I wonder what literary historians will make of the fiction of our times?
Dark times often produce light stories. After World War I, for instance, British crime fiction took a cozy turn. In contrast, economic prosperity can bring us tales grimly pessimistic. The year 1949 produced the novel 1984. The year 2008 gave us The Hunger Games. The economy crashed that year, true, but the novel must have been written earlier when high-risk mortgages and credit default swaps were like candy.
Currently, our economy has been on a path of tepid, unequal recovery for ten years—nothing to brag about but not wholly bad either—so you might expect that such a time would produce a literature of mild discontent. Nope. Our era has produced more unabashedly dark fiction than probably any other era in literary history.
Why now? I’ll leave the question to academics to answer, but dark fiction generally involves an element both puzzling and important for writers to understand: dark protagonists. Nasty, menacing and murderous protagonists are wildly popular. Go figure. Is it exciting for readers to vicariously enjoy being amoral?
Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) is the story of Edward Glyver, a Victorian booklover, scholar and murderer. His first killing is of a randomly chosen stranger, a murder for which feels no remorse—but for which he has a reason:
Now I knew that I could do it; but it gave me no pleasure. The poor fellow had done me no harm. Luck had simply been against him—together with the colour of his hair, which, I now say, had been his fatal distinction. His way that night, inauspiciously coinciding with mine in Threadneedle-street, had made him the unwitting object of my irrevocable intention to kill someone; but had it not been him, it must have been someone else.
Until the very moment in which the blow had been struck, I had not known definitively that I was capable of such a terrible act, and it was absolutely necessary to put the matter beyond all doubt. For the dispatching of the red-haired man was in the nature of a trial, or experiment, to prove to myself that I could indeed take another human life, and escape the consequences. When I next raised my hand in anger, it must be with the same swift and sure determination; but this time it would be directed, not at a stranger, but at the man I call my enemy.
And I must not fail.
Let’s think about that confessional passage. Glyver claims no remorse, and yet he describes the murder as “a terrible act”. He has no pleasure in it, sounding almost indifferent, and yet he calls his victim “the poor fellow”. Do you get the feeling that Glyver’s sentiments and words are at odds with what he’s done? They are.
Thus, we can discern the most fundamental trick of putting over a really terrible person: The dark protagonist who purports to have no conscience actually has one. Furthermore a “bad” protagonist, if palatable, is necessarily and somehow and in some way, to some degree, good.
Fantasy fiction has recently spawned a new sub-genre which doesn’t yet have a label, that I know of, but which we might call Foul-Mouthed Fantasy. It involves a band of burned-out, possibly old, certainly cynical warriors or mercenaries of legendary stature who are called again—wearily and unwillingly—to action.
One such novel is Nicholas Eames’s Kings of the Wyld (2017), the story of ex-mercenary Clay Cooper, whose scattered former bandmates have grown old or fat or drunk or all three. Naturally enough, one returns to beg for Cooper’s help. As the novel opens, Cooper’s credentials are established in a tavern scene and he then wanders into the night:
He remembered how small the night sky used to make him feel. How insignificant. And so he’d gone and made a big deal of himself, figuring someday he might look up at the vast sprawl of stars and feel undaunted by its splendor. It hadn’t worked. After a while Clay tore his eyes from the darkening sky and struck out down the road toward home.
He exchanged pleasantries with the Watchmen at the west gate. Had he heard about the centaur spotted over by the Tassel’s farm? they wondered. How about the battle out west, and those poor bastards holed up in Castia? Rotten, rotten business.
Clay followed the track, careful to keep from turning an ankle in a rut. Crickets were chirping in the tall grass to either side, the wind in the trees above him sighing like the ocean surf. He stopped by the roadside shrine to the Summer Lord and threw a dull copper at the statue’s feet. After a few steps and a moment’s hesitation he went back and tossed another. Away from town it was darker still, and Clay resisted the urge to look up again.
