Category: Fantasy Criticism

A New Kind of Fantasy

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Sometimes I think I would enjoy writing a fantasy novel in which the lead character is a coward and an idiot who can’t do anything right. For instance, the Knight turns to him and says, “Soon the battle will begin.” And Mr. Screw-up answers, “What? What did you say? Did you say battle? Man, no way–I’m outta here!” Think Bill Paxton in Aliens or True Lies, and you’ve got exactly the kind of character I mean.

Or, “Sir, did you not know that this is Camelot, and the stronghold of King Arthur?”

“Camel lot? Like you can buy used camels here? Fooey! And what’s this king, Arthur Whatsisname? King of what? Why can’t anyone around here talk sense?”

This could be fun. But it could also get very tiresome: the writer would have to take care not to cross the line. And of course, in addition to the fun of shaking up fantasy cliches, there would have to be a point to the story.

I think some of you can probably guess what that would be.

Here’s hoping you all had a nice Thanksgiving.

 

Did I Write That?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’ve been reading a book I wrote circa 1988 and published in 1990–and what I wrote has shocked me.

Mind Stealer was the last of four horror novels I wrote for Zebra Books during the 1980s horror boom. At the time, I didn’t know it would be the last.

I was never terribly proud of it because they changed editors on me and the new editor made a mess of the book. I had to work like crazy to restore some semblance of readability.

Mind Stealer is the story of a special, hush-hush management training program run by Japanese consultants somewhere in the North Carolina wilderness. Back then, America’s business community worshiped everything Japanese–especially their insanely fanatical devotion to their employers.

So I wrote about that. And I wrote savagely. I wrote raw. I read it now and wonder, “Why was I so angry? What was in my heart, to make me write like this?” I’ve found in it no glimmer of redemption, and I don’t remember writing any such thing into it.

If that was who I was then, and God has heard my prayers and changed me so that I can hardly recognize my own writing from that age of my life, then I give Him thanks and rejoice. If I had stayed the man whom I discern in the pages of Mind Stealer, I’d have burned out like a highway flare. The fire would have consumed me.

I would write that story very differently today, if I had to write it at all. But I’m sure I don’t have time for it.

‘City of Boneheads’ (a Novel for Not Very Bright Teens)

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As someone who writes novels for young people, I try to read as much Young Adult fiction as I can stomach. Occasionally I discover something really good. But not this time.

City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare, was a New York Times best-seller in 2007 and went on to win dozens of awards. I’ve learned that an award from the American Library Assn. usually denotes tacky or unwholesome subject matter.

This particular book embodies most of what’s wrong with YA fiction. Dividing readers into age-group classes is a dumb idea. We don’t have Old Adults or Middle-Aged Adults fiction, or Doddering Adults With One Foot in the Grave Already fiction. Why set up a literary bantustan for younger readers?

(But didn’t you just say you write “novels for young people”? Yeah, I do–in the sense that I don’t presuppose the reader knows or cares about certain matters that only seem to become important after one has passed the age of 50. I also leave out profanity, graphic violence, and sex scenes. The reality is that my publisher disapproves of such things in a novel. I have learned to live without them, and my books are much the better for it. I strive to write material that any reasonably intelligent person from 12 years old and up can enjoy.)

Cassandra Clare is not an awful writer. She knows how to set a scene and how to keep the story flowing. But she writes down to her audience, as if readers under the age of 21 just aren’t able to think outside a narrow “teen culture” box–a little coffin for the brain. Her dialogue is dreadful–what you might expect a clever extraterrestrial to write after spending some decades monitoring MacDonald’s commercials. It would be a better book if the characters never spoke. She even succumbs to the temptation to make her rigidly teenage protagonists superheroes with cool powers. I hate superheroes with cool powers. And there’s a lot of technicolor violence.

After some 200 pages of it, I doubt I’ll have the patience to read all the way to the end of this 500-page monstrosity.

And I can’t think of any reason why you should, either.

Hey, Teens–Clue Me In

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I am one of those adults who write Young Adults fiction. Note that none of it is actually written by young adults.

Because this is where I park my pen, I try to read a lot of contemporary YA fiction to see what the standards are, these days. It ain’t lookin’ good.

The oldsters who write books for teenagers seem to think “young adults” need a steady diet of gore, cruelty, aberrant sex, and really corny dialogue that will be unreadable, a generation down the road. Most of them write with a certain image of “teen culture” in their minds, and imprison their characters and their readers in it from cover to cover. I know I wouldn’t have liked these books when I was 16.

Here is my shout-out to young readers. If you have teenagers in your house, ask them to respond. I need to hear from them.

Do you folks really like Young Adults fiction, as it is today? Do these books speak to you? Do they create a world in which you want to spend a lot of time? Do the old crocks who write them really understand young people? What does it do for you, to read about persons having sex with vampires–dead bodies, you know–or other kinds of monsters?

I ask because I write books which I hope young readers will enjoy and find edifying, (Sly hint: they make great Christmas presents) without being soppy or patronizing. I can see that mine are very different from most of what’s out there–especially from most of the fantasy, which constitutes a big chunk of the teen market.

