The morning email brought me to this interview, by the lovely and talented Abigail Lakewood a.k.a. “Strange Girl,” of fantasy writer P. J. Ashton:
💜: You view yourself as a grimdark fantasy writer. What does that mean exactly?
A: Grimdark means I don’t put the training wheels on. Some fantasy wants you to believe everyone’s basically good, villains politely monologue instead of killing you, and true love fixes war crimes. Charming, but not remotely true to life.
Let’s leave aside the haughtiness of Ashton’s response. Has he defined grimdark adequately for you to grasp it? I must admit that I’m groping a bit.
I get a picture of stories replete with predation and brutality, that end un-heroically, perhaps even tragically. The villain gets what he seeks; the hero – if there is one – either gets the dirty end of the stick or gapes uncomprehending at the way things turned out. Not my sort of story, to be sure. Perhaps George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire would qualify, despite its ending. But I didn’t like that series either.
Let’s have a bit more from the interview:
For characters like Henna, a woman shaped by years of abuse, violence became her language. She hides her trauma behind swagger and cruelty, and in every man she kills, she still sees Thorne. Henna isn’t hopeless; she’s surviving the only way she knows how. And there’s a strange, tragic beauty in that.
Grimdark doesn’t smother hope, it forces it to earn its place. When kindness appears, it feels miraculous. When someone chooses loyalty over self-preservation, it matters.
And if a reader finishes a chapter feeling shaken or breathless… good. It means the story meant something.
[...]
The market practically hands out gold stars for playing it safe. But comfort eventually dulls a genre, and readers are far sharper than publishers give them credit for.
I do agree with that last part. It’s the aim to portray a world in which cruelty and brutality are the rule that baffles me.
Well, as I said in a comment at Miss Lakewood’s place, I suppose that given my quite different orientation I shouldn’t expect to understand it, nor to find it appealing. And I must admit that there are readers who prefer settings and themes diametrically at odds with mine. Tastes do vary.
C. S. Lewis once said that the tragic disillusionment of his youth was the discovery that the things he most loved – the heroes, the fantastic creatures, the magic, the quests, and so forth of the great works of fantasy – were imaginary. The prevailing sentiment was that kids should be shown a darker, more tragic view of existence. “Realists” exhorted the adoption of that approach. Lewis’s conviction was that children’s literature should prefer a different course:
Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can’t bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the…atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.
In the above, Lewis was speaking of stories for the young. Yet optimism pervades his adult-oriented fiction as well – and by “adult-oriented” I most emphatically do not mean sexual. The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces demonstrate this perfectly – and they were plainly not written for children.
I think a case could be made that even mature adults, immersed in the real world and all that it demands of us, need reinforcement for the conviction that we who people existence are basically good, and that good will triumph over evil, given effort and time. That’s why I write what I write. If even my typical reader occasionally veers to the dark side, perhaps out of a need for variety, he can surely be forgiven. For the world does demand a lot of us. To stay staunch requires that we remain aware that all things, including the ascension of goodness over cruelty and brutality, have a price we must pay.
But do remember not to eat the cookies:
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