It Cuts Like a Knife; It Might Leave You Bleeding · 5:17pm Dec 3rd, 2023
Story reviews are interesting because, sure, you can use them to know if a certain book will be the right one for you? But I feel they’re more useful when the review is in itself a tool to talk about storytelling in general. You review a book, but the book is a jumping-off point to discuss what it means to have good pacing; stuff like that.
So! Since I’ve been reading a lot of horror books lately—I’m in the mood! It was October recently after all—I decided I’d use it as a way to structure a scattershot lil essay on stories and why they matter.
I don’t expect you to know the books I’ll be talking about, nor do I expect you to care much about them. They’re just a way to anchor my arguments about themes, or structure, or what it means for a book to be good. That said, hey, you might wanna pick some recommendations if you’re in the mood, I guess.
So, let’s get to it!
First book: Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist.
If you look up this book on Goodreads, you’ll see a myriad of reviews claiming that “this is what The Twilight Saga should’ve been”. Now that I’ve read this book, I wonder what the legitimate fuck do these people think The Twilight Saga is about.
So the plot of Let the Right One In is this: Oskar, a young preteen who’s miserable in that way all children are in Northern European fiction (shitty family life, no friends, horrendously bullied at school, childhood defined by poverty and misery, constantly pisses himself) befriends (and falls in love with) a girl his age, Eli, that just moved next to his house. Eli is a vampire who needs to kill people to survive.
The thing about Let the Right One In is that it isn’t a dark book, it’s a mean book. And I don’t mean that in a good way. It’s a misanthropic story; it’s edgy, it’s shallow, and it’s meaningless.
Or, in other words: this is a book that says that suffering is inherent to human nature, and that the only way to avoid getting hurt is to hurt others first.
So, you know. Not the greatest message overall.
In a book about vampires, especially when you write it so the vampire HAS to kill others to survive, clearly your main theme is going to be abuse or parasitism. You can only live by hurting others, and so on. That’s not a bad theme by itself, you can explore that and come to some conclusions, but the problem is, this book doesn’t explore shit. It just states.
Like, the thesis here starts and ends in “To live you must hurt others”, and seems to find no issues in it. Every single character is a predator in some way. The vampire is, well, a vampire, obviously. The cops are corrupt violent meatheads, the schoolboys are cruel bullies, the fathers are drunk abusers. One of the main characters is a pedophile. This is just how life is, according to the book.
Misery by itself is not a plot, nor is it a theme. At some point, it becomes comical: every single character in the book, and I’m being serious here, EVERY SINGLE ONE, has a drunk abusive father. All the dads are alcoholic pieces of shit. Likewise, all the mothers are pathetic meek things that traumatize their children and have some weird oedipal shit going on with them.
There’s just no pleasant people, no good people. It’s all predators, with some victims who simply aspire to prey on others some day. All presented with complete sincerity, and with no sympathy whatsoever.
Ultimately it all crystallizes in that pedophile character; I think it’s the clearest indicator of the kind of book we’re dealing with: there’s no real reason, plot-adjacent or otherwise, why he’s gotta be a pedophile. He just is. And it’s all he talks about.
I am not going to go out and say that you cannot explore the darkest parts of humanity in literature—I am, turns out, not a fucking idiot—but if you’re touching on such a sensitive topic, the least you can do is to actually say something about it. In Let the Right One In, the pedophile character exists to make the reader uncomfortable and to give the story an air of seriousness. Because this is a book about vampires, which are inherently silly, and so I guess the writer wanted to offset that?
So the pedophile character exists, does nothing, then dies in a way that also says nothing. You could have eliminated him from the story and literally not a thing would have changed.
Funny thing here: the story makes it clear that this character never did anything. He has impulses and fantasies that I cannot describe without feeling nauseous, and we’re privy to that? But in the actual reality of the story, he’s never, you know. Actually sexually assaulted a child.
Which to me indicates that the author knew, instinctively maybe, that you cannot ask your audience to fucking relate to a character who has assaulted an infant, and then feel bad for them when they have a horrible death later. Like, somewhere in his human brain, he was like, wait. That’s probably too much.
But like, he still added the character? Which is just insane to me. He didn’t fully commit to being edgy, so the end result is—well, as I’ve been saying, it’s meaningless. It says nothing. It’s just unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant.
And you can’t even say that the pedophile is there to show that Eli the vampire isn’t the worst predator in the book, because A) Eli the vampire targets children as well, B) the pedophile helps Eli the vampire, so what’s the message here? That the pedophile is good because at least he’s helping a child while… murdering other children?
(Side note: Eli is a vampire, so she’s hundreds of years old, but for all intents and purposes, she’s twelve. So, like, she’s coded as a child, she counts as a child, and the pedophile sees her as a child. Ain’t that just a great thing to write in your book?)
Plus, you know, Eli got turned into a vampire against her will, in an extremely sexually charged ritual that is very blatantly a metaphor (and, uh, a literal depiction, but i’ll save you the more disturbing details) of a sexual assault.
So sexual assault causes predators? But again, every character is a predator. Hell, every character is shown as being perfectly capable of murdering others, too. So what’s the point, here? Trauma makes you evil, so might as well fucking own it? Everybody’s evil, so don’t judge others for being terrible?
Actually, you know, let’s touch on that. Two characters are turned into vampires in this book, and are told that to survive they must kill others. There’s no other way around it. Kill other people horribly or die. One of these characters immediately kills herself. The other chooses to murder others instead. This second character is implied to be the one who did the right thing.
A story’s purpose is made clear by the ending; I pulled through and read the entire book because I kept waiting for it to find a point to make. It never did. Nothing of value is learnt or said or understood; every story simply peters out. They don’t end, they simply stop.