Best keep your eyes on the ground, he told himself, and leave the past where it belongs. You’ve got what you’ve got, Cooper, and it’s just what you wanted, right? A kid, a wife, a simple life. It was an honest living. It was comfortable.
Not such a bad guy, that Clay Cooper. Admires the stars in the night sky. Is humble or superstitious enough to toss coins at a god’s statue. Got a wife and a kid. Just a regular dude. Well, of course he’s not. He’s a warrior, however much he may be in denial at the moment, but before we meet the rowdy leader that he truly is, Nicholas Eames makes sure that we know that Clay Cooper is a decent bloke at heart.
Another Foul-Mouthed Fantasy is Jonathan French’s The Grey Bastards (2015), about a half-orc, boar-riding war band. Their leader, Claymaster, is up to something. His company is never orderly. The fighting is bloody and the magic weird. The crew themselves are not exactly mannerly. Early on they mix it up in a brothel with human soldiers, whose captain insults them and tries to order them about:
“You will keep a civil tongue,” Cavalero Garcia told him. “Speak with such impudence again and I shall have you horsewhipped in the name of the king.”
Jackal looked directly at Bermudo and found nervousness infecting his face. But there was also a look of creeping satisfaction.
“King?” Jackal said, sucking the last film of blood from his teeth. “Oats? Do you know the name of the king?”
“Such-and-Such the First,” Oats replied.
Jackal shook his head. “No, he died. It’s So-and-So the Fat.”
Oats gave him a dubious squint. “That don’t sound right.”
“Wretched soot-skins!” Garcia exclaimed.
Jackal ignored him, throwing his arms wide in a mock flummox. “The name escapes us. Anyway, he’s some inbred, overstuffed sack of shit that weds his cousins, fucks his sisters, and has small boys attach leeches to his tiny, tiny prick.”
How can you not love Jackal? He’s earthy and crude but at least more honest than the stuffed-shirt captain. Wretched soot-skins? I mean, who talks like that? Dicks, that’s who. Jackal is in no position to provoke him, but he does and we’re rooting for him all the way. His low wit is lovable. Thus, we can see another main principle underlying lousy protagonists: They are clearly better than the stinking, stuffy, stuck-up hypocrites around them.
The dark protagonist of Caroline Kepnes’s You (2014) is not only a creepy stalker but gleeful in his narcissistic judgment of others. He works in a bookstore. One day a smart and pretty graduate writing student enters and becomes his obsession. She wanders into the fiction aisle marked F—K (get it?) and his delight knows no bounds. Nevertheless, he still has customers to deal with and his contempt is dripping:
F—K yes, I found her.
Calm down, Joe. They don’t like it when a guy comes on too strong, I remind myself. Thank God for a customer and it’s hard to scan his predictable Salinger—then again, it’s always hard to do that. This guy is, what, thirty-six and he’s only now reading Franny and Zooey? And let’s get real. He’s not reading it. It’s just a front for the Dan Browns in the bottom of his basket. Work in a bookstore and learn that most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are. I bag the Dan Brown like its kiddie porn and tell him Franny and Zooey is the shit and he nods and you’re still in F—K because I can see your beige sweater through the stacks, barely. If you reach any higher, I’ll see your belly. But you won’t. You grab a book and sit down in the aisle like the Natalie Portman movie Where the Heart Is, adapted faithlessly from the Billie Letts book—above par for that kind of crud—and I’ll find you in the middle of the night. Only you won’t be pregnant and I won’t be the meek man in the movie. I’ll lean over and say, “Excuse me, miss, but we’re closed” and you’ll look up and smile. “Well, I’m not closed.” A breath. “I’m wide open, Buddy.”
Gross. Me. Out. And yet we enjoy Joe Goldberg. He is unashamedly judgmental, not least about pretentious readers and literary trash. Heh-heh. What vicarious fun! As Joe infiltrates Guinevere Becks’s life, eventually becoming her boyfriend, we almost hope he will ultimately succeed and be happy. In a way, we hope he will change, or at least that his fortunes will.
