Out-Brutalling the Last Guy: “Grim and gritty, yes … but make sure it’s doing some honest work” by K.V. Johansen
I’ve written some reasonably grim stuff. The hero of Blackdog does tend to go for the throat on the battlefield and the assassin hero in my forthcoming series, Marakand, has a past that is decidedly Not Nice (his present just gets worse). Violence, horror, fear, pain, death — these are all part of epic fantasy, which almost by definition is going to deal with war at some point along the way and will certainly throw its characters into nasty situations, both as active doers of deeds and as suffering victims. Sometimes detailed physical description is what you need to do what the story needs done. Sometimes it isn’t. When it is, the detailed physical description alone shouldn’t be the point of the exercise. I was talking about this just last night with the Spouse, and then, while procrastinating on Twitter this morning, I wandered into a conversation with Juliet E. McKenna and Tom Lloyd that touched on the same ideas. This led me to wonder if, as we see the increased brutality inflicted in books praised as some kind of standard that is supposed to be achieved, we fantasy writers don’t sometimes get the feeling that we’d
173. The Gate (1987) — A Torture Cinema “Adventure” (the Halloween Special)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFEpisode173TortureCinemaMeetsTheGate/SandF%20–%20Episode%20173%20–%20Torture%20Cinema%20Meets%20The%20Gate.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSBackyard demons, claymation creeps, and geodes, oh my! Shaun, Julia, and Paul return to form with a special Halloween-themed torturous review of The Gate. Needless to say, they had a bit of fun tearing this one apart! We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below): Episode 173 — Download (MP3) Show Notes The Gate (1987)(IMDB) You can also support this podcast by signing up for a one month free trial at Audible. Doing so helps us, gives you a change to try out Audible’s service, and brings joy to everyone. Our new intro music is “Time Flux” by Revolution Void (CC BY 3.0). That’s all, folks! Thanks for listening. See you next week.
Movie Review: Mama (2013)
One of the things I enjoy about horror is its connection with fairy tales. Anyone who has actually read Grimm’s Fairy Tales is aware of this association. It’s one of the reasons why Andrés Muschietti’s 2013 film, Mama, attracted me. The story has a mundane, if tragic start fed to the audience in the form of a car radio news story — a dramatic stock market downturn results in the suicides of several members of a prominent investment firm. The abandoned car is parked in front of a beautiful house and there is a gunshot. The camera pans closer and the next scene is of a little girl named Victoria dressed for school. Her one-year-old sister is in her crib nearby. Their father arrives. His clothing is speckled with blood. Victoria asks, as all Fairy Tale heroines do, all the right questions, but her father, who is insane with grief, brushes her questions aside. He collects the girls and drives off into the wilderness with them. The car wrecks in the snow and they end up in an abandoned cabin, which is, naturally, haunted. Their
Recommended Reads for October 2013
Recommended Reads is a monthly feature in which the Skiffy and Fanty crew tell you about one thing they recently read that they think you might like too. Here are their picks: Shaun Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit Books: Oct. 2013) To say that a lot of people are talking about this book is an understatement. Yet, the amount of buzz Leckie has received for Ancillary Justice, her debut novel, is deserved. This is the kind of military SF / space opera a lot of us have been waiting for. From the first pages, the novel tears down our comfortable notions of self and gender, pulls apart language to display its arbitrary construction in relation to culture, and shoves us right smack dab in the middle of a sprawling, reminiscent empire. It’s the kind of novel that my geek side can squee about without end…oh, hell, my academic side is doing that too. If you’re looking for
My Superpower: Gail Z. Martin
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Gail Z. Martin to talk about how Chasing Squirrels helps her create many things, including Ice Forged, which will be a Kindle deal of the day on the 31st of October. My superpower is chasing squirrels. Not the fuzzy kind, the mental kind. I’m an “ooh, shiny!” kind of girl, but it’s not Tiffany’s bling that catches my eye; it’s usually something on the History Channel, or a footnote on Wikipedia, or a stray reference that I chase down “for authenticity’s sake.” It starts out as a noble cause. After all, as a writer, it’s important to fact-check. That’s dangerous when you’re the kind of person who can go to the dictionary to look up a word and not come up for air for an hour because you’ve hopped from one interesting new word to another. Fact checking is like that, too. I go
The Disquieting Guest — Readerly, Writerly and Malevolent
In the last week or so, there have been interesting discussions about the pros and cons of “cozy” fiction by Justin Landon (here) and on Sam Sykes (here). Those exchanges made me think of Roland Barthes’ distinctions between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Said distinction is summarized here. According to Barthes in S/Z, the readerly text is one where the reader is passive, “plunged into a kind of idleness […], left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text,” whereas the writerly text’s goal is “to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.” The writerly text places greater demands on the reader, forces an active engagement with the text. It is disruptive and destabilizes the reading experience. Barthes is unequivocal in seeing the readerly text as entirely retrograde. The distinctions are, furthermore, usually deployed in a way that would see “readerly” and “cozy” as nearly synonymous. I find, however, a certain use in doing some violence to Barthes’ project and using the terms in a more descriptive, rather than prescriptive fashion, at least in the context of the aforementioned discussions. One reason for my caution is that the usual schema of “readerly=easy to