The one character who chooses to murder others is Oskar, the main character, by the way. After being abused and bullied for the entire book, he decides that—well, everybody gets hurt. This time, he’ll do the hurting. This is the only correct way to live, and the only way to be happy. The writer, upon being told this was kind of a horrific ending, wrote a short story as a sequel that emphasizes just how happy Oskar is now, and how he totally made the right choice.
Misery is inevitable, Let the Right One In says, so make you’re the one causing the misery. In a world of oppression, strive to be the oppressor.
What a dogshit fucking book.
Stray thoughts: Incredibly dodgy gender shit going on in this story, by the way. I focused on the way the book essentially legitimizes abuse (everybody does it so might as well enjoy it!!!) and so I barely touched on that? But it’s one of those cases where gender equals body horror. The book portrays the intersectionality of gender as esoteric and creepy and horrific, and just, man. I get that it’s a book from 2004, but I’ve met a lot of trans women, and they’re not creepy eerie monsters. They just really fucking like Hearts of Iron IV.
Second book: Cabin at the End of the World, by Paul Tremblay.
The literal definition of an airport book, at least at the start. This is one of those novels you read to turn off your brain and simply enjoy the cheap thrills—up til the very last few paragraphs, which instantly elevate this book to like, a high eight out of ten, for me.
It’s funny how much of a diametrical opposite this is to Let the Right One In. Cabin at the End of the World is a high-concept horror story with serviceable prose and basic characters, and there’s a genuinely bizarre moment in which the characters stop all they’re doing and tell you the entire plot of a Steven Universe episode, but god dammit, I like it a lot.
Again, it all comes down to the ending. Cabin at the End of the World has a plot that could’ve worked as a short story without many sacrifices; while I would never call this badly paced, I also recognize you can cut out large chunks of the story and lose essentially nothing of that much value.
Still, it works. The story tackles the exact same conundrum that we’ve been talking about in the previous review: what do you do if the only way to survive is to hurt others? But while Let the Right One In revels in the chance to hurt others, The Cabin at the End of the World claims that mercy and love are what makes life worth living, and it says it with the kind of ferocious fervor I can only admire.
The family at the center of the story gets told this: the only way for the world NOT to end is if you kill one of your own. You need to group up together and choose to kill your husband, your daughter, or your father. And the characters—this is not a spoiler, this is how the book starts; like, it’s the prompt, not the plot—refuse to do that. Fuck you, they say. To the people telling them this, to the apocalypse, to God itself.
A world, the book says, where the only way to survive is to hurt innocent people—that is not a world worth saving. Love is what makes us human. If you make us choose between life or humanity, much as you hate to hear this, we will choose humanity.
And it’s the ending that sells it. As I said earlier, that’s when the message of a story is solidified. And ultimately, every story has a message, whether the author intended it or not; and while in certain cases the message might not be the most fundamental part of the tale, it still matters.
Here we’ve seen two extreme examples, which is why I wanted to review one book after the other. The fact that they tackle the same question is the cherry on top. Give The Cabin at the End of the World a try, if you’re bored. It has a very good ending. It’s a pretty good book.
Stray thoughts: There’s a movie adaptation made by Shyamalan that changes the ending, and so, it turns the story into utter dogshit. Astounding move there, Shyamalan. Genuinely incredible. I guess he didn’t change the main characters from two gay men to a straight couple, at least. We take our victories whenever we can.
Third book: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
Holy shit. What an incredible book. In my mind, Shirley Jackson went from being that writer who did The Lottery, which some people REALLY dislike (cause they had to read it in Highschool) to one of the Absolute Greatest Writers of the Last Century, and it’s all thanks to this story.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is all execution, and very little concept, and so it is difficult to talk about in abstract. It’s all about the main character. It’s written in first person, and so you follow the protagonist—delightfully nicknamed ‘Merricat’—as she goes around her day.
This is one of those stories that pulls out the absolute basics with such deep, cutting elegance, that it reminds you why we say there are ‘rules’ in storytelling. A slice-of-life tale ideally does two things: first, it presents the everyday routine of the setting, what a ‘normal’, average day is like. Then, it introduces something new or unexpected, and explores how the characters and the setting navigate that novelty.
In other words: establish normalcy, then subvert it. That’s what “a slice of life” means, and god dammit if We Have Always Lived in the Castle doesn’t do that. It explains to you what Merricat’s life is like, and that alone could make a book; it’s bizarre, it’s disturbing, it’s fantastical and mundane and it is so, so dark. And then this horrible balance is thrown asunder.
There are only so many ways one can write “this is so fucking good” without it ringing hollow. Castle is not a horror book, but it is scary and horrific; it doesn’t have gargoyles, but it’s a gothic tale nonetheless.
I love this book. Put a gun to my head and force me to describe it in an audience-friendly way, and I’ll say “imagine the Addams Family, but make it majestic”. I struggle to put it into words. Imagine someone who’s broken and dangerous, but you love them anyway, and they love you back. That’s what this book feels like. That’s what this book portrays.
You should read it as soon as possible, and look up nothing beforehand. Let it surprise you. God knows it surprised me.
Stray thoughts: Looking it up online, I see the first sentence of this book is often lauded as one of the best openings of any book; I also see that Shirley Jackson herself labeled it something like a hymn to agoraphobia. Both statements are correct, though they weren’t the things that jumped at me the most when reading it. Maybe I’m wrong! Give it a look and tell me what you think, I guess.
Fourth book: Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix
This is a rare breed: a story with pacing that is way too fast for its own good. This thing desperately needed two hundred more pages; as it is, the story asphyxiates because there’s just not enough space to explore what’s going on, and it all comes and goes way too quickly.
Part of this issue is just inherent to the concept of the book. Horrorstör is gimmicky, but it’s a good gimmick, it’s the kind of gimmick that makes you excited to read the book.
See, it’s a haunted house, set in an IKEA store. And the book is formatted, and looks like, an IKEA catalog.
