Paul Tremblay is an asshole. He’s an asshole because he’s supremely talented, and really nice, and actually not an asshole at all, which makes me think he’s secretly an asshole. His two newest novels — Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock — are so good, they make me mad at him and make me mad at myself that I’m not him. Like I said: asshole. And then he goes and gets praise from Stephen King? Okay, let’s not gild that lily, dude. Jesus. Anyway. He writes these novels that, like the first season of True Detective, are what I call “supernatural-adjacent” — they live in a world where people believe in the supernatural, but you’re not quite sure how much of it is real or not. That they believe it is enough. Anyway, I said to Paul he was free to take the keys to terribleminds any time he wanted, and he wrote something that falls right in line with what I’m talking about. Please to enjoy. Oh also he wrote 23 footnotes.

* * *

(Or, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Fear the Bomb, and Cultists? Don’t Forget the Cultists…”)

Was I shouting, “Hail Satan¹,” dressed in cute little paisley bellbottoms, while eating breakfast cereal and watching Saturday Morning cartoons? No, of course not. It wasn’t that kind of satanic childhood. I was just your normal child of the 1980s who grew up watching 1970s satanic horror movies on TV. Okay?

I was a painfully skinny, quiet, not all that popular, and overly sensitive oldest child who kept to himself. From ages 9 through 14, my afternoon routine consisted of walking home from school by myself and then camping out in front of the TV. I’m sure some of you imagine life before Netflix, the Internet, and DVDs as akin to a digital dark age². In those wild-wild-west days of early cable television the movie menu of HBO was hardly an exhaustive cataloguing of our vast cinematic culture. Most of the movies HBO broadcasted were crap, and those crap movies ran in an endless loop just in case you hadn’t seen Seems Like Old Times³ fourteen times already. Besides Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn movies, I watched satanic horror movies; semi-classics like The Omen⁴ (1976), The Omen II⁵(1978), The Amityville Horror⁶ (1979), and the weird and terrifying Phantasm⁷ (1979).

Luckily, that new fangled cable TV was far from the only place for a kid to get his satanic horror fix. On Saturday afternoons a local UHF channel⁸ ran a program called Creature Double Feature. Score, right? But there was also plain old network television. Yes, I know, it’s now hard to imagine the three major networks filling the horror movie viewing void, but they did. After their morning game shows and soap operas, mid-afternoon network TV was the dumping group for so many movies, and 1970s horror movies in particular. One such afternoon TV mainstay was Race with the Devil⁹. Produced in 1975 and starring Peter Fonda, the underrated Warren Oates, and Loretta Switt¹⁰, two young couples are vacationing in the desert in their groovy RV when they stumble upon (oops!) a satanic cult ritually sacrificing some shmoe. Sort of a live-action Scooby Doo, they spend the rest of the movie on the run from Satanists. The movie is goofy and hokey, yes, but its ending with their RV trapped in the middle of the desert at night and suddenly encircled in a ring of fire and the Satanists chanting as they closed in, aye that scene still works. Another afternoon network favorite was the made-for-TV masterpiece Devil Dog: The Hound from Hell¹¹ (1978). It’s sort of like The Omen, but with a dog. A nice suburban family adopts a, well, devil dog. Cue the Satanists in robes¹², and a devil dog transformation scene in the climax that’s the special effects equivalent of a flying saucer on a string.

Despite my full-fledged scaredy-cat status¹³, the satanic movies weren’t as scary to me as movies about hauntings, invading aliens, sharks, and psycho killers¹⁴. The satanic movies featured clearly delineated sides in their portrayal of good vs. evil. It was obvious who was good and who was evil and what team you wanted to be on. In that way those movies were like so many of the comics and cartoons I also enjoyed. Even in the movies where the evil won or wasn’t destroyed, there was the promise that good would always be on the right side of a robe-less history. It really didn’t matter if Satanists were afoot, plotting their flawed plots because, thanks to the movies, I would always be able to tell who was good and who was evil, and I would surely prevail. Plus it was kind of fun pretending to be chased by hapless satanic cult members while out on my bike heroically completing my paper route¹⁵.

Of course when I was a kid I had no idea that these movies were a reflection or a symptom of the satanic panic of the 1970s and 1980s. The fundamentalist Christian fear that there was in fact an underground network of Satanists secretly controlling society went totally mainstream. Satanists were to blame for a rise in secularism, the decline of morals, and for wild, logic-defying tales of ritual child sexual abuse and even sacrifice. It sounds downright silly now (I hope) but there were police departments in the US giving talks and departmental instructions about how to deal with the heinous crimes committed by upwards of 50,000 Satanists operating in the United States¹⁶. Of course the 50,000 number has no basis or foundation in factual data, just as repressed memories of Satanic ritual abuse were faked/coerced/debunked and many people who were accused (some convicted¹⁷) of crimes supposedly linked to Satanism were innocent.

As I got older and became a teenager in the Reagan 1980s, my interest/obsession evolved away from satanic horror movies and instead I became fixated on the idea that the world would almost certainly end in a nuclear war. That fear wasn’t as much fun. At times it was near incapacitating. My nightmares no longer were populated with sharks, monsters, and creepers, but a boom, a blinding flash of light, and the earth rumbling beneath my feet¹⁸. I remember adults and classmates discussing the geopolitical climate of the Cold War in the cinematically clear lines of good-vs.-evil. We were the good guys and the Soviets were the devils with their finger on the button. Americans were as certain and fervent in our righteousness as zealots. Our president even said we were the good guys. Ronald Reagan famously dubbed the USSR and the spread of communism as the Evil Empire and he referred to the age old struggle between good and evil.¹⁹ An awkward new-teen, I couldn’t articulate it then, but I knew the simplistic reduction to good vs. evil that I so enjoyed in my movies was more than wrong in practice, it was disastrous. The good-vs.-evil reduction removes empathy and tolerance from the equation, which leaves us only with enemies and hateful, dangerous acts and decisions, and it helped push humanity to the precipice of nuclear annihilation. Yet somehow, despite all of the Satanists scurrying around and the Evil Empires in our midst, I managed to survive the 1980s. Phew.

Circling back to the movies, I didn’t watch the most famous and popular 1970s satanic horror movie of all time, The Exorcist (1973), until I was a young adult safely ensconced in the early 1990s. I had yet to see it because my parents had deemed it too scary for the kid-me²⁰. By the time I watched that iconic movie my understanding of good vs. evil had evolved, thankfully, and I realized that those lines were blurry if they were there at all. The movie was shocking and frightening but in not quite the same way as it would’ve been if I’d seen it as a kid.

There were scores of other 1970s movies featuring Satan or with the words devil or hell appearing in the title even if Satan wasn’t actually in the movie²¹. As an adult I’ve returned to many of those films from my childhood and I’ve watched other classic and not-so-classic occult, or what people now call ‘folk horror,’ movies from the 1970s that I’d missed.²² There are, of course, more recent satanic/occult revival films being made today that are well worth your time, and I highly recommend House of the Devil (2009), Kill List (2011), and A Field in England (2013).²³

All those movies I watched as a kid, though, they’re still there. They blend together to form this cumulative kaleidoscopic memory, a mishmash of garish colors and psychedelia, blinding sunlight filters that were supposed to be gritty and realistic, religious iconography and the reddest blood you’ve ever seen, those musical cues and chants, those wonderfully over-the-top arias of occult insanity, and the hoards of robe-wearing wild-eyed cult members. Those movies are not at their scariest when the devils or the dogs or the devil dogs are finally on screen for the climactic battle of good vs. evil. It’s the blinding as a nuclear-bomb-flash fervor within the cult membership that is the scariest part because it’s so recognizable. The lazy, soothing irrationality of the us-versus-them mentality, the seething anger and hate of our currently toxic political climate, and the unwavering ecstasy in the madness of righteousness and belief is what terrifies the adult-me now.

1. That most famous of lines, equal parts camp and terror, was uttered at the end of Rosemary’s Baby, released in 1968. I know but it might as well have been the 1970s. Work with me, people.
2. Sans bubonic plague. My childhood was rat-free generally, except for the water rats my cat killed and left on our doorstep. So there were rats after all. My bad.
3. Not satanic. At least not overtly.
4. Gregory Peck and Lee Remick adopt Satan’s kid. He had the number 666 etched on his head and everything. I used to look for those numbers on my brother’s noggin. This is all for you, Damien!
5. More Damien, this time getting his antichrist on at a military academy. I’ll admit I was rooting for Damien in that movie.
6. Terrible “based on a true story” claptrap starring Margo Kidder and James Brolin’s beard, plus a fly covered priest. Get out, indeed.
7. The creepy mortuary and the Tall Man and his flying spikey ball of death gave me nightmares.
8. UHF was not just a Weird Al Yankovic movie, but a real thing! A radio frequency designation on which local stations would broadcast and… Okay, it’s a Weird Al movie.
9. Check out the glorious trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqv6PIH_ymY
10. I had no idea until the writing of this essay that M*A*S*H’s Major Houlihan was in this movie. Ten bonus points awarded to RwtD.
11. It starred Richard Crenna and Kim Richards, and it’s not really a masterpiece. It barely qualifies as camp. You can watch the movie in its entirety on YouTube if you wish. Why would you wish that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSAmUDlUUhQ
12. They always wear robes. But it totally slows them down in chase scenes, and fist fights in those things? Forget it. There should be a The Incredibles-esque no capes! rule for Satanists. Except, you know, it would be no robes!
13. Seriously. I wouldn’t go in the basement by myself. I always forced my younger brother to go up the stairs to our shared bedroom first as bait? an offering? just in case? I slept with a fortress of stuffed animals built around my head to help protect me; a sleep strategy that I employed for more years than I care to admit.
14. Burnt Offerings (1976), the Donald Sutherland Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Halloween (1978), Trilogy of Terror (1975), and Jaws (1975) were among the movies that gave me nightmares for years afterward.
15. As opposed to imagining the real-life serial killer and purported Satanist the Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez)—thousands of miles away, mind you, in Los Angeles—had somehow dropped in on the east coast to terrorize my paper route.
16. 50,000 Satanists Can’t Be Wrong! That’s a record by that Elvis guy, yeah? The number 50,000 mysteriously first appeared in the cultural consciousness during the Satanic panic. It was nothing but an imaginary scare figure, a figure Geraldo Rivera bumped up to a cool one million during one of his embarrassingly shoddy and sensationalistic TV specials. Others claimed that 50,000 represented the number of children slaughtered by Satanists. Yikes! Oddly enough, no one ever claimed it represented the number of cans of Deviled Ham sold or consumed in a fiscal year. Anyone remember the “It’s a devil of a ham!” catchphrase, anyone? Anyway, the very same 50,000 number appeared again in a less supernatural form in the early 2000s as major network news breathlessly and erroneously reported that 50,000 pedophiles were prowling Internet chat rooms and attempting to prey on our children. Read Dan Gardner’s excellent book The Science of Fear for more on the odd cultural role of 50,000.
17. re: The West Memphis Three http://www.wm3.org/
18. Watching the nuclear war aftermath films The Day After (1983) and Testament (1983) remain two of my most scarring pre-teen experiences.
19. “Let us beware that while they [Soviet rulers] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination over all the peoples of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world…. I urge you to beware the temptation …, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of any evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”—Ronald Regan March 8, 1983— in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/reagan-quotes/
20. They were right.
21. The Legend of Hell House (1973) is a fine example. It’s really a weird haunted house story (based on a novel by the excellent Richard Matheson) with a self-amputated dude in lead-lined room. Seriously!
22. Not-so-classic: The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1973), oddly earnest and trippy, but ultimately disappointing. Classic: The Wickerman (1973). The ending with the villages signing a folk song while Edward Woodward’s unflappably pious police Sergeant reciting Psalms as he burns inside the giant man made from wicker is one of the most horrific scenes in film history.
23. House of the Devil, directed by Ti West is made to purposefully look like a 70s/80s satanic panic film and it’s fantastic. Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and A Field in England both turn to occult/folk horror but in different ways. Kill List is a brutal hammer blow. A Field in England isn’t trippy, it’s the trippiest.

I love you, Guy Fieri.

I hate you, Guy Fieri.

I’ll explain.

