Sundial and Thongor and the Dragon City and Showing Your Influence
Sundial and Thongor and the Dragon City and Showing Your Influence
Two books that affected me recently were Sundial by Cartiona Ward and Thongor and the Dragon City by Lin Carter. They could not be more different. I recommend only the former, though I did learn a lot from reading the latter.
Sundial is a horror novel set in the American southwest about motherhood, and sisterhood, and marriage, and dogs. I can't say more about its plot, aside from stating that it fucking rules. It is genuinely scary, genuinely upsetting, and features a so many twists and turns that you can't possibly see them all coming. I loved it.
It is also very up front about its roots. One conceit of the novel is that its main character, Rob, is writing a series of young adult adventure novels that many of us grew up reading. The characters are young people at a boarding school. Their problems may be dramatic and upsetting, but they are always resolved in the end—and the school itself is a nearly mythical place, a home away from home that gives these blessed young people room for adventure and danger that doesn't become too dangerous.
Except in Rob's unpublished excerpts, some twisted stuff does start coming in.
It's a neat trick, since the strange twists in Rob's writing show her own troubled mental state and provide other characters something to think about and, maybe most importantly, it's a metafictional flourish that puts the world firmly in a world in which stories matter. Much of Sundial, as in many horror novels, revolves around false narratives meant to cover up previous, more horrifying truths. The novel starts to ask us if we take the things we read as tools, as comfort, or sometimes as dangerous messages. In a country where so much homegrown, white nationalist terrorism is founded on a number of false narratives peddled relentlessly in acts of everyday stochastic terrorism, these are good and important questions. Sundial avoids the kind of navel-gazing and back-patting that some "stories about stories" fall into. It leaves you more troubled. Hopefully, it leaves you thinking about the kinds of stories you consume, and those you tell.
Thongor and the Dragon City could not be more different. I mean, you probably got that from the title.
But it did make me think similarly about authors being very clear about their influences. Lin Carter wrote a lot of Conan the Barbarian pastiches, and his Thongor stories are the most popular. I don't want to upset any Carter fans. He edited a bajillion books in his time, wrote many of them too. But what strikes me is that Thongor, for all of his willingness to show where he came from—the back cover of the old 1966 paperback version I read actually argues Thongor is the best hero "since Conan"—doesn't meet the expectations of anyone looking for a Conan-style story.
Conan can be smart. He can outwit his enemies. He is sometimes curious. His victories are hard gained, and that's why we keep coming back to Conan. In the best Conan stories, he is fighting enemies that either outnumber or out-magic him. Even though he is strong, he is at a disadvantage most of the time.
Now, Thongor and the Dragon City does have some great horror moments. There are monsters that Thongor cannot beat by himself, and he must sometimes flee. In an early chapter, a big freaking sea dragon nearly kills him and his companions. Then…comes another sea dragon. There's two of them now! Oh, no! This stuff rules, and it's where the book won me over with its charm. Carter can describe a big, scary monster in some big, scary place and it's compelling stuff, even if the style probably differs from the kind of stripped-down prose many modern readers are used to.
But the problem is that it hits the notes, the trappings and the tropes—evil wizards, swooning princesses, scary beasts getting in fights with scarier beasts—but none of the spirit. It's as if Carter knows that we know that Conan is cool, and relies really heavily on that to make his own book cool, rather than having his protagonist actually accomplish cool things. Without spoiling too much, the novel's climax basically ends with a lot of people telling Thongor how great he is, even though most of his victories happen from chance or simply because he is physically robust—something that the text itself can't shut up about.
As a genre writer who loves some very, very trope-y stuff, I think I lucked out by reading these books almost back-to-back. Ward is aware of how much the reader knows and expects of the horror genre, and the YA girls' school adventure genre…but she still delivers on those tropes with a degree of patience, even as she turns many of those tropes on their head. Carter's Thongor relies too much on the audience's desire for something Conan-esque, and in doing so puts too much labor on the reader; it's a chore, basically, because Carter doesn't do the work himself to show us his hero's cunning, courage, and ability. He knows that we have seen Conan be cunning, courageous, and able…and so he kind of quits mid-way through his own story.
As writers, we want to be judicious. On the one hand, like Elmore Leonard said, we want to leave out the parts that readers skip over…and that might mean the overly familiar. On the other hand, we don't want to rely on our readers being game to follow along stories that shrug their shoulders and say, "You know how this goes, right?"