Only, because of this cool little idea, the story has to be rather short. You can’t have an IKEA catalog-looking book with a thousand pages; you sort of limit yourself to strict character limit. Those catalogs are hefty, but they’re not THAT hefty.
So like, is this book good? I think it is. But there just isn’t enough of it.
I don’t think this HAD to happen, though. See, the main problem of Horrostör is that the cast is too large, there’s too many characters going around, and they all share the spotlight.
The plot centers around a few people spending the night at that IKEA store, and turns out it’s haunted, by angry ghosts who pick ‘em up and try to break them one by one, exploiting their fears and traumas and torturing them in very personalized ways.
Good high concept; morbid in a Saw way, so to speak. The story seemingly makes a good choice in having a large cast: more people, more tortures, more interesting things to discover and try to predict (“Ooooh I wonder what will happen to THIS one”). But the book has artistry behind it; ironically, Hendrix is a bit too good at writing characters to have the kind of detached, blasé, ‘I-don’t-care-about-humans’ attitude you need to write a Saw movie.
All this to say: the characters have a bit too much nuance, too much stuff going on, and so we spend some time exploring that…. And thus the number of words dedicated to the weird haunted torture stuff goes down. Only, we still don’t spend enough time with the characters. And now we don’t spend enough time with the horror scenes. So it all comes out half-baked.
Individually, what we see is good by itself? But you’re left wanting more. To make this story work within the strict character limit, you either have less characters, and dedicate more time to explore them and then the way the ghosts haunt them—or you have a large cast of mostly archetypes, and just go to fucking town.
Hendrix understands that the second choice (many characters, no real depth, you immediately think of ways to torture them in imaginative ways) is how you end up with an incredibly forgettable book, so he went for the other option.
But, again, you can only write so much when you’re committed to the IKEA catalog gimmick. And Hendrix wanted more characters to have just, more torture scenes, because that’s why you’re reading the book, so you get… Well. You get a large cast with a bit of depth, and a bit of horror, and not enough of any of it.
So, y’know, lesson learned here: pick your battles. Understand the scope of your own story before writing it, or else it might destroy itself. Heartbreaking stuff, really. I’ll read more Hendrix in the future though; I liked the sense of humanity he gave to the characters. With more space to breathe, this could actually be really good.
Stray thoughts: I have never worked retail, but Horrorstör depicts it in a way that’s so horrific it can only be realistic. From what I understand, it captures it really well, and it’s just another sign that I do trust Hendrix can write some competent stuff if he picks the right format. I also appreciate the fact that, you know, for the workers, IKEA is a torture chamber, figuratively and literally. As Sartre said, we find heaven in each other, but hell is other people.
Fifth book: The Tunnel, by Ernesto Sabato
The Tunnel is masterful. There’s no other word for it. Some books, you read them in one go, and the first thing you want to do is to go read them again. A friend recommended this book to me by literally putting it in my hands, and going “this made me feel like shit, you need to read it.”
The plot of The Tunnel is simple: a man has killed a woman. He’s confessed his crime. The book is a letter written by him after the fact, explaining what and why and how he did what he did.
The thing about the book is that it doesn’t feel like a book. It’s not stream of consciousness, it’s eminently readable, but the narrator doesn’t hide anything. It’s a direct, no filter look into his mind. It’s the best argument I’ve ever seen for honesty being the most important part of a good story.
You read the narrator’s justifications, his delusions, his discoveries. You see the way he daydreams, the way he grows paranoid and hateful, the way he feels guilty about his worst thoughts but still thinks them.
It is all so human, and it is so fucking scary. The Tunnel is one of the single most realistic depictions of an abusive relationship I’ve ever seen, and I would be surprised if there’s any that can really rival it.
But the worst thing is, the narrator doesn’t come off as an alien. He’s not deranged, he’s not weird, he’s not a psychopath. He’s not Camus’ Mersault, he’s not Kafka’s Gregor, he’s not Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. He’s just a fucking dude. He’s just a guy.
You can, in other words, see yourself in him. You see the darkest part of yourself, the intrusive thoughts, the obsession, the jealousy. It’s laid bare, no filter, said in simple words. He describes his lover, and you see yourself in her, as well—the way she’s victimized, the way she’s used, the way she can’t fight against it and then believes it’s all her fault.
I said earlier, in the first review of this blog, that misery, darkness, needs a purpose. The Tunnel is extremely dark, darker than Let the Right One In, but it gives the darkness a meaning. Because at the center of the book there’s a question—what does evil look like from the inside? What does an unequivocally evil man think?—and then it shows you the answer.
And then it adds: you knew this already. Everybody knows. That’s why it’s so evil.
The Tunnel cuts like a knife. Depending on how hard you can relate to it, depending on how much you’re able to lose yourself in the mind of the narrator, it might leave you bleeding.
It’s an incredible book. It made me feel like shit. You should totally read it.
Newfound respect for review writers because, holy shit, this shit was so hard. How the fuck do y'all do it. I have rewritten the review of Let the Right One In like three times (the original version of this blog was JUST a review of that one!! It sucked!!) and I still think I fucked it up. I don't want to just, like, explain the plot -- I find that boring and uninteresting -- but striking a balance between talking in abstract and explaining myself? Horrible.
Anyway, I hope this wasn't completely undecipherable. Thanks to the incredibly intelligent Mousse for editing help; she's better than me at this, so her support meant a lot.
This was pretty interesting. I have no interest in horror myself, but it's cool that you enjoyed yourself.
Not having read any of the books, I still feel like I understand the virtues and problems at their cores, and why they either do or don't work. I certainly know which of these I want to read. I'd say you did an outstanding job with the reviews.
Ooh, definitely going to check out some of these.
