lovecraft's analysis of "what was going on"--it's not really in the text and I think HPL pulled it out of his aft. Machen's idea of horror seems to be Women With Agency Doing Things, which really, really doesn't age well.

And then there's H.P. Lovecraft, who wanders freely between cosmic horror of "man was not the first, and won't be the last being to rule the Earth, and they will return when the stars are right", the existential horror of losing your identity to undeath, body-theft, gender-change, or species-change; and the racist's abject horror that Those People live in his neighborhood, possibly even right next door!. Guess which aspect of HPL's horror has not aged well?

Writers need to pay attention to the classic horror tropes they're using, or they might find themselves saying "Genocide is morally good" or "Slaves are by nature inferior beings whose lives and desires are worthless and meaningless" in the themes of their stories. (Looking at you, Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft). Or you, the writer, could think about those tropes and deconstruct them instead, giving us wonderful stories like Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom".