Recently I read a very popular, award-winning SF novel, which I won’t name, since a lot of people clearly liked it and I’m far too old to be getting into internet slapfights. The book was clearly intended as a lighthearted, jokey read, and, plot-wise, might well have been entertaining under other circumstances.
But, as I read, I became sharply conscious that the characters in the book and their world were nothing but words on a page – talking heads in a white void. Now, I’m aware that prose fiction is always just words on a page, and that some texts deliberately emphasise this to unsettle the reader, to create an artistic effect or make an argument. I don’t think that’s what this popcorn science fiction adventure was doing.
I had no idea what a single one of the characters looked like. There was a brief indication of what the place the main characters were staying looked like and the weather on their arrival (a passage of description rare enough that it stuck in my mind), but otherwise no sense of the space they inhabited, the passing of seasons, or any kind of sensory experience at all.
Physical manifestations of emotion were nowhere to be found, either. Grief, excitement, fear, triumph – all these things express themselves in the body. Here, the reader was left to assume emotion from the events of the plot: this character must be sad, because it would be weird not to be sad when your friend dies; everyone must be scared, because a monster attack is scary.But feelings were nowhere in the text. What sparse description did appear was mediated via pop culture references. This thing looks like that famous movie! This other thing is a bit like that other movie! Anything that might have made the book tangible, atmospheric, something you could feel, was left off the page – on the assumption, it seemed, that… well, the reader would know what was intended. Everyone’s seen a Star Wars movie, after all. Shorthand can be useful, but here there was nothing but.
The one thing the book really seemed to revel in was the banter-laden, MCU-esque dialogue. I get the appeal. I’m not immune to the charms of a quippy back-and-forth – I wrote Buffy fanfiction, for God’s sake (no, you can’t have a link) – but here it seemed to exist at the expense of just about everything else. In the most egregious example, a weird-looking alien food was introduced, and then nobody tried it. It existed only for the characters to make jokes about. The book read like an extreme example of what I tend to call “screenplay syndrome”, though I’ve also seen it referred to as an aspect of what Wesley Osam, in a series of blog posts that are well worth reading, terms “novelization style”. You might recognise it. Its symptoms are those books and stories that feel like the author really wanted to be writing a screenplay, and the things that are strengths of prose fiction – its ability to invoke a variety of senses, to handle pacing in ways other than the moment-to-moment, to explore interiority – have been resentfully phoned in.
But Jess, why are you even bothering to write about this? Why spend almost 500 words discussing a book you didn’t like? Isn’t it better to be positive?
Well, yes and no. I rarely pick up a book if there isn’t some aspect of the premise that appeals to me, and I mostly can’t be bothered hate-reading or -watching. But I’m using this newsletter as a space to talk about my writing practice, and part of that is figuring out what doesn’t work for the kind of writing I want to do.
I’ve often been drawn to literatures of the body. My PhD work was on classic weird fiction, which is obsessively concerned with bodies – monstrous bodies, alien bodies, bodies in flux and dissolution – and bodily sensation and transformation are similarly central to horror and the Gothic. Think Hellraiser, or Poppy Z. Brite describing a romantic sex scene and a decaying corpse with the same loving, sensual attention. Inhabiting a breakable, mortal body is vulnerable and frightening, and that’s often where the most successfully discomfiting fiction is rooted.
Of course, these are also genres subject to semi-regular moral panics. Their sensationalism is corrupting; it will undermine both their readers’ morals and their grip on reality! I can’t help wondering if the stripping-out of the physical from some contemporary SFF is one side of a similar coin, the other being the current vogue for comfort fiction or “cosiness” (and the condemnation, explicit or implicit, of fiction that doesn’t provide comfort as unfeminist or immoral). Being reminded of our bodies and their vulnerability strips us of our illusions of control – the opposite of comfort.
Though I write more SFF than horror, I want my work to feel alive with sensation, and sometimes unsettlingly so. My current project, about which I’ll talk more some other time, is a dark contemporary fantasy about characters who work on the borders between life and death. They deal in dead bodies and dying souls – and they also have a lot of ill-advised sex and a collective drinking problem as a result of that. The story needs to feel tangible to work, for the themes to land and the characters to embody them. I’m constantly going back and adding layers of sensory description to scenes I’ve just written.
So, in the interest of sketching out what I do want to do, I’m going to talk a little about a recent novel that really did work for me, Andrew F. Sullivan’s horror novel, The Marigold.
The Marigold takes place in contemporary Toronto, or something like it (I mean, I’ve never been…), a version of the city being swallowed by rising waters and a sentient mould known as the Wet that swallows and incorporates still-living people. From the half-empty luxury tower blocks that stand as monuments to wealth and ego, to the reeking caverns beneath the city, it’s the tangibility of the environment that makes the book powerful. It’s decay the characters feel and breathe. The broken-down physicality of a former athlete, a filthy-rich couple who stave off their boredom with strings of affairs: these characters inhabit their bodies, and as a result, when those bodies are emptied of life or absorbed by the Wet, their loss means something.
It works for horror, too, on a layer deeper than the gross-out. I’m not somebody who often gets scared by horror – my interest in it comes from a different place – but the precarity and vulnerability of the characters comes through so clearly, and it’s this which makes the Wet seem like a real threat.
Sentient mould isn’t the only threat in the novel. The callousness of the rich developers, to whom human bodies and lives hold no more significance than the rest of the dirt they trample underfoot, becomes monstrous only when those bodies and lives are more than words on a page, talking heads in a white void. Sullivan manages it brilliantly.
The Marigold is an excellent read, and gestures toward something I want to achieve in my own writing. If you get a chance, read it.
Writing news? Not much this month, I'm afraid. My ghost story, "Crumbs", will be coming out in New Welsh Reader at some point, probably later this year. More on that when I know it.
What I've been reading
Currently about halfway through an advance copy of
by Roppotucha Greenberg -- a strange, fragmented, dreamlike novella that reminds me a little of Paul Auster's
In the Country of Last Things
. (That means I think it's very good, in case you were wondering.) It's out in November.
What I've been watching
Talk to Me
is a decently jumpy horror movie, if you're into that kind of thing, but where it really succeeds is as a raw, painful depiction of grief and loneliness in the midst of a crowd.
What I've been listening to
"Extraterrestrial" by Small Miracles ft. Mirari. Stunning --
.
See you next month. Who knows, maybe this newsletter will even contain some news then!
J