* * *

You probably know, but in case you don’t, Guy Fieri is the creature who ate the Food Network. He won one of the network’s reality shows (WHO WANTS TO BE THE LEAD SINGER OF SMASHMOUTH AND ALSO EAT FOOD ON TV I GUESS), and since then has slowly, like a swelling amoebic infection, taken over the entirety of the channel. I don’t know where he came from. I cannot speak to his origin story for it has never been told. I like to imagine that he sprung fully formed when one day, in the small hamlet of Flavortown, a radioactive taco truck crashed into Motley Crue’s tourbus and the resultant explosion set fire to the town’s Axe Body Spray factory. From the cataclysm, the Juggalo Prime Kaiju known as Guy Fieri (pronounced Guy Fee-Eddy) arose in a hot geyser of donkey sauce and surfed his way to the Food Network building in New York City. And the rest is a plate of grease-spattered destiny.

Guy Fieri (pronounced Gee Fai-oody) has like, seventy shows on the Food Network, though they may also all just be pseudopods of the same animal. Many of these shows are reality shows where human beings compete for his adoration and affection, I think, I honestly don’t know what’s going on there. Last time I turned on Guy’s Grocery Games, I saw people racing around grocery store aisles, leaving behind smears of blood and sriracha sauce on the white tile as they sliced into each other with plastic knives, snarling over the last package of ramen. Meanwhile, Guy Fieri (pronounced Gorb Forby) sat back on his pallet-made dais like a Hutt-slug whose frosted tips are lubricated with duck fat and whose rubbery biceps are inked with fake tribal tattoos. I tuned out after that, but I do remember a lot of rad guitar licks and jets of flame and sizzling viscera.

Of course, his flagship show is Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, which has defied the actual time-space continuum by somehow having more seasons than The Simpsons. I bought an old postcard from 1870s Philadelphia, and in it you can see Guy Fieri (pronounced Gabbalek Fernody) seductively licking a soft pretzel from a ragged orphan’s pretzel stand. In the so-called Triple-D, our cherub-cheeked antihero travels the country and occasionally the galaxy, visiting various un-fancy restaurants where he sits in the kitchen, telling cooks what they’re doing as they do it before finally sampling their wares messily in some egregious food bukkake that leaves him covered in ranch dressing and spackled with strips of pork belly. If it’s a sandwich he’s eating, he inverts it, picking it up from underneath and then flipping it toward his maw as if he is an alien creature who has yet to learn our Human Sandwich Eating Ways. He hunkers down. He eats. Then he makes word-like noises about that food, telling us about its complexity and its flavor profile before ultimately fist-bumping the cook into fame and fortune. And that’s a real thing, by the way — those restaurants Guy Fieri (pronounced Gordon Freeburg) blesses with his papal-like presence end up doing pretty damn good after the fact. This is the so-called “Fieri Effect,” which sounds like a symptom of airborne syphilis but is really the bump restaurants get from appearing on the Food Pope’s show.

He is also a restaurateur, though I’m sure he’d prefer a cooler, radder, gnarlier title like FOOD BRO or SHOGUN OF FLAVORTOWN. His menus are full of foods that are rockin’, killer, fully-loaded, made of dragon’s breath, sporting lava from its culinary volcano. Many items are purposefully misspelled — “slyders” instead of “sliders,” “stix” instead of “sticks,” “unyawns” instead of just fucking “onions.” And of course he is famous for a thing actually called Donkey Sauce (recipe here) because I guess the sauce you milk from a donkey sounds appealing, somehow? I have never been particularly interested in consuming the byproduct of a donkey, not as a meal, not as a condiment, not even as the most meagerest of garnishes, and yet here we are in a world where Donkey Sauce exists as a think you can make or buy. (In the interest of fairness, if you’d like the origin story of the donkey sauce name — here it shall be.)