Having been young once, I have this notion that I’m still much the same person I was then, and that there isn’t that much difference between “young” and “old”–aside from what is emphasized as a marketing ploy.

Tell me if I’m wrong.

 

Fantasy and ‘Realism’

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I think I must be more than halfway done writing my new book, The Glass Bridge. All sorts of things are happening in this story. I wonder how it’ll end.

Meanwhile, one of the issues that comes up all the time in both my writing and my reading is… to what extent is anything I read about or write about ‘real’?

Ray Harryhausen used to say nobody wants to go to the movies to see a sinkful of dirty dishes. Ah–but there are a lot of movies (and even more novels) that show you nothing but stacks of dirty dishes, and even mold growing on them. This fixation on decay and ugliness is always called “realism.”

To impress college professors and literary critics, Stephen King filled The Shining with infinite detail about the protagonist’s whole life, starting with early childhood–all of it ugly, painful, perverse, etc. Betcha it added 100 pages to the book. He provided this excess of unedifying information because it is what intellectuals and literary wallahs consider to be “realistic” detail. If the author writes about someone who has led a wholesome and happy life, that would be pooh-poohed as unrealistic.

What this teaches us is an important lesson about what Godless humanists think about reality: only the bad stuff is real. This comes across in their literature all the time. It is a world-view that also works its way into their personal lives.

They can keep it.

 

Jules Verne vs. Stephen King

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I recently re-read my favorite Jules Verne book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Next I chose to revisit Stephen King‘s The Shining, which Patty and I have long agreed is King’s best book. It must be at least 25 years since I last read The Shining.

Oh, does it suffer by comparison! People nowadays don’t give Jules Verne much credit as a novelist. He’s mostly remembered as a pioneer of science fiction who was among the first to see the potential of the submarine. Okay–but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still one corker of a novel. It’s also one of those books which, once I’m into it, I don’t want to see come to an end.

Just a few chapters into The Shining, I find myself wondering just how fast I can read this book so I can start on something better.

For those of you interested in the craft of writing, do you know what is the difference between these two books?

In The Shining, Stephen King tells you everything, and I do mean everything, in flashbacks galore. You know almost as much about his major characters’ lives as the Recording Angel does. All right, this sort of helps you to understand them, and to understand what happens to them as the story plods on. But it sure does slow things down. Later in his career Stephen King would carry this practice to a ridiculous extent: for instance, in The Tommyknockers you get the whole life stories of various walk-on characters. It’s like someone having you in a headlock and giving you noogies, and you can’t get away…

in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne is too busy telling an exciting story to bother with flashbacks of his main characters’ early childhoods, etc. And yet as his story gallops on, you come to know Prof. Arronax, Conseil, and Ned Land like brothers. How does the writer do that, without flashbacks? Let me elucidate a deep mystery: What the characters say and do reveals their personalities. Voila! He makes it look so easy, you’re hardly aware you’re reading a book at all.

I despise the Serious Mainstream Literature of the 20th century. It’s all pseudo-intellectual cow-flop and no story.

It’s Jules Verne over Stephen King by a knockout, just a minute into the first round.

C.S. Lewis on the Untold Narnia Story

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I’ve been reading a book on the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion’s World, by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. I’ll be writing a full review later on. Meanwhile, this book has surprised and delighted me, so far. And I had spent years thinking Archbishop Williams was just another politically correct chucklehead… But he has said some wise things in this book. So far.

Like some of you, I’ve long thought there was a Narnia story yet to be written (see “The Missing Chronicle of Narnia,” March 13, 2013). Like many of you, I was shocked when Susan, one of the original Kings and Queens of Narnia at Caer Paravel, is left out at the end–despite the fact that Aslan himself made her a queen and declared, “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia.”

Among the gems stored in Archbishop Williams’ little book is this excerpt from a letter from C.S. Lewis to one of his young readers, written in 1960, just three years before his death:

“Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?”

As I felt sure must have been the case, Lewis did know there was a story he had not yet written. It seems he just wasn’t ready to write it: hadn’t quite decided how he ought to write it: knew what he didn’t want, but couldn’t yet see how he would have made it the kind of story that he wanted.

I wonder if he left it to each of us to write it for ourselves.

P.S.–I now understand that Lewis mentioned the eventual redemption of Susan in other letters, too.

An Open Letter to My Critics

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here is an open letter to the handful of critics who object to “all that religious stuff” in my Bell Mountain series. I write with all the respect I can muster for their opinion.

Dear Ignorant Peabrains:

It has probably escaped your notice that, except for the little corner of our own present age occupied by radical secularists, there has never been a human culture without “religious stuff.” There has never been an atheist civilization. So if I’m going to write realistically about human beings, even in a fantasy, “religious stuff” must be included in their way of life. To leave it out would be to amputate a big chunk of who they are.

Yes, I knew we find hardly a trace of “religious stuff” in contemporary fiction of all kinds. That’s because those works are produced by only a microscopic portion of the general population. Those works also conform to certain conventions that no one ever questions.