It is not to be, of course. Joe cannot change nor does Beck, as she’s known, prove finally to live up to his fantasies. Is she worse than him? Does she deserve her fate? Kepnes’s novel is a cautionary tale so, no, not really nor is Joe ultimately redeemed. That said, we spend an entire novel glued to his POV, in equal parts entertained, horrified—and, let’s be honest—liking him more than we should.
What about dark protagonists who are cryptic or secretive? Suppose that your narrative strategy is not to reveal too much about your protagonist, or at least not right away, as with Jack Reacher or Nicholas Easter, who is the mysterious juror in John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury?
The gunslinger protagonist of Stephen King’s Dark Tower (1982-2004) series, Roland, is at first introduced with a certain narrative distance. As we meet him walking across a desert trailing the “man in black”, King tells us more about who Roland is not than who he is:
He passed the miles stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A hide waterbag was slung around his middle like a bloated sausage. It was almost full. He had progressed through the khef over many years, and had reached perhaps the fifth level. Had he been a Manni holy man, he might not have even been thirsty; he could have watched his own body dehydrate with clinical, detached attention, watering its crevices and dark inner hollows only when his logic told him it must be done. He was not a Manni, however, nor a follower of the Man Jesus, and considered himself in no way holy. He was just an ordinary pilgrim, in other words, and all he could say with real certainty was that he was thirsty.
King’s intention is to create a sense of mystery around Roland, a certain menace. How many dangerous gunslingers, though, have been followers of some mystic discipline? Do you get the feeling that King’s gunslinger is not only strong and hardy but also thoughtful? King may seem to be telling us little, overtly, but his hints let us know that his protagonist is more than just dangerous, he’s a man to reckon with on many levels.
When they work, dark protagonists are, if not good, then at least adherents to a code. They are reflective, observant, level, frank and upfront. They might seem to sink below the rest of us, but in spirit they rise above. They may not always tell us everything—becoming “unreliable”—but they nevertheless speak truth. They are candid about themselves. Bad they may be, but they are at least better than the shallow, corrupt humanity around them.
The darkness of dark protagonists is deceptive. Loathsome behavior masks an underlying heart. Dark protagonists may appear vile but we quickly clue in that they are actually clear-eyed, forthright and honest…which is more than can be said about some of the public figures in our real world who are supposed to be our heroes, wouldn’t you say?
Is your MC a dark protagonist? What not-so-hidden good do you show even as you paint this protagonist as bad?
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About Donald Maass
Donald Maass (he/him) is president of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He has written several highly acclaimed craft books for novelists including The Breakout Novelist, The Fire in Fiction, Writing the Breakout Novel and The Career Novelist.
Hi Don
My MC spent decades preparing for a revenge that they use on the wrong person. In confessing the truth about this they expose a flaw in the justice system and with it millions of wrongful convictions. It makes them a hero to some and a major threat to others.
That may qualify them as dark.
Thanks for the post.
I am thinking my MC’s husband, who once played a loving role in their marriage and is now forcing her to move from a place she loves, has a dark underbelly— necessary to the coming evil that befalls their family, but also necessary to help break through the tangled dark of my MC’s past. All done to reveal the story.
Bad husbands. Never heard of that. Ha! Seriously, that character type is pervasive in contemporary fiction, which ought to make us think.
Sounds like there’s even more under the surface in your story, as well. Intriguing.
Millions of wrongful convictions? Oh, come on. No way. You expect me to buy into a premise like that, or that someone gets caught up in a corrupt system and, deceived, winds up doing grievous harm?
Never. Not in our real world. Can’t think of a single example.
Hey Don – In regard to fantasy’s new “foul-mouth” sub-genre, only one character’s name needs to be mentioned to bring even non-fantasy readers to an understanding the genre: Sandor F through K-ing Clegane.
