A Dark World Needs Dark Stories.
Whether in book or movie format, a story that my thoughts return to long after I’ve come away from it is the kind of story I enjoy most. You’re supposed to “write what you like to read” and “write what you know” as an author, and I’m happy to do so.
My favorites are classics:
C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy and mythology retelling
Tolkien’s epic fantasy and ALL THE EXTRAS
Dicken’s David Copperfield
G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories
Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles
Bronte’s Jane Eyre
everything Flannery O’Connor
I’m noticing a trend. These stories all contain suspense, elements of despair and suffering, exploration of human nature and the nature of evil. If “you are what you eat”, then I write what I like to read because my stories are also full of characters who traverse dark and dangerous roads. I’ve a deep-seated conviction that a dark world needs dark stories. I intend to use the suffering of my fictional heroes and heroines to give my readers catharsis.
That’s what good literature does for us, right? We watch Dr. Jekyll wrestle with a demon that is himself. He lives in a hell of his own making. Robert Louis Stevenson didn’t write this story simply to terrify his readers, he wrote it to make a statement. Whichever way you interpret his art, you come away from it wrestling with existential questions you mightn’t have considered before they were kindled through the medium of fiction.
When I take up the figurative pen, I don’t want to waste my time creating a pleasant distraction from the anguish of living on this planet. There’s no debate: this place is far closer to hell than it is to paradise. We’ve filled it to the brim with distractions, opiates, and cries of #yolo. There’s nihilism for those who want to make an honest break with disillusionment, and there’s universalism for those who hope this isn’t all that’s out there but just don’t know.
None of these worldviews hold light or beauty or joy. But since those virtues exist, we have to reconcile them with the bleakness of our experiences. Indisputably, our story isn’t just about taking up space for as long as we’re alive, and then not. Irrefutably, the hedonism that comes in every flavor, color, and scent imbibed to excess doesn’t satisfy (or most of the US would be sated). And does dissolving into the star-specked void make you happy once you’ve left your wishy-washy life of “I hope so” and “knock on wood” behind? Who knows… certainly not the living.
I will write fantasy. I will make up worlds and create creatures that stretch the imagination, invent magic that makes you wish it was real, tell love stories that you eat up like honey on bread. But I’ll write it with such a slant of light, glancing off edges of diamond-hard truth, my readers might go blind to all this world offers. Those will be stories worth spending a lifetime to write.
