This is a hybrid question/rant. Both halves of this hybrid are entirely legitimate; I really do want answers to the question, and I really am annoyed by the thing I’m asking about. If you want to skip my thoughts and just answer, feel free; and if you want to just read me spewing hate-words into the webbertubes, that’s fine, too.

The question, about which I shall rant hereafter: Why does it seem like so many urban fantasy stories insist on main characters with earth-shaking levels of power, interacting with (or being) characters who occupy unique and/or crucial positions within the fantasy subculture or the fabric of reality, fighting battles with world-shattering stakes hanging in the balance?

I understand that it is a good idea (if not mandatory) that there be something unique about your protagonist, either in terms of their nature or in terms of their situation; if they are an un-special person to whom nothing special happens, then there is likely no conflict and therefore no story. However, it seems like urban fantasy writers in particular are copying a narrative template I last saw in the heady Dark Age of comic books: using high power levels and Big Important Words and high-end mythological beings in place of actual diligence and detail, and leaning on weird MacGuffins and strange loopholes to get the main character from one cosmologically important plot point to the next.

Let’s establish some terms, as I used to do in my graduate courses. What do I mean by “high power level,” in a genre where supernatural powers are par for the course? I’m glad you asked, Assumed Reader of Essays! “High power level” refers here to characters (or objects utilized by characters) with powers that are constantly useful, completely reliable, and capable of solving a wide variety of tasks both magical and mundane. Classic “high power” abilities include the ability to easily, even off-handedly, kill the average threats present in the fiction’s universe; resistance to physical and/or magical harm bordering on invincibility; unaided, high-speed travel through space or, God forbid, time;  the ability to raise the dead or undo apparently permanent damage; and the capacity for other significant, permanent alterations to reality. Bonus points if the powers in question can be activated with a second or less of warning (e.g., teleporting across the world with a snap of your fingers) or if they come with some weakness or limitation that does not appear to actually limit their use in any way (e.g., the power causes the user great pain, but not so great that they are reluctant to use it to solve any but the most trivial problems). In short, an “average” power level allows an urban fantasy character some amount of shortcuts around mundane problems; a “high” power level allows an urban fantasy character to ignore mundane problems and barely struggle with all but the most fantastic ones.

I also said some flippant things about Big Important Words, and that should be explained here as well. Fantasy, since the dawn of language, has loved to give characters, places, and things Names with Capital Letters, titles that convey mystery or importance. The Lady of the Lake, the City of Brass, the One Ring. Etc. Urban fantasy follows suit, giving us things like King Rat, the Black Friars, or the Room of Thirteen Doors. Both fantasy and its younger cousin also love made-up words for things: the various demon races in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Sandman Slim come to mind, or kything (admittedly based on an old Scottish word) in the A Wrinkle in Time series. Urban fantasy has a predilection fantasy doesn’t always share, however, for prescribing near- (or beyond-) deific uniqueness to characters, even beyond the whole Chosen One thing that has been popular for quite some time now (like all of it): I’m thinking more of Sandman Slim’s parentage in his novels, or the cosmogonic status of the Endless in The Sandman, or the strange propensity for “edgy” characters in urban fantasy to wind up meeting Jack the Ripper.

But wait, the Assumed Reader says; don’t many works you, Tyler, love feature some of these very things? The Doctor, with his Sontarans and Daleks and his ever-more-potent sonic screwdriver? The aforementioned Dream, he of the alternate dimension where he is god-king and the ability to appear almost anywhere he wants? Mike Carey’s Lucifer? Well…yes. They do have this stuff. But the way they handle it…well…

OK, let me give you an example of what I mean. A few years back, I read an urban fantasy novel that took place in an Otherworld version of a famous big city, where it’s always the middle of the night and all the monsters and miscreants like to hang out. Alright, so far so good; decent urban fantasy setting. Early on in the book, the main character figures out that someone is trying to kill him for investigating the things he is investigating; assassins from multiple timelines keep suddenly materializing in front of him. Sure, alright; again, a bit weird even for the genre, but go big or go home, I guess. As such, he hires three bodyguards. One I have forgotten entirely, except for the fact he is unkillable; the other is a pair of lovers, a mortal and a succubus, who are damned by definition but are so deeply in love that the good emotion keeps them out of Hell and damnation keeps them out of Heaven, so they, too, are immortal. Uh? The very first place they go to investigate anything, they get attacked by a bunch of wizards in three-piece suits, and the main character just hits the deck while the immortal bodyguards graphically murder all the minor antagonists (I hesitate to call them “bad guys”). Over the course of the book, the main character hangs out with a bartender who is occasionally possessed by an impressively Satanic rendition of Merlin, fights someone wielding a gun that speaks the Word of God backwards to erase its targets from existence, and discovers he is the son of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who has been unleashed into our world now and who becomes the antagonist for the entire series.