By the way, if you’re looking for recommendations, here’s one: Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes. It’s a somewhat abstract horror novel about art and artists that I can’t make up my mind on because it also contains one of the dumbest made-for-tv comedy-ass scenes I’ve ever read and it has coloured the rest of the book in my memory. I still think it’s worth a look, though.
I haven't read Let the Right One In, but I saw the original movie with subtitles back when everyone was talking about it, and it feels a lot like your description of the book. I just don't have any patience for this sort of world-view any more.
This seems like an epidemic in popular entertainment nowadays. It's so off-putting to me because it's so untrue and it makes the character depictions dull and lifeless from lack of contrast. I am not going to hold up Stephen King as a paragon of writers, but one thing that he got very, very right in many of his books is that evil seems much more horrifying when set in pleasant places among pleasant people. I think that's one of the reasons why I enjoy the old Ray Bradbury juveniles so much.
I just ordered Cabin at the End of the World. It sounds fantastic. That one little bit at the beginning is exactly the sort of contrast I mean. I'm not surprised that Shyamalan ruined the movie. I mean... What is up with that guy? From an iconic masterpiece right out of the gate down a steepening slope to guaranteed crap, every—single—time?!
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of my favorite books in the world. I first read it in a paperback edition with the coolest cover. (I'll see if I can find it online somewhere.) I read it because I was forced to read The Lottery in school. Yes, most of the other students hated it, but I was a bewildered atheist child in a very, very conservative, religious community, and my initial reaction was, "Oh! This person gets it!"
COVER
Horrorstör doesn't sound like something I would get into. I appreciate the cleverness of the gimmick, and I am one of those people who often play media at 1.5x speed, and will sometimes shout, "Just get on with it, already!" at books, so the pacing might not bother me, but the individual horrible ends... I was forced by a friend to watch the first Saw movie, and it was eye-rolling, watch-glancing boring for me.
In general, I really love these reviews and hope you do more!
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I think the reason so many works lean into "There are no good people" these days, is because the alternative is saying "There are only a few really nasty people, but for some reason we let them run things".
Granted, this is based on how I've seen it in America, but...yeah, either we claim that there aren't enough good people, or we accept that, for some reason, we let the bad ones make all the decisions. And I think for a lot of people, it's more comforting to believe that the pain is necessary than it is to believe that the pain was preventable.
As for Shyamalan: I think he's a victim of success. Namely, he's a victim of not knowing how he succeeded, which is a surprisingly common problem. I mean, the most famous thing about The Sixth Sense is the twist ending, right? So, surely that must be why it was so big...except that it's not that simple--it's never that simple--and what audiences remember is not always what actually made a thing compelling or good. So, I theorize that Shyamalan's flops are a result of trying to do the thing that "obviously" made Sixth Sense good, over and over, because he got lucky once, and now everyone thinks he's a genius, so he's never gonna get any help from editors (because who would say "no" to the guy who wrote The Sixth Sense???).
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I'm not sure why that's not the better choice. It's both true(-ish) and more hopeful than "everybody is shitty." I've lived a couple of other countries, and I can say with absolute confidence that the crappy ruler thing is not just a US problem. I think it's because most rulers aren't common people; they're a subset of a subset of a connected/wealthy class who have nothing they want to do more than acquire power by running for office. That situation narrows the voting choice down to one of a few very shitty people. The people who have no choice but to vote for them, your friends and neighbors, are still, on the whole, pleasant and good. We don't let the shitty people rule us, they force us. Yeah, that's not a great situation, But I'd rather frame it as the majority of good people against a minority of evil ones, rather than "people are garbage."
Of course, I may be totally misreading the psychology of most people in this situation, but I constantly hear people complaining about the difficulty of finding entertainment that isn't set in a crapsack world full of immoral monsters. Publishers are even starting to put the word "cozy" into book blurbs to signal that there are fun characters and humor involved, even if the setting seems grim.
As for Shyamalan, I think you're dead on the money.
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I found your blog post very clear and interesting, thanks!
I liked seeing you use these books to talk not only about whether and why you think each book is good or not, and in what ways, but also to make clear what you personally think makes a story good, bad, or completely execrable.
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HAHAHA! I mean, you're right that it's not that simple.
If an audience member saw or at least guessed at the twist coming, the Sixth Sense still works. THAT'S what makes it such a good movie.
Or as a friend of mine says, "if a movie or book isn't good on the rewatch/reread, it's not really all THAT good."
I've never actually listened to the basic "Loreley" by Blackmore's Night until now, always the Nightcore version. It's really odd listening to a slower paced song than what I am used to and being "off" in my timing of the lyrics. In this case I do prefer the faster paced version but it's about even odds on if I'll prefer the original version over the faster one.
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Definitely agree with this.
Shyamalan has 3 good films, imo: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Split, with Unbreakable being my favorite but prob the weakest of the 3.
And he has some mediocre but okay films like Signs and Glass.
And then he has the doggerel like The Happening.
His take on Cabin isn't awful (I havent read the book and want to now), I enjoyed it until it failed to stick the landing; I'd still watching the first 3/4 of it again happily.
Yeah, I've been thinking lately that this may be the only way a review can be useful. It doesn't seem possible anymore for me to say "this was good" or "this was bad". I can only say "this was good/bad at enacting this storytelling intention". A thing can only be good or bad with respect to some function or purpose. But there are so many different purposes for stories that you can't leave it unsaid. There is no default story purpose.
A consequence is that stories should ideally be reviewed by writers. Most of the things stories do are invisible to most readers, and only discoverable by failing to do them. I dwell on that because today people have this weird idea about writing, that it's the only art form or kind of work that you can criticize and analyze without being able to do it. There's this weird idea that literary theory has nothing to do with literary craft.
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I think that writing and reading are two different skills, honestly. Not all good writers are great readers, and not all great readers are good writers; there's a significant overlap but it doesn't necessarily have to be there. I definitely have met a bunch of writers that I thought were really, really good, but they assure me that they aren't that good at analyzing other people's stories.
