(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys

I went back to Emrys's earlier work because I liked A Half-Built Garden so much, but I felt a little trepidation because it turns out her earlier novels are Cthulhu Mythos.

Winter Tide has a lot of the same warmth and building unexpected family vibes that I so enjoyed in A Half-Built Garden, but I am not super-into Cthulhu Mythos work and I am fucking tired of The Monsters in Old Horror Represented Minorities, So Therefore Let's Tell a Story about Sympathetic Monsters Who are Metaphors for Minorities. Okay, maybe sometimes it can work but there's this fundamental problem of them still being monsters. One way or another, it concedes something to the bigots that I don't wish to see conceded, and usually that includes ceding more of the moral high ground than I would like.

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

Talk about Jews as Monsters. Roth paraphrases the Spider-Man line "With great power comes great responsibility" in this novel as "With great talent comes great responsibility", which is ironic given how great an abuse of talent this novel is. Roth manages stunning moments of language and human dilemma, but he squanders it all in a truly disgusting chapter in which Nathan Zuckerman fantasizes that a young woman he lusts after is actually Anne Frank and that somehow by marrying her (or simply having sex with her) he will absolve himself of his self-hatred.

Comments

[batdina]

I have a soft spot for Zuckerman. I don't think I could name why. I carry the same mixed feelings about Roth as you do.

[seekingferret]

I've previously only read Zuckerman in American Pastoral and The Human Stain, both of which I liked a lot more than this. But even here, it was really only the Anne Frank chapter that was giant horseshit, the rest was pretty good.

[scintilla72]

wait, do the monsters in old horror actually represent minorities, or are they just assumed to by the people who write the kind of story you're tired of? not that I've really read a lot of old horror (off the top of my head I can think of Dracula, many of Poe's works, and the original Cthulhu short story), but this is still an angle I haven't heard of before.

[seekingferret]

There's definitely a connection. You could analyze it a few different ways. One possible way is that there are codified things that people find horrific or that people when reading horror stories understand to be intended as horrific, and separately racist people have used those horror tropes to describe minorities they want to denigrate, and therefore the two things become entangled. Another is that there are certain physical tropes associated with lower status people and horror writers associate those physical tropes with their monsters in order to play on the pre-built horror that racist readers have. Or a third way is that racist authors are deliberately writing fantasies contrasting good and evil in terms of Us and Them, the pure natives and the dangerous other. But it's definitely a thing. And it's definitely a thing in some of the horror you mentioned. Dracula has extremely xenophobic depictions of Dracula's Romanian acolytes, who Stoker seems to regard as less rational and therefore almost less human than his English characters. Similarly, Lovecraft is full of xenophobic depictions of the cults worshiping Deep Ones and Old Ones as again, foreign and dirty and dangerous and unintelligent and a threat to decent New England society.

It's not just old horror, either. I wrote a review last summer of a recent Polish horror movie in which the horror comes from making the mistake of inviting Jews into a Polish community. Ultimately Demon is more sympathetic to the Jews, but it still plays into the horror and danger that the Othered community represents.