People talk about the phenomenon of Jaime Lannister’s transformation from loathsome and incestuous king-slayer (and would-be Stark-slayer) to redeemable human being. But for me, that’s nothing. It took Brienne of Tarth to facilitate it. For the Hound, there’s no such crutch. (With the exception of his turning on Joffrey, I suppose). He remains a foul-mouthed horror-show, and yet, even while he’s holding Arya captive, we sense he’s somehow a guardian presence, and even a mentor of sorts. There’s such a self-awareness, and – you’re right – a deep thoughtfulness behind his scarred facade. For me he remains *the* epitome of the world-weary warrior, nihilist/non-nihilist in a genre crowded with imitators.
Is it me, or do you think that there is a growing reader-weariness with the world weary warrior? I find that I can still “go there,” but I’ve set aside a few in the past few years, too. I think I have a tougher time being asked to find the redeemable in a “outwardly horrible” lone protagonist. Though I wonder if a female version might work better for me (Abercrombie’s Monza Murcatto, from Best Served Cold springs to mind)?
Still, I think it works better when the type is a part of a larger cast. Maybe it’s just me, since there seems to be no F through K-ing end in sight to them as primary protagonists.
Thanks for the insight into making the type work. Though I don’t see myself ever trying for that sort of lone protagonist, I could die a happy fantasist if I landed a character even half as hilarious/appalling, hateful/lovable, and ultimately provoking as George created in the Hound.
You are a close reader of Game of Thrones! George’s series is stuffed with bad characters who show a good side, ask me. I think that in part explains why we keep reading about his miserable, power-hungry, game-playing world.
Are we growing weary of dark protagonists? Perhaps, but neither do we any longer believe in pure-hearted heroes.
What I found interesting in the excerpts you gave us was how the authors borrowed from movies. There are two that were obvious to me.
In ‘Kings of the Wyld’ the reference to “Tassels farm” conjures up an image of the van Tassels in Sleepy Hollow. In ‘The Grey Bastards’, the line “the name escapes us” along with the action, is straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean. Works too. One sets the tone and the other still makes me laugh.
Nice catch of cross-references, and I think there’s one more…though the name escapes me.
Seriously, though, you raise an interesting topic. Do easy tropes and cozy-familiar references cheapen fiction, or do they make it welcoming for readers–especially when a story is cloaked in darkness.
A related point, which I didn’t cover here, is that dark protagonists also become palatable when they demonstrate a sense of humor.
I hadn’t heard of Foul Mouthed Fantasy before, but I like the concept behind The Grey Bastards, so I might have to pick that one up!
I love a dark protagonist, but I tend to steer away from dark stories right now. It’s a gem of a story when the dark protagonist saves the day. Maybe it speaks to the redemption available to all of us, if we make the good and right choices.
One of my favorites dark characters (not protagonist…yet) is Loki, the Marvel movie versions, and my favorite Thor movie is The Dark World because I think it does exactly what you’re saying in the post – shows that Loki has feelings and does really care about things. Potentially that’s why Loki kind of stole the show from Thor for a while.
Vaughn (above) also expressed some weariness with this trend toward dark stories and protagonists. We’re ready for some hope, I suspect, but where will we find it? Is there a good protagonist we can actually believe in?
“Is there a good protagonist we can actually believe in?”
Next question: Are any WU habitués up to that challenge?
Surely someone will bite.
Thought-provoking stuff, Donald – thanks! I remember you warning us at one of your workshops to be careful about creating a protagonist who was so deeply flawed that he or she was basically a hot mess whom we’d want to avoid in real life. But I think you’ve found an appealing factor in each of your examples, that would compel us to keep turning the page.