This kind of applies to most art, though; since by definition art is an expression of a message or idea or aesthetic, the entire point is that other people consume it. Paintings, music, writing... Experts on the field are going to be able to consider how the thing was made with a bit more depth, but that doesn't mean that laypeople cannot analyze the actual piece.
I think we're not super disagreeing, though; there's a difference between criticising how well a story does what it sets itself up to do, which is a more writer-y concept, and then there's criticising what a story actually does, which is unequivocally on the field of the reader. Reading takes skill! It's why we talk about "reading comprehension", after all.
Ultimately, though, as I said, there's overlap. If you enjoy and are passionate enough about any kind of art, even from an audience point of view, chances are you're eventually going to try your hand at it -- partaking in a medium is the most intimate way to express love for it, after all.
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I don't quite agree with the "leaders are bad" thesis, if anything because whenever I encounter this kind of overly misanthropic message, it really doesn't do any kind of systemic criticism of society.
Like, you can absolutely have a nihilistic point of view because, say, capitalism is ruining the world. That's valid, and you can write something bleak based on that? But chances are you're going to show people suffering or rebelling against the systems you're criticising, because... Well, you're criticising them. You sort of have to show that they're bad.
This is not that. Let the Right One In (and other examples, but we're talking about this one in particular) doesn't think society is broken, it thinks individuals are broken. While it shows poverty as something that makes people suffer, it also makes a point of showing the poor people choosing to suffer instead of making an effort to better their lives, right? And it shows people loving the chance to abuse others outside of any given system.
It's not a power struggle, it's not "I need to be the baddest guy in the school so that I can survive in this predatory environment," it's "BOY HOWDY I FUCKING LOVE HURTING WEAK PEOPLE". The motivations of the characters are intrinsic, not extrinsic. The abuse isn't systemic, it comes from within, it comes from human nature.
Again, we have a vampire and a pedophile as two of the main characters. The book doesn't think people are forced to harm each other, the book thinks that even in a perfect utopia people would be right bastards against one another. When I finished the book, I mentioned it to my father, annoyed at the ending -- the MC kills all the bullies gruesomely offscreen, showing that they were right when they said violence is the only way to interact with others -- and he absentmindedly went "That's how the fascists think, yeah. You gotta be the biggest bastard so nobody can touch you".
You abuse others before anyone else can abuse you, and thus you become the boot on everybody else's face. It's not a criticism of that system as much as it is just going "the system is inevitable, this is how you navigate it!! Yayy!!". I didn't add this to the review cause it felt a bit too much of a jump; I don't wanna accuse the author of having fascist talking points just because an offhand comment by my father. He did go to school under a fascist dictatorship and grew up in that environment, though, so I don't want to dismiss his opinions either.
Re: Shyalaman, I agree! Re: The Lottery, I was under the impression all Americans hated it, since every person I've talked to about it seems to think it's garbage; Mousse edited the blog and told me to changed that line since I was factually wrong, though, so maybe more people like it than I thought. I think the story is good, it just suffers from being exclusively itself, right? It has a point to make and it makes it. If you know what the twist is from the get-go, though, the story sounds hollow because you're meant to sorta get it as you read along.
In my mind I always compare The Lottery to Those who Walk from Omelas. The stories have nothing to do with each other whatsoever, but for me they rhyme somewhat; there's definitely parallels. I read Omelas when I was too young to get it, and it simply upset me and annoyed me, and then I re-read it as an adult and was like, oh shit, jesus. Oh man. Oh shit this is so good. So, if you liked Lottery and haven't read Omelas, iisaw, check it out!
5757914
There are still many other alternatives.
One is to say it's the system. (But I don't mean that in the naive, childish way of sixties radicals, who thought that meant "fight the system". I mean it in the manner of an engineer, who needs to diagnose the system. If you actually have a systemic problem, the solution is almost never to destroy the system, but to study it and figure out how to fix it. Nobody would hire a car mechanic whose only tool was a sledgehammer.)
When I was a government contractor, there were laws which made it impossible to be an honest government contractor. For instance, the biggest expense of a certain type of contractor is writing grant proposals. In my case, it cost me about $6000 to write a proposal, and the average win rate in the industry was 10%. The contracts were usually $100,000. So to get one contract for $100K, an average person had to write 10 grants, spending $60K to do so.
That means that every time you win a $100K grant, you're going to spend $60K of it on writing other grant proposals, and only $40K on doing the work. BUT, the law doesn't allow you to do that. You're supposed to spend ALL of the grant money working on that grant. Which is impossible; you'd go out of business. So what everyone does is hide the grant-writing expenses inside various "fixed costs", which you use to come up with a "cost multiplier" for your company. So when you spend $1 on the grant project, you multiply that by your cost multiplier of 2.5 and charge the government $2.5. The law says all those fixed costs have to be related to your project, even though the mechanism of the fixed cost is only introduced in order to enable everybody to circumvent the law, because the reason for the law is to stop reporters from pestering Congress with questions about why contractors are spending money they were granted to cure AIDS or whatever on writing other grants. That is, the system was deliberately constructed in a way that requires everyone to be dishonest, because being open and honest would let someone like Senator Proxmire manipulate ignorant voters into shutting the whole system down.
In practice, scientists are usually insulated from this by managers. The scientist doesn't know how the cost multiplier really works. The manager knows that, technically, he could be thrown in prison at any time if somebody did a really detailed analysis of the cost multiplier; but he also understands that he is protected by the collusion of the culture of managers, who all understand tacitly which rules are to be broken. It is this shared tacit understanding among managers of how flexible different rules are which allows complex organizations to operate according to rules.
