Dark stories' appeal to children (and adults).
"Some creatures are eaters, while others are eaten, but only a set of sharp teeth will convince them that I am not a woman, but an artist, a human being."
So, those of us searching for representation–we’re in a tough spot. We have subtext, we have “word of god,” and we have the reassurance that we can make these characters whatever we want them to be outside of canon and that’s fine, but we still have so few explicitly queer characters and that…still kind of sucks.
Such aestheticized idleness is likewise a key feature of what Nicholas Dames calls “throwback fiction,” ambitious novels set in the 1970s. Novelists are drawn to this decade because, among other things, it “lacks the unbearable, compulsory dynamism we live under” and thus allows stories to be “ruminative rather than dynamic.” It allows novelists to write 1000-page novels about a super-particular time and place (à la Hallberg’s City on Fire).
Walk into the woods and keep walking. The tall pines swing like curtains in the moonlight; the moonlight swings like a drunk man on a ship. Search for the place the jewels are hidden, a.k.a. the dark-furred hollow. Search for the mirror in the old oak. Search for The Stag Who Can Speak to Girls Like You (his voice, the stories say, is like a river— low, and full of deaths it can’t help). Small animals will serrate the silence with their chatter. Underfoot, roots will crack like bones. Wear your hair uncovered. Wear your mouth unset. You may not find the jewels, the mirror, the stag. But you may find a bare possum skull. You may find some eyeteeth in a damp log. You may find a berry patch, but with bullets in place of berries, silver sparks in the nightgleam. Put all these things into your pockets and keep walking. The grackles will tell you This way out, this way out. Don’t answer. Don’t be turned. You entered the woods lost. Leave that way
July 1, 2016 — Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country drops into the world of science-fiction and horror publishing at an interesting time. The fandom around this culture is arcane and probably irremediably nerdy to outsiders, but even “mundanes” (non-fans) must have registered something of the huge boom in Lovecraftian horror that has plumed out through film, TV, and video games into the general culture. You can’t move for cosmic pessimism (True Detective), visceral horror (Hannibal, The Walking Dead), or tentacular, slimy horrors (The Strain, the recent monster movie 10 Cloverfield Lane).
“We're singing of solitude, but we're singing it to one another.”
Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise women to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws, rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time – that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.
But then, I’ve found that my taste in places, like my taste in literature, runs toward the obscure, the forgotten, the dismissed. I didn’t engage the poet that day. There’s no point. I’ve found no shortage of strangers eager to inflict their political opinions upon me, who are ready to fix the “problems” of the country—when I say country, I don’t mean the nation, but the rural places far from Interstate highways, far from centers of population, media, commerce, and power. The towns you drive through and wonder how the people make a living.
"Thank you for doing this with me. Thank you for carrying on when I cannot.’”
Perhaps the most important comic, this portrays a Superman I would love to see onscreen, and one that we sorely need.
Think of this as a “trickle-up” effect: smaller indie creators can push back against the larger problems with representation in stories by making their own stories, whether it’s fan-fiction or original works. Then, people who work for massive companies that are creating more corporate and slick stories might be inspired to find ways to be subversive within those formats. Indie creators with a smaller scale can take more risks because they don’t have to worry about appealing to a wide base. But also, corporate entities would do well to realize that being more inclusive does appeal to a wide base — and they have indies to thank for paving the way there.