A couple of other factors that can help are the appeal of extreme competence – your mercenary character sounds like a force to be reckoned with, even if he’s seen better days. I think there’s also an appeal to the character who’s willing to say or do the sort of things most of us would only fantasize about. John Kennedy Toole’s self-absorbed Ignatius in “Confederacy of Dunces” is in many ways an appalling human being, but you have to grudgingly admire how completely unapologetic and honest he is in embracing his appallingness (which might or might not be a word).
A more extreme example is Hannibal Lecter. He not only kills his victims; he freaking eats them. BUT – he only kills people who are rude. Gotta admit, there’s a certain charm to that philosophy…
Good stuff, and a helpful nudge during what for many of us are dark times indeed. Thanks again.
Ignatius and Lechter are extreme examples of awful characters who nevertheless win us over with honesty about themselves. I’d add Humbert Humbert to that crew.
Hello, Good Sir:
I wrote an article for the magazine BRIGHT IDEAS titled “From Odysseus to Walter White: The Antihero’s Journey.” It used to be available online but a Google search just now failed to come up with anything except a cite of the article in the Introduction to a book of essays titled PHILOSOPHY AND BREAKING BAD.
I’ve included an expanded version of the article as a chapter in my upcoming book, THE COMPASS OF CHARACTER. We’ll see if it survives.
My premise: anitiheroes (or what you call dark heroes here) tend to appear in literature when a culture is in a state of decline, and the “moral certainties” the culture used to defend itself are increasingly revealed as threadbare.
This is by no means a universal rule, but it’s interesting to note that the appearance of Odysseus marked the transition from the warrior ethos of Achilles to the more clever, cerebral–and deceitful, immoral–ethos that would become the Sophist tradition.
The picaresque novel became wildly popular as the Hapsburg Empire was crumbling. English writers embraced the picaresque hero during the troubled 17th century and discarded it as the empire reinvigorated itself during Industrial Revolution of the 18th.
By the end of that century and the beginning of the next, when the Gilded Age rewarded robber barons and fought to crush the burgeoning union movement, American Naturalists such as Crane, London, Norris, Wharton, and Dreiser were denouncing the bourgeois Realism of James and Howell, which stayed silent on the gross financial inequities of the era, to embrace the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless.
Film noir flourished after WWII because there was an almost Freudian acceptance that the darkness had not been dispelled by victory–McCarthyism being a prime example of what still lingered in the zeitgeist.
Neo-noir films flourished during and after the Vietnam War as an antidote to the phony patriotism being used to justify that conflict and Nixonian corruption.
Dennis Lehane noted that you saw a resurgence of noir in the 1990s because, though the Clinton economy looked great on paper, the supposed prosperity wasn’t reaching the south Boston neighborhoods he knew so well, or many other blue collar enclaves.
I think that trend has continued precisely because there is a prevailing sense that we are in a second Gilded Age, to the detriment of the common man, and in defiance of American egalitarianism. But the brand of populism that has arisen as a result has a decidely vicious, defensive, hateful, bigoted undercurrent that has many people talking about a new civil war, violence in the streets if this happens or if that doesn’t happen, etc.
You want a good reason to understand why literature has turned dark, read HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE (great book, terrifying book).
Again, the principles that seem to have guided us are increasingly seen as hypocritical, corrupted, or not “up to the task” of solving the problems we face. Either we will descend further into demagogic despotism or somehow renew our republic. Till then, this is a scary time of profound uncertainty, and our heroes reflect that
And yet, in a marvelous interview Brendan Gleeson gave in conjunction with his appearance in the 2014 film CALVARY, where he plays a priest who is nobody’s fool but is still a fundamentally good and decent man, he wondered if the antihero had not become a bit of a cliché. Maybe it was time to rethink what it meant to be a good man in a troubled world where people are truly hurting and lost.
Finally, in a piece I wrote for Writer’s Digest titled “No More Mr Nice Guys,” which you CAN find online, and in which I repeat some of my thoughts about the antihero, I also discuss a number of techniques writers can use to make even a reprehensible character compelling. You address several of them above.