This is not the only example. There are other ways in which the contracting business requires honest people to act dishonestly. And it creates a managerial culture in which it's hard to know where the moral lines are, even if you're a good person, and in which you have to be suspicious of conventionally "good" people, because they might NOT look the other way when they're supposed to, and that would be bad for everyone. A "straight shooter" who always follows the rules must not be allowed in.
And if you study the system carefully, it is NOT obvious how to do it any other way. Nobody has yet thought of a solution to this problem.
There are many ways like this in which systems become more and more problematic as they become complex. The systems that organize our nations and industries are each far beyond the ability of any individual to understand them, and all of them are laden with moral compromises like the one I just outlined; and this is not because anybody is "shitty", but because it is an inherent problem in large complex systems. It will always look like the people at the top are shitty, even if they aren't, because simple democratic systems are inherently dishonest because they must tell a narrative of how they work that satisfies the large number of voters who have neither the time nor the intelligence to understand the subtleties of complex systems. The workers at the bottom are given the narrative; the shit is everything that doesn't fit the simple narrative; and the shit floats to the top. The higher up someone is, the more they are concealing from the people on the bottom, not because they're evil, but because no one who hasn't helped run the system could comprehend why the shit needs to be there.
(This does not excuse extraneous and purely harmful shit like Hunter Biden's tax dodging, Senator Robert Menendez' bribe-taking, or Anthony Fauci's corrupt ways of concealing his hand in helping to create covid-19. Not all shit is the same.)
There is no way to make these systems perfect; and if there were, it would work only for a week or two before something would change requiring the system to change again. Good complex systems are robust, not perfect. Perfection is brittle and soon shatters.
Based on your summary of "The Cabin at the End of the World", it's got exactly the same theme as Omelas.
It's original meaning was literally just a slice of normal life, with no subversion, no message, no character arc, no plot, no theme. Oxford dictionary says, "a realistic representation of everyday experience in a movie, play, or book." I don't know anywhere other than fimfiction where slice of life means a story with a plot or theme.
Ooh, I love this sentence, but I want to revise it:
... coz those characters were all meant to be psychologically realistic criminals, but I think all of them failed to be psychologically realistic criminals. because none of those authors wanted to believe that ordinary salt-of-the-earth people could do horrible things. They all blamed evil on above-average intelligence or sensitivity, in one way or another. This seems to be a cultural universal; reifying harm as "evil" leads to blaming it on clever people ("witches" or "tricksters").
There's an audio reading of "The Tunnel", but only in Spanish. Hmm.
5758472
Leaders are people, and I don't believe people are inherently bad, so that's not exactly what I'm saying. It's a complex problem and any brief, general statement of mine will be inadequate at best, so let me clarify with a somewhat less brief and general statement: Many, possibly even most leaders are bad, and that's the fault of the system and human nature as expressed within highly pressurized in-groups.
Human behavior is a very broad and irregular spectrum, not a series of pigeonholes--except when written by John Lindqvist, it seems.
From a perspective of statistical significance, you're probably not wrong. I was the only one in my class to love it, and that was solely because of the single point it made that clicked with my life-experience. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is freakin' brilliant! I first read it about the same time I read The Lottery (on my own, of course, because it would have never been allowed in my school) and it became a moral touchstone for me. The answer to the "These are the rules. This is the way it has always been done. Your only choices are X or Y" sort of authoritarianism is to walk away. Of course that's metaphorical,* and means rejecting the false duality/framing of whatever's being imposed from above.
I just finished The Cabin at the End of the World, and there are some direct parallels to be drawn with the le Guin story! (When the rules suck, fuck the rules.) I'm still thinking over the book, because there are some incredibly good choices that Paul Tremblay made, as well as some that I still haven't wrapped my head around, but the fact that he made such strong and unusual choices really elevated my enjoyment of the book in the moment.
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* Though some bewildered girl working in dangerous and abusive conditions in a Vietnamese village factory that stamps out Funko-pop figures of a Banksy mural character might disagree.
5758531
Oh HELL yeah!! Glad you also found the ending good; when you mentioned that you were picking it up I was suddenly struck by the insecurity of like. What if iisaw reads it and is like "the FUCK is Aragón talking about" once he reaches the ending. Glad it wasn't just me, then. If you want to get SUPREMELY annoyed, check out Shyalaman's ending (I just read it online tbh, rather than watching the movie) and then you'll see why I went "WELL, THAT FUCKING UPENDS THE ENTIRE POINT NOW DOESN'T IT".
Re: the rest of the book, some choices I haven't really thought about hard enough to wrap my head around them (Wen's lip comes to mind; I'm sure there's more to it than just a way to signal her being somewhat an outsider in society, the same way her parents are) because, to put it bluntly, the ending was so fucking good that it eclipsed the rest of the book. Which is probably unfair? I keep hearing recommendations for Tremblay's other works, so I'll eventually check them out, cause I wanna see what the guy is cooking.
Also, like. The book sure stops at one point when a character watches that Steven Universe episode, doesn't it? I'm guessing Tremblay is a fan?
5758508
Yeah I might've been biased when making that comparison -- to me Raskolnikov is more 'normal', though? Like, what he does isn't normal, but when you read him, he's a bit more relatable than the other two, or at least you understand his line of reasoning, even though you disagree with it. Compare and contrast with Meursault, who's so detached, so alien, that you don't really -get- what the fuck his deal is till the very end of the book.
Underground Man, though, that's a goblin-ass character, hence why I mentioned him. I do agree with your statement though; I don't think either of those characters are psychologically realistic per se. They're heightened, so the thesis of the book is made more apparent.
(Sidenote: I've started Notes from the Underground like five times, and I always drop it when I realize I'm not in the right headspace for it, even though I really like Dostoevsky. On the other hand, I've read Crime and Punishment three times, and I still count it as one of my favorite books -- me arguing that Raskolnikov is more 'understandable' than the Underground Man might be less based on actual reasoning and more on the fact I haven't read the latter's book yet. Whoops.)