* * *

When I first beheld Guy Fieri — you do not see him so much as you witness him for the first time, the way you see an entity being born or the way you watch a car crash happen — I kinda hated him, because, ew, what the fuck. What am I looking at here? He seemed like a product, a creation of the same shadow council who makes new eXXXtreme Doritos flavors, like he’s a living mascot for a cartoon fast food restaurant that exists only in some satirical dystopia where people are food and donkeys are sauces. He has those vicious meringue tips atop his head, and that buttery pale pubic strip down his chin — that strip is bleached boldly blonde in a sea of dark beard, as if Guy one day saw some kind of food ghost and it scared him so bad that one Band-Aid-sized area of his face will forever remain fear-struck in ghastly white. That beard looks like you could squeeze it and from it you would get some mad hallucinogenic nectar that smells of peanut oil and shame.

He looks like a guy who eats suntan lotion. Just squirts it into his mouth, pbbt.

Then one day I watched the Triple-D, and I watched it in the way you mock-watch something, like, you watch it only for the snarkenfreude factor. You sit there, you make fun of it, you feel better about your life until you go to sleep and once again are haunted by your own nefarious inadequacy? Like that. Guy Fieri would go into these various professional kitchens or restaurant dining rooms and it was like seeing someone try to be funny –? He had the same riffs on the same jokes, the same comfort-food-variants of punchlines. Something-something Flavortown. Something something Taking A Ride On The Flavor Express. Something something Murdering Your Face With A Knife Made From Pure Flavor. He was a man on a program, a spam-bot made sentient, an advertising brand struck with lightning and crassly animated with life.

Over time, though, I stopped hate-watching it and started, well, watching it.

Just regular old watching it. Unironically! No snark in my heart.

If it was on and I wasn’t watching it — I flipped the channel to it. Willfully!

But snarky cynicism is my natural state and soon I felt compelled back to hating Fieri. I found things to despise anew about him. For instance, I hated how whenever he confronted an ingredient he didn’t like or understand he made these childish Mister Yuk-sticker faces like ew no I won’t eat that weird thing, yucky poopy doodoo, Mommy. And it was only emboldened by various COOL KIDS inside CULINARY HIGH SCHOOL sitting in the back of the class shitting on their clown-face teacher. Bourdain called Fieri’s NY restaurant a “terror-dome,” comparing it to Ed Hardy. He said of Fieri: “Did you ever see the Simpsons episode where it’s decided that Itchy and Scratchy need a sidekick? So a committee gets together and they invent one called Poochie.” Fieri feels as if with but a drunken twirl he can transform into Paula Deen in the snap of your butter-slick fingers. You try to hold in your head a world where Grant Achatz makes food like this, and Guy Fieri is rolling around in a hot tub full of chili and you have to spoon it out of his various divots and crevices and — you can’t. You can’t imagine that world. It is such cognitive dissonance that to try to maintain it will cause you to hemorrhage and fall down.

Then came the time someone hacked Guy Fieri’s menu online, with hilarious results.

Then came the NY Times review of Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar in NYC.

Choice quotes from that:

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

and

Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?

and finally, a question that plagues us all, existentially:

Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?

It was cool to hate Guy Fieri.

And boy howdy, was it so fucking easy.

Look at this post I just wrote.

It’s joyous to savage someone so simply, so plainly, so completely. It becomes a powerful thing to hold up figures of what we deem to be icons of American Mediocrity and cut them to ribbons — Nickelback? Fuck you, Nickleback. I’m going to hate you and I’m going to let everyone know I hate you. Twilight? Eat shit, Twilight, you perfectly cromulent piece of vampire garbage. We roll around in our disdain like an animal covering ourselves in the scent of the cool kids, so they know we hate the same things they hate, so they can tell we’re not bought, we’re not sold, we’re not slathered in the drippings of weeks-old donkey sauce.

But I gotta tell you — I’ve turned the corner again on Guy Fieri.

This is what I’ve come to believe:

Guy Fieri is one of the more authentic presences we have. He’s not exactly funny. He’s totally affable. He doesn’t give a fuck what you think about his shitty hair. He has the gonzo balls to feed us something called donkey sauce without any of the self-reflection that the act would normally engender. This is not a man full of doubt. This is a man who loves food. He eats it with gastronomical gusto bordering on the grotesque, and he stitches that easy hammock smile between the two pillowy ranch-shellacked cheeks of his when he really likes something. You get the sense his fist-bumps are earnest as fuck. He likes these people. He likes food. He likes being on TV. He likes having restaurants and being Guy Fieri. He loves his family. He loves his work, his life, his little milk-white pubic pelt. He is who he is. I want to be that comfortable with myself. I want to be that authentic to who I am no matter who says boo about it.