So what, you might say? So this: At no point does the main character resolve any conflict himself. Every conflict is presented in the same format: impossibly horrible, powerful, inexorable thing appears; main character tells us how screwed he is; some sort of deux ex machina, occasionally a literal one, steps up and fixes it, perhaps after the main character points out some mystical loophole in the problem that they can exploit, perhaps just via brute force and ignorance. And the characters are so flat they could get a job as a cardboard standee, with each of them having exactly as much personality as is lent to them by the archetype they embody and not a whit more. Even the main character, who is our first-person narrator to boot, is just a Central Casting noir detective with a quasi-tragic, quasi-mystical spin on his backstory that you just know will result in a pity party being thrown in the later books.

It’s the latter point that bothers me, and the point on which Doctor Who and The Sandman deviate from the cavalcade of sins I am mentioning here. These stories have shallow characterization and cliche plots, spiced up only by making everyone a godlike special snowflake and/or making sure the gore quotient is somewhere in the stratosphere. The stakes keep getting bigger, the amount of worlds and realities threatened larger, the consequences ever darker and dire; but these are tautological consequences, consequences that are only dire because we keep being told they’re dire, because the easiest way to make something look like a threat is to have it threaten everything. You don’t have to tell people how serious a threat to the world is, and you don’t have to work to make people worried about it.

And that is why this behavior among urban fantasy writers bothers me. Because it’s lazy. By going big, by going enormous and epic and scary, the writer can skimp on the harder parts of writing – character depth, relatable conflicts, emotionally moving…well…emotions. (Prose fail.) You can pave over your deficiencies by just having something else weird or gory or explosive happen and never have to go back to making your main character anything more than a cynical detective or a bewildered everyman; Chandler’s Law writ large. It’s the literary equivalent of a heavy metal garage band that covers up its lack of musical training by detonating explosives onstage, a loud distraction that will hit your primal side and draw attention away from the noisy deficiencies of the rest of the product.

The thing is, I can get behind that; not every single book needs to move me deeply. But I feel like urban fantasy in particular gets the lion’s share of this, and I don’t quite understand why, especially when there are plenty of examples of high-power characters in high-power settings who nevertheless are complex, conflicted, and interesting – the aforementioned Dream and the Doctor. I’m not quite certain why it is that urban fantasy falls victim to this so thoroughly (and I’ll admit, it’s even possible I’m wrong, and this is a problem across a wide swath of genres); is it just the easy access to godlike characters? What is it about urban fantasy that encourages fulfillment of a college-campus stereotype about speculative fiction? Is this actually an issue for anyone besides me? Am I just not OK with letting magic be…er…magical?

I don’t know, and it bothers me a lot. It’s to the point that I’m almost scared to write an action sequence, lest I be written off as yet more popcorn in a world overflowing with kernels. Luckily, and here is my conclusion, this gives me purpose: to recognize this apparent pitfall, and to avoid it; to keep the power levels of my settings low; to keep my characters deep; and to always remember that even if the rest of the world disagrees with me, the fact that I want to do those things in my stories is reason enough to do it.

Alright, cats and kittens, my guest episode of Your Book is Why Daddy Drinks is now up. I’m linking to their main page instead of the episode itself, because you should check out all of their work; if you are just looking for me, I’m a speaker on Season 1, Episode 5, The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2 (an adventure for 3-6 players levels 2-5).

Now, the question I want to answer here, for you and for myself: why did I do this?

As may be clear from my tweets about bad books I’ve read, I generally try not to publicly lambaste books that I did not like.  This is partially because I really don’t want to be seen as a dick, and this is partially because I do not want that behavior to come back at me.  If someone did not like my work I would rather not find out because they bitched about me on Twitter.  (This is still liable to happen at some stage, but I at least want to be able to act like I don’t deserve it.)  It’s also because, well…see this TED video.  I don’t want to risk quashing someone’s creative spirit, someone’s soul, because I happen to not like the things that they like.  My tastes are my tastes and particular to me, and to force them on others – moreover, to force them on people who are still seeking their creative voice – is wrong.

So why is it OK for me to get online and make fun of someone else’s book?