(Second sidenote: Last time I reread Crime and Punishment it was actually because I had just finished The Stranger, and I wanted to compare the two main characters. There's a surprising number of parallels between the two books -- the plot of each one borderline mirrors the other! So that also influenced my choice of character there.)
5758565
Naw, a big middle finger to "because God says so" is always a high point as far as I'm concerned! I was shocked by Wen's death, but then I realized that Eric would have sacrificed himself to give her even a chance at a future. But with just him and his husband left? Yeah, piss off "god," we aren't playing your sadistic game.
He must be, to pick out one particular episode like that. Weirdly enough, for me, that bit didn't slow down the action as much as some of his flashbacks. Maybe I was looking for some deeper meaning or symbolism there? Anyway, I would be interested in more of his stuff, too. Novelty is my crack.
I'm gonna go look up Shammy's ending now, just so I can shake my head sadly.
EDIT: OMFG! I am not sad, I am enraged! That is a neutered travesty of the book!
5758568 Neutering books that might make people think is Hollywood's job.
5757914
It is the better choice...in the long run, after you've come to terms with the idea that we've let a bunch of awful people run our society. That realization is painful; it is more comforting to believe that everyone is awful, because that A) means there's nothing to be done about it and B) justifies taking your frustrations out on much softer, easier-to-hurt targets...as opposed to the people who are in power--having to try and throw them out is a terrifying prospect. Politicians can fight back in ways that a random homeless guy on the street can't, so "everyone will backstab you if given the chance" means you can kick the homeless guy while he's down and feel good about it, instead of having to figure out how to oust a politician who can casually make parts of your life illegal.
As for whether or not we are letting politicians have power...the fact of the matter is that yes, we do let the people in charge stay in charge. Fundamentally, all of the rules that say those people are in charge are social constructs--they only exist by mutual agreement. It's not that it's impossible to put someone in power without voting for them; it's that the alternative to voting is all-out war, so 99% of the time it's better to just do the voting thing--but it is important to remember that the rules of society exist for the convenience and safety of people living in that society, and that when the rules of society stop keeping people safe, they stop being useful. Even the threat of force from a bad ruler is somewhat overblown, in my opinion, because the armed forces of a country are typically vastly outnumbered by its citizens even before you account for deserters--but that's another discussion entirely.
A corrupt ruling class may be trying to force the people under them to pick from a series of awful options, but at the end of the day, the country (and by extension, its rules) exist only because the majority agree to play along.
5758472
That's kinda what I was trying to get at--the thing that is missing from the "people are fundamentally bad" take is the understanding of, and critique of, the society those people live in. That's what separates "people bad" from "our society is structured wrong". The reason Let The Right One In and similar stories assert this idea that everyone is evil at heart is because they look at the world, see "bad people are doing bad things", and stop there--concluding that if bad people are able to do bad things, it must be because there aren't enough good people. Critiquing society never enters the equation, so it never gets brought up as an answer to "why do bad things happen?"...so, the only answer left to consider is that people are just intrinsically evil.
Part of me sees it as kind of the ultimate form of--you know that thing where people talk about things that are happening in America as if they're things that only happen under non-capitalist societies, even though they're literally happening in a capitalist society right now? It reads like that, to me. A willful ignorance, or inability, to recognize the way that society's structure affects people. Why does the Orphan Grinder 3000 exist? It can't POSSIBLY be because the society it was built in rewards needless cruelty with massive amounts of wealth, so it must be because people naturally want to see orphans mulched by giant spiked wheels. And now we can feel comfortable in knowing that everyone's shitty and there's no point in improving anything, instead of having to wrestle with doing actual critique of society!
I think I agree with your father--this "it's either them or me, and I'm making it me" mentality, this idea that everyone is ultimately evil at heart so you might as well screw the other guy first, it's one of the roots of genocide. The idea that hurting the people you meet is ultimately the best thing you can do for yourself is like a microcosm of the idea that hurting an entire category of people can be the right thing for a country. It's the justification for genocide, shrunk down to the personal level. This is also more comfortable than critiquing society, because on top of not having to think of ways to fix society, it also justifies any less-than-wholesome behaviors one has. You don't have to become a better person when it's objectively correct to be evil. (This is also what's appealing about Objectivism.)
And I think it's also comforting to readers who don't buy into "it's them or me", because it connects with the feeling that everything IS awful. People who are struggling, who are stuck in awful living situations, who are stuck in awful jobs dealing with awful people--I figure, those people feel seen when they read a story where everyone around the main character is awful. Now that I think about it, I figure that's why so many people said this is what Twilight should have been: the story feels impactful because it connects to people on the level of "Everything Is Horrible". Instead of the vague, indirect awfulness of the characters in Twilight, this book openly states "Here's an actual straight-up pedophile, yeah, those exist. We're not going to shy away from that. That's fucked up." It never goes anywhere with it, but that still feels more honest--and it creates an emotional connection with people who feel like they're alone in noticing the fucked-up things around them. Most people don't do literary analysis at all, though (let alone do it effectively), so they stop at "This felt good to read" and conclude "This is what that other book about vampires should have been".
I haven't sat down to read Omelas--but I know about the crux of it, and to me, it seems like a metaphor for this concept of things that are uncomfortable to admit but necessary for being better. Walking away from Omelas is not an easy decision to make, and a lot of people remain in Omelas precisely because it is safer and more comfortable than leaving--but to remain in Omelas is to ignore the truth. I don't think most people consciously choose to ignore the truth--but I do think a lot of people ignore the truth because actually facing it is deeply uncomfortable. I figure, the author of Let The Right One In is just as likely to have never even questioned his belief that everyone is awful, and the people who praised it probably haven't either. I figure the most likely case is that he wrote what felt right, and what felt right was a story about awful people, because the world feels like it's full of awful people right now. The book posits that a perfect society would be full of people shitting on each other because our current "perfect society" is built on doing that. It says "This is how the system works, and this is how you succeed within the system" because that's what comes out when you aren't really thinking about how the system works.