So, I salute you, Guy Fieri. Never ever has there been a better example of someone embodying the phrase, you do you. You keep doing you, and we should all try to be ourselves so plainly, so boldly, so donkeysaucily. One day, Guy Fieri will diminish and go into the West and remain Guyfieriel, taking a ferry to Flavortown with the rest of the Dorito Elves. We will mourn his passing.

(And as an epilogue, Bourdain and Fieri seem to have squashed their culinary beef.)

PSST.

You.

Yeah, you.

Put down your Pokemon-abduction game for a moment.

Guess what?

LIFE DEBT IS OUT NOW.

Or, the more proper title: Star Wars: Aftermath: Life Debt: The Gang Hunts Imperials: Han & Leia’s Excellent Adventure: Jar-Jar’s Erotic Awakening 2, Gungan Bombadaloo.

You can procure it anywhere where books exist. That includes your favorite indie bookstore, or Amazon, or B&N, or that shady guy who lives in the wizard van down by the docks.

I think it’s a good book. Other people seem to like it.

The Collider Jedi Council did a smashing review video.

Sci-Fi Now gives it four out of five stars.

Tosche Station team gives it a GO review (no spoilers).

Blabba the Hutt gives a pretty spoilery positive review.

You can also check out some excerpts —

Han Solo excerpt at EW.com.

Leia excerpt at Mashable.

Maz Kanata excerpt at USA Today.

Malakili excerpt at IGN.

Hope you check it out and hope you like it. If you do like it, I’d surely appreciate a positive review somewhere. If you don’t like it — well, ha ha, ahh, I expect to be hearing from you folks one way or another. *winky shrug emoji*

As promised, my (tentative, may certainly change) SDCC schedule is here.

First, I want to say right up front that even if you’re not going to the con but are able to make it to San Diego, a bunch of us are doing an event Saturday morning at the Upstart Crow Bookstore! (Event page here.) Saturday the 23rd at 9AM! Kevin Hearne! VE Schwab! Richard Kadrey! And myself. Come swing by and say hi.

Okay. Onto the schedule proper:

Thursday the 21st

10AM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth

1:30PM: Nerd Trivia Challenge, Author Edition! Location: Horton Grand Theatre. Featuring: Me, Patrick Rothfuss, Romina Russell, Sam Sykes, Cecil Castelucci, V.E. Schwab, Camilla D’Errico, Duane Swierczynski, and Brandon T. Snider

3:30PM: Signing! Location Autograph Area 7

Friday the 22nd

11AM: Star Wars Publishing Panel! Location: Room 7AB

12:30PM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth

Saturday the 23rd

9AM: Signing! Location: Upstart Crow! Featuring: Me, VE Schwab, Kevin Hearne, Richard Kadrey

4PM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth!

Sunday the 24th

11:30AM: Signing! Location: Del Rey Star Wars Booth!

That’s one of the painted lady butterflies we raised in B-Dub’s butterfly garden kit that we got him for his birthday. The little flutterby hung around for a while after release to get some vanity shots, the little narcissist. Raising butterflies was a lot of fun. You should do it. You should do it and then start a butterfly farm because they’re all so delicious and sustainable and you just deep fry them for 30 seconds and them pop them in your mouth and —

Whoa, ha ha, hey, no, I’m just kidding. I don’t eat butterflies.

*quickly pokes a crumpled wing back in mouth*

*chews*

*swallows surreptitiously*

Let’s see. Any news?

I’ll do a more proper Life Debt news-purge tomorrow when the book is out.

My SDCC schedule should be fairly well finalized, and I can get that up too for tomorrow.

I’ll be gone for SDCC, then, and also for the time before, so expect BLOGGERY to be light over the remainder of July — particularly after this week is over.

I think that’s it.

Enjoy the butterfly.

Be good to each other.

Stay brave.

Drop acid and fight demons at Wal-Mart, or as I call it, “Pokemon Go.”