That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with since yesterday.  I have this gut feeling that it is OK; that my reasons for doing the podcast are beyond just wanting to talk with my friends or some carnivalesque need to feel superior to authors with better street cred than me.  But until I sat down to write this post I wasn’t 100% sure what the actual reasons for that gut feeling were.

And the reasons are these: one, while no-one deserves to have their creative confidence attacked, every artist deserves to have their creative talents improved; and two, I am on a never-ending hunt to understand what, if anything, makes a book objectively bad.

Everyone has a talent ceiling for every task they undertake. I am never going to pitch a baseball as well as Tim Lincecum, or act as well as Robert Downey, Jr.  However, if I’m lucky, I might get to the place where I can write as well as Nick Mamatas (though doubtless my strengths and weaknesses will be different than his).  I want to try to get to my talent ceiling.  I am at a place where I do not need to be taught the basic mechanics of the Spooky Art; I need to be told where my attempts at the Spooky Art fail, so I can try to study hard and not fail in those respects next time I attempt to be Spooky; and I need to be exposed to a wide variety of examples of the Spooky Art, and have a chance to analyze those examples and see what they do right and what they do wrong.  So it makes sense to try to expose myself to bad writing; to see the places other people stumble and try to understand how not to make the same mistake.  In order to avoid the mistakes of bad fiction, I need to know what makes bad fiction bad.

Most of what is “bad” is undoubtedly subjective, and I’ll freely admit that I hate some things that are probably not considered “bad” by the mainstream (my feelings on “show, don’t tell,” for example).  At the same time, there are books that I, and nearly everyone I talk to, agree are bad, but we often seem to flounder when we try to decide what exactly makes them bad.

There are some obvious things, like poor grammar and spelling, that really stick out (I am still haunted by the small press that briefly courted me, only for me to find that they had “corrected” the title of the foreword to “forward”).  But that is obvious, as I said; a mechanical problem, not something higher-level.  Then there are the slightly less obvious, but still fairly universal things: totally untelegraphed plot resolution, total lack of plot resolution, deviating from the world you’ve established, having characters suddenly act out of character without explanation.

But. But but but. What if you do all these things? What if your plot resolution is fine, your characters stay on note, your world is coherent…but your book is still bad?  What is making that book bad?

That’s what I want to understand.

The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2 (an adventure for 3-6 players of levels 2-5) does not do all of these things; and on some level, I think it intends to not do all of these things. The concepts underlying the book make it so that deviation from good literature and good taste are mandatory; and yet, somehow, even knowing parts of it are deliberately bad, that doesn’t stop it from feeling like a bad book to me.  The author has been blurbed by Christopher Moore and Cory Doctorow and seems to be highly regarded, which means that this is that rare and beautiful thing: a bad book by a good author, or possibly, a good book that I am mistaking for bad. I want to crack that open, rip out the guts, grab and clutch and try to understand.  I want to start with something that left me cold but that I could tell should have done much more.  To magnetize my compass using the most powerful magnet I can get my hands on.

That is why I did this podcast.

Now, to be just about this whole thing, I am going to check out some of the author’s other work. I feel like my life will be .01% more complete once I have read a book called Satan Burger.  First, though, I need to read some quality writing. Maybe a little Cormac McCarthy, speaking of great authors whose work might look bad through the wrong eyes.

My grandfather, Raymond, has passed away after a short, fierce fight with cancer.

I knew him and didn’t know him all at once.  I remember him for the huge farm down in Arkansas; for his kind, laconic Southern patter; for his awkward love for his sons and his grandchildren and his wife and his later girlfriend.  I remember him as a smiling, charmingly addled, older version of my father.  I remember him working hard when he didn’t need to and manning up when no-one would have judged him.  I remember nothing but good things about him and nothing but kindness; it wasn’t until I was nearly thirty that I learned we disagreed about nearly everything.  My deepest connection to him was blood and the complicated sort of love that came with that, but there was a little bit more – his name is my middle name, given directly after him.

My reaction is a cocktail of sadness, regret, relief, and fear.  Sadness because my grandfather is gone from this world; because he was a wonderful man and the world is less for his passing.  Because I can’t help but shoulder some of the sadness my father feels, my mother feels, my sister feels, even if my own emotions are different from their own.  Because I hate death to begin with and to see it strike so close to home is jarring and a reminder of things that leave me with my head bowed and my heart heavy.

Regret because I did not say goodbye the way I wanted to.  Because our last conversation was a strained mess of damaged hearing and bad reception, because the last words I heard from him, hoarse and thick and agonized, were that he appreciated me calling and that he doesn’t get around so good anymore.  Because I eschewed a trip out there in favor of a phone call that ultimately never happened.  Because I suck at saying goodbye.