The author didn't really critique society, and the people who praised him didn't really critique his book. It's kind of poetic, I guess.
5758915
I agree with your first paragraph, it’s the second where we begin to diverge in our opinions, and that’s mostly because of over generalization/simplification.
This phrasing makes it seem that “we” have the power to not let them stay in power. Lots of people struggle to make it possible to get reasonable and responsible people into power, with very limited success. Campaigning, protesting, whistle-blowing, and less legal methods are constantly being employed. Using the word “let” puts a passive color on the issue, which is deceptive. Millions of people in the streets protesting against a particular governmental action or policy that they have no direct control over is hardly a passive situation, even if they fail.
The first part is true, the second part is only true for people who do agree with the construct. For the many who do not agree, the rules still apply because of the threat or application of violence. (And I am including losing one’s job, housing, healthcare, or liberty under the umbrella term of “violence”, because that’s what the enforcement mechanism ultimately comes down to.) That’s not agreement, that’s capitulation out of fear.
That’s a false dichotomy, and one that’s promoted by those in power, because they know most people don’t want a war.* Those choices are two extreme ends of a very broad spectrum. As I said above, there are alternatives such as protesting, whistle-blowing, civil disobedience, strikes, infiltration, boycotts, investigative journalism, both legal and extralegal resistance and sabotage, and yes, walking away. All of these and more are being employed right now in the struggle against the locked-out systems of government and finance that most people are suffering under.
Do some people have the mindset you’re describing? Without a doubt! But it’s a self-defeating one that helps accelerate the enshittification of our society and culture, and I don’t believe it’s a prevalent one, despite a lot of corporate
mediapropaganda promoting it. Saying that things are the way they are because people want them that way is, in large part, victim-blaming and defeatism.Give US citizens ranked-choice and run-off voting, and then you’d really see what they want, instead of what the oligarchs want. The result might not be ideal or even pretty, but at least blaming the people in general for the system as a whole would then have some credibility.
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* Aside from a small minority of ammosexual sociopaths, of course. There is no position so extreme that you can’t find someone to support it.
5758924
For clarity, when I say awful people are in power because we let them be in power, I'm not saying we, as a group, want them in power. What I am trying to communicate is that we do have a choice in the matter, even when it seems like we're being handed a magician's choice instead. It's not "we let them be in power (because we're stupid or short-sighted)", it's "we let them be in power (and we can therefore take that power away)".
5758998
Ah! Thanks for the clarification. Yes we can. It's incredibly difficult, but it can be done, and when enough people get fed up and/or abused, it might happen.
5758531
I also read Cabin thanks to this, and had previously seen the movie (so knew a lot of what I was getting into) and /yea/ wow why the fuck did he change the most important part of the message.
Like I finished the book and went 'wait, what?!' but now that I've had longer to digest it...
1) Way better ending
2) Absolutely, you tell the sadistic god to fuck off. And I am sure there are some Cabin in the Woods inspirations at play here given the similar final messages.
Anyhoo I guess We Have Always Lived in the Castle has to enter the reading list soon.
On the leaders issue - I do think we /do/ let shitty people be in charge, but it's a complicated thing because a lot of them aren't deliberately shitty.
Like, I think he's doing a terrible job now in many ways, but I also think Biden is a 'good' person slash someone struggling his best to be.
The problem is in the past century we've built such a complicated interwoven system that the number of people who can truly effectively exercise government/oversight over it is vanishingly small, and in networking the world and inventing social media we've turned politics from 'The thing you do because of passion' to 'Great way to get rich' which has invited in all the hucksters who only make it worse.
But after years in corporate, what I've observed is there aren't thaaaat many truly bad apples. It's just that being a good apple isn't enough, you need to also be a hyper-capable apple. When one of those /is/ in charge you get something like Nvidia. When one isn't. you get Facebook.
And MBAs by and large are both incompetent /and/ bad apples and they disproportionately get hired to run shit because since most people can't truly interview/hire effectively they use degree and experience pedigree as shortcuts.
I suspect that the 'fix' is a combination of 'Get together a small group of the Adamantium Apples, and have them focus on only recruiting more while also training the next generation of them' but that requires resources I lack to test said hypothesis.
5761092
SO complicated…
Some don’t start out shitty at all, but the political environment changes them. Some stay very unshitty, and the political environment undermines them for “not playing ball.” It is appallingly difficult to be a good politician and be effective at the same time.
I think Biden was “good” enough for the era he grew up in (at a guess, mid 13th century?), but “struggling” is probably an excellent one-word summation for his administration.
As for corporate… It’s plagued by the exact same dynamics: the people who want to “win” much, much more than they want to be competent or fair or good for the company, are the ones who claw their way into positions of power. I’ve been a “corporate” artist* for most of my life, and I’ve seen the frat-bro MBA dynamic play out over and over again. I’ve seen it cripple and outright destroy companies.
That said, I’ve also worked with a couple of Adamantium Apples who not only did spectacular work, but also elevated all the good apples around them. (Nvidia is a good example, Naughty Dog is (was**) another.) I think the AAs will take care of themselves, and the best thing for the corporate/political environment would be to stop bailing out/making excuses for the outright gangrenous apples.
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* Hence the lack of the usual “starving” prefix.
**
5761201
Oh, yea, the AAs can always be fine if they want to be. I'm just of the opinion that the ole 'With Great Power...' line is true, and given how fucked the world is the best thing the AAs can do is collectively band together and work their butts off to fix things - and the best way to do that is to take advantage of the fact that a group of them truly united will be able to outplay basically everyone else, giving them a huge advantage over the sclerotic juggernauts of today's corpos.
5761535
Yep, that's a good point!