THE END

S.L. Huang is one of those authors who, if she ever wants to pull up blog space here at terribleminds, she’s welcome to with nary the blinky-wink of an eye. Her posts prior — one about defending big boomy popcorn fiction and another about unlikable women protagonists — are just so damn good. This one is no different. Behold: manpain.

* * *

Watch out, feminism incoming.

There’s a fan term called “manpain” that fascinates me. It refers to the phenomenon of a media property that excessively and self-centeredly focuses on a male character’s angst after tragic events happen to the people around him. As the linked Fanlore definition says,

“I’m a dude, this is my pain, this is the REASON FOR ALL MY DOUCHITUDE, BEHOLD MY EPICNESS AND DESPAIR … sometimes it leads to sitting in the dark, brooding.”

(Or just think of any scene in which a stoic Manly Man gazes into the distance as a single crystalline tear slides gently from his eye.)

When this trope is in effect, The Man’s pain is the one we are focused on, as readers/viewers, and meant to sympathize with. If his family is murdered, if his girlfriend is turned into a vampire — it is still his pain we are shown, his drama that is the important fallout.

There’s an even more disturbing subset of manpain that starts to set itself apart after you see it enough times. It’s the “Man Is ‘Forced’ To Make A Horrible Choice That Hurts Someone He Loves Just To Wring Angst For His Own Emotional Journey” trope.  For instance: Tyrion is “forced” to rape Tysha, and we see how  tragically that affects him. The Doctor is “forced” to ravage Donna’s memories to save her life, and we focus on how sad and despairing that is for him.

I have a love-hate relationship with this trope, because I have to confess that a character being “forced” to do something awful can, when well-executed, be one of my all-time favorite means of deliciously wrenching emotion. But there’s no denying the troubling trend that we so often see men being “forced” to do horrible things to women, and afterward, the woman disappears and we focus on the pain of the man. His pain. The pain he has because he did something horrible to HER.

And she’s gone from the narrative.

There’s something so very fucked-up about that.

To be sure, some of the gender imbalance here probably comes from there being a gender imbalance in protagonists — we’re naturally focused on the protagonist, and the protagonist is disproportionately a man. But even when a woman has to make a horrible choice and do a terrible thing, it tends to be framed differently. See when Buffy had to kill a re-ensouled Angel at the end of Season 2 — we don’t get to sympathize with her single stoic tear over swelling orchestral music as she stands in the rain, tragic and romantic and remade. Instead, she’s severely depressed, her friends turn against her, and instead of striding off into the distance in a swirling long coat to be a lone dark knight, she has to come back and try to fit herself back into her old life — where her friends immediately start yelling at her about having their own problems.

Oh, yeah, and Angel comes back. And gets better. And gets his own TV show where he is the definition of manpain and can brood into next century with all the focus on his angst forever.

I’m still waiting for Tysha and Donna to get their own shows.

In Plastic Smile, the fourth book of my Russell’s Attic series, I set out with one of the subplots to do something very aware and very specific: to take a typical Manpain scenario and tell it from the opposite point of view (and hereafter will be some spoilers for the book). Cas, my main character, meets someone from her past who did something horrible to her — because, as he sees it, he had to; it killed him to hurt her but he had to; the guilt has eaten him up forever but he had to; yadda yadda etcetera MANPAIN.  If this book were told from a different perspective, that same male character would be the Epic SF Hero Filled With Angst, brooding in the dark as we feel his moral anguish, and Cas would be a distant, grievous memory.

Instead, she punches him in the face.

It’s interesting, the responses I’ve gotten on this character and this scene. Male readers have tended to be neutral on the arc and the character or even view him as weak. Whereas female readers have almost universally come back with, “OMG I HATE HIM SO MUCH YEAH CAS PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE PUNCH HIM AGAIN!!!”

Of course, a few first readers on one book aren’t enough to draw empirical conclusions. But what I can say is this: it’s a pervasive trope, and at least some of us are really dang tired of seeing men given sympathy for the awful things done to women.

It ain’t your pain, dude. It’s ours.

SL Huang majored in math at MIT and now uses it to write eccentric superhero novels. The box set of the first three Russell’s Attic books is on sale for 99 cents through July 11, and the fourth book is available now. Online home: http://www.slhuang.com and @sl_huang on Twitter.