One of those conventions is to ignore the religious dimension of human life. Whether one is producing a sitcom, a movie screenplay, a detective story, or any kind of fiction whatsoever, one leaves out “religion.” After all, eternal truths and immutable moral laws might offend some thin-skinned dork out there. The American Library Association, the teachers’ unions, and Scholastic Books won’t like it: that’s for sure.

I’ve chosen to ignore that particular convention. The civilization I write about is inhabited by people for whom religion is an important part of daily life. That is, the lives of my fantasy characters conform to a virtually universal characteristic of the human race. In that respect my fantasies are more realistic than the goings-on at any Democrat dum-dum on TV.

I daresay my Bell Mountain fantasy world, for all its faults, is a far sight better than the prison-world you’re constructing for America, in which the devouring state is the god and crooked, mad, and wicked politicians are its prophets–where “diversity” means a coerced uniformity of opinion, and “inclusion” means the exclusion of everyone and everything that won’t conform.

Do us all a favor, and exclude yourselves.

What Turns You Off Fantasy?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

My wife says it’s the names. She was recently taking a Lord of the Rings trivia quiz, and threw up her hands, shouting, “If I ever tried to read this blasted book, these [deleted] names would drive me absolutely loopy!” The name “Galadriel” really gave her fits.

“That’s not fair,” I protested. “After all, you like Russian novels. They’re full of funky names! How can you read about characters with names like Vsevolod Zhitomirivich and Sopiko Guramishvili, and be frustrated by a name as simple as Galadriel?”

“That’s different!” she said. “I’m used to the names in Russian novels.”

To each his own… But I can’t deny that there are a lot of screwy names in fantasy literature, and I suppose there are readers who can’t warm up to it on that account. Burdened with enough goofy names, a fantasy novel may sink irretrievably into mere silliness.

I read a lot of fantasy, and much of it is just plain awful. It’s not the names that put me off. It’s the deluge of cliches, especially those pertaining to female characters. I am especially averse to air-headed young girls who are treated as love goddesses by sickly-looking young males with hairless chests; to warrior-women who routinely outfight strong men twice their size; and even more especially to wenches with insatiable sexual appetites. Like, what ever happened to normal girls and women? I get the impression that a lot of this “literature” is written by male nerds who don’t get out too often and deal mostly in wish fulfillment, and young feminists with bad complexions.

It’s enough to send you running off to Russian novels.

I continue to wade through the mire, in search of well-written fantasies that satisfy my imagination: the last one I found was Inkheart. As soon as I can find another, I’ll let you know about it.

Best Supporting Characters

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

A novel, like a movie or a play, needs a cast of characters. Some of these will be supporting characters. It’s deadly dull to read a book in which the author fixates on his protagonist and all the other characters are one or even no-dimensional nonentities–a common mistake made by inexperienced writers.

Without further ado, here are a few of my favorite supporting characters.

1. Mr. and Mrs. Webb in the Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks. When Freddy’s in a jam, he turns to this pair of bold, resourceful, quick-thinking… spiders. Yup, I said spiders. They are invaluable allies in any complicated criminal investigation. They just have to be careful not to get swatted, stepped on, or sneezed into tomorrow. But don’t take my word for it: read a few of these books. It’s a great antidote for arachnophobia.

2. Tarzan’s monkey, Nkima, is in many of the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but in none of the Tarzan movies. Not taking away from Cheeta the chimp, who’s in the movies but not the books, but Nkima is a much more interesting character–terrified of practically everything in the jungle, boastful, easily distracted (but then so is Tarzan himself), vain, and totally devoted to his human friend. Great comic relief.

3. Reepacheep the Mouse, in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia: imagine a Cyrano de Bergerac who’s only two feet tall, and you’ve got him. Courageous to the point of idiocy, Reep nevertheless sometimes sees more clearly into a situation than the human characters.

4. Prior Robert, in Ellis’ Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries. A Norman of noble birth, proud, arrogant, convinced that he ought to be the abbot, finicky and overly fastidious, inclined to self-righteousness–in spite of all these flaws, there is a wide streak of innocent un-worldliness in Robert’s psychology; and deep down inside, he is truly a man of God. Ellis Peters was the best when it came to creating truly complex characters; and she had the rare gift of being able to write about goodness, and truly good people, without ever being gooey or unbelievable.

5. Duke Corsus, a second-tier villain in E.R. Eddison‘s quirky fantasy masterpiece, The Worm Ouroboros, was once a great man. But years of wine-bibbing, pointless plotting and scheming, and inactivity have taken their toll. Corsus is just so bad in every aspect of his character, so lacking in redeeming qualities, that his actions become oddly fascinating. And then, given one last chance, he almost returns to greatness–but winds up making a hash of it. He’s just too steeped in villainy even to be successful as a villain anymore. He’s truly the worst of the lot, which makes him interesting. Which would certainly not be true if he really existed and had a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Yes, I know I’ve failed to mention many more great supporting characters. I’m hoping my readers will join in the fun and nominate some favorites of their own.