damerell

I've just been plugging through Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion, and while it's quite well written, my God, is everything awful all the time. This isn't specifically about Hurley, although AFAICT all her stuff is like that, but about this vexing (to me) narrative device of having everything be uniformly dreadful.

I just finished Raven Stratagem (sequel to Ninefox Gambit, not appreciably a happier book), so my benchmark for "awful" is set quite high... but people tell jokes in that universe (albeit mostly gallows humour), they eat pastries (even if that does provide a vector for assassination attempts), they had happy childhoods until something ghastly happened to their parents, etc.

When everything's awful it loses any force. I got to the bit in the Hurley where it turns out someone routinely eats her own mutated newborn, and, well, of course she does. No-one in this world ever tucks into a ham sandwich.

It reminds me of the transition between early Warhammer 40,000 (yeah, never a pinnacle of fine writing) where everything was slightly tongue-in-cheek and modern editions which are entirely po-faced ghastliness. (I think, given modern Blizzard, this sort of thing may be correlated with thinking an excellent design for armour is looking like you covered yourself in glue and rolled around an ironmonger. One reason I usually play Sgt. Hammer in HOTS is she's one of about 2 characters who ever says anything remotely lighthearted, and that game's got more enormous shoulder pads than 80s power dressing. But I digress).

Ghastliness is more effective, I think, when there's some kind of contrast with non-ghastliness. Hope must exist, if only so it can be brutally crushed.

In fairness, I have to mention that there's a bit of a problem here with my contention that unremitting awfulness makes for bad reading; that problem is Edgar Allan Poe. I'm not sure what to say about that. :-/