Relief because my grandfather is finally done suffering.  Because he doesn’t have to fight, for himself or for anyone, and can rest after a long, solid life, a life like the one I believe he wanted.  Because my family can finally start grieving and healing instead of hoping for something that we all knew was beyond hope.  Because the worst of it has passed and now we’re on to the mourning.

Fear because he was so healthy.  Because there was no sign, no hint, no indicator that this would happen to him.  Because death has struck close to me and my terror at the thought of it is greater and more immediate than ever.  I find myself checking every weird little swelling, examining every skin tag or wart, worrying and frowning and fretting that maybe I got whatever genetic snake-eyes besieged him at the end of his life.

I’m a twisted-up mess inside, because all at once I can’t help but feel what I feel, and can’t help feel like I should feel differently.  I’m not as sad as I feel like I should be; the man was old, at the twilight of things already, and in so much pain, that it almost seems like a release, a reward, for him to have been sent off wherever it is our souls go when they shuffle off to the next level.  I worked instead of going out and seeing him, but I did it at his request and the request of my father – the former’s need to be allowed to take this journey alone, the latter’s belief that the trip would do more harm than good.  Still, I can’t help but feel guilty, and also can’t help but wonder if that guilt is really some need for closure gnawing at me.

The bottom line is this: my family is smaller now, and my loved ones are hurting, and I will be there for them if I have what they need.  The world has lost a great man: a dutiful soldier, a hard worker, a kind father, a loving grandfather, husband, boyfriend, and boss.  The world is a little less for his passing, but I think he would agree that he’s finished howing that row; it’s up to someone else to reap the harvest.

So please, Raymond, rest in peace, and I’ll do my best to make my name stand up to yours.  You were one of the good ones, and I will never let anyone say otherwise.

As I sit here, waiting for some rice to cook (I’m being all adult and trying to make breakfast ahead of time instead of going out; please, feel free to comment if you are impressed), I find myself reading creepypasta.  Because that’s a smart thing to do when I’m alone at home in an apartment whose upstairs neighbor makes the floor creak all the time, right?

(Sidenote: For those who do not know, “creepypasta” is horror fiction distributed via the Internet, especially email; root word “copypasta,” from those stories people circulate via email after COPYing and PASTing them.  Dig?  For those who do know, tonight’s helping is “Ben Drowned.”)

The pasta is having the intended effect, and I assure you, the appropriate hairs are standing on end as a result.  But the other thing that’s happening is, I’m sitting here wondering how real people actually would act when confronted with the paranormal?

The accepted reactions are the extremes of fear and fascination.  That certainly makes sense; the supernatural tends to appear in forms that would evoke primal emotions and those are pretty primal, as Lovecraft loves to remind us.  But in this age, with the idea of a person discovering a magical world just beside our own now de rigeur in popular fiction, and with people having access to a great deal more information than they did in the theoretical heyday of this type of story, I wonder if the reaction wouldn’t be quite different.

Fear, certainly, or discomfort; those seem only natural (as it were).  After all, being confronted with the paranormal is at best a disruption of the underpinnings we base our world on (even if we are religiously devout, in most cases; many may believe in God but few expect to see him), and at worst a direct threat to our continued well-being.  Doubt, too, seems likely, again, because the hope is that this is close encounter is a hallucination or some weirdo in a rubber suit and not an actual world-altering experience.  But I wonder, would we freak out that much anymore?  Would we have a moment of panic and then a longer period of logic, of understanding, even of curiosity?  Would we find ourselves trying to figure out what really works to kill werewolves rather than just sitting and flailing and going “Holy shit, werewolves are real!”?  Or would we even not react at first, or perhaps for a good long while, until the crisis is over and we can afford to panic, or until the shock has passed and our brain can actually start correlating its contents?

I ask these questions for the same reason I ask all questions: it’s for a book.  My own theory is that the reaction to witnessing a supernatural event will vary wildly depending on the person and the event, but that the gamut of reactions is wider than it was pre-media saturation and pre-Internet.  Some people will still soil themselves; for others, there’s simply being nonplussed while we run away and find time to panic; and for others, there’s hunting down a forum about how to defend against the supernatural and asking people to help them field ID whatever the hell just swooped out of the night in a flying mop bucket and tried to decapitate them.  It’s moments like these, questions like these, that make me so grateful to be writing in the modern era.

So really–what do you think?

He speaks truth.  Go ahead and listen.

More content to come later.