One I will cite here: “Give him a kid or a dog.” By this I mean give the character someone to care about other than himself. We care about those who care about others. It is almost magical how redeeming this can be for even the most seemngly irredeemable character. It speaks to the power of contradiction, which creates its own variety of suspense: which side of the character, noble or villanous, will reveal itself in this scene, the next scene, etc.
Great stuff. We really do need to share that beer.
Is the anti-hero/dark protagonist a cliché? Your wonderful quick summary on the relationship between economic history and fiction–love it, please go on!–suggests to me that the anti-hero will always be with us because economic swings and income disparity will always be with us too.
That said, I wonder where we in both history and literature are going next? (Hopefully not further down the path described in How Democracies Die, a thoroughly chilling work.)
Yes to the beer. Will you be at Un-Con in November?
I will be at both Thrillerfest and UnCon. Two opportunities for beer.
And it’s not so much economics and cultural decay and hypocrisy that seem to evoke the antihero as a preferred type. The culture’s averred virtues are shown to be something the powerful expect the powerless and no one else to observe.
“The culture’s averred virtues are shown to be something the powerful expect the powerless and no one else to observe.”
That.
We’re on for beer–twice!
Don, immediately on reading Edward Glyver’s reflections on his killing of the red-headed stranger I thought of Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, where the narrator insists he had no animosity toward the old man, indeed even loved him, but killed him because of his clouded eye.
Red-haired, cloudy-eyed fellows, lock your doors—you make people dreadfully nervous. The language of Cox’s passage even reminds me of Poe’s in Tell-Tale in its Gothic qualities, though I didn’t go back to the original to compare.
I don’t think I’ve dug deep into the Foul-Mouth Fantasy genre, though your rendering of it put me in mind of the protagonist of the Charles Portis novel, Gringos, a grumpy, cynical old dude living on the edge of his days as an expatriate in the Yucatan. He is called wearily into action as well, though there’s a comic element in the call, which is part of his redemption.
Thanks for guiding us into the foulness, but providing galoshes.
Readers won’t necessarily wade through any muck. They need a reason to do so. In the case of dark protagonists, it’s the hints of good in them, as I’ve said, which provides that reason.
Hi Donald,
I liked your list and the way you think about these dark protagonists as part of the time we live in. How come you haven’t included any female/non-male charcters on your list?
There are some, though not as many, dark women that people root for. A great example is Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black. Just a thought.
Best,
Mari
Well, fill us in Mari! Who would be on your list?
For me, Lindsey Faye’s titular main character Jane Steele comes to mind. Lisbeth Salander. Arya Stark. Olive Kitteridge. For starters.
Don, Glyver’s thoughts on his killing of the red-headed stranger reminded me of Crime & Punishment. I love the use of inner dialog to show fear, guilt and shame in my dark protagonist. My MC’s fatal flaw is his desire and obsession to be revered for his adept skill at healing. My short-hand for it is using the “dark side of the force”. We see in our current culture a great many healers, gurus, spiritual tourism and teachers are too often dark cult-like figures, manipulating and controlling their followers.
Yes, agreed. So many of those, plus tech gurus promising to solve the world’s problems with apps, self-help gurus promising to give you instant empowerment, politicians promising to save America with one simple idea.
Why do we fall for this stuff? Who are the followers? Why do we put our faith in charismatic charlatans rather than in ourselves? I am mystified.
I dare you to read “The Huntress” by Kate Quinn and not fall in love with Nina! She’s one of these!
Don’t have to dare me. Looks worth a read.
This is a great subject! Being inside the head of a serial killer and sympathizing with this very flawed, damaged, and yet likable character made YOU one of my favorite books of last year. The scene in the ferry, OMG! As Joe learned more about Beck, I doubted her character more than his…for a while.
I had heard the same thing about entertainment and wonder what will be popular a few years from now… Either way, my fingers are crossed for more dark fiction in the future!