A review by sisteray
Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein
3.0
CW: Racism and Sexual Assault
So, I guess I should just jump into talking about the biggest elephant in the room: the racism.
First, I totally get writing all sorts of characters. I don't think that an author should be limited to only writing about good people, or avoid writing characters that think or act a certain way. I also totally get that authors are conditioned by the times that they live in. Again, I also get how an author might want to emulate a style or form overriding the consideration of a segment of their audience. BUT, I feel like these can be used as excuses to facilitate an author's biases, even if they are self-aware or even self deprecating.
In two of the four stories we get two main characters who are pretty racist. In horror, I'm used to seeing someone cast in a negative light so that you don't mind when they get offed. But that's not what's going on here.
In a lot of ways T.E.D. Klein is laying the groundwork for a lot of contemporary horror stories where they are more personal mundane storytelling with the occasional monster or impending doom to apply pressure. I would say he's a vanguard in the change of form. When you compare him to someone writing weird tales like Robert Bloch where you get a touch of character, you get supernatural conflict and then a twist or reveal at the end, the point is the supernatural. With Klein he's really character focused, and the mysteries kind of reveal themselves in the background. Honestly, he's a very compelling storyteller because he lets you live in the space of the characters for a while, he throws in a little mystery, and then whammo. This is something that I feel Laird Barron, Jon Lanagan, and Nathan Ballingrud adopted from Klein to their benefit.
Because of that when you have characters that are racist, you live in their head and you feel what they think. But, what's important is to create a distinction between the internal world and the reality of the world that the author is creating. I feel like Ballingrud pulled it off in North American Lake Monsters: Stories with his neo-nazi failed recruitment story. But Klein regularly fails for me because in addition to character's language and actions, he is also injecting racism into the stories himself as an author.
One story about a racist author (Black Man With a Horn) has him throwing out Asian slurs, but then also has a scene focused around the Asian spilling Chinese duck sauce on a plane, as if Asians just carry duck sauce around (and the person in question was Indonesian, yet they had Chinese Food for some reason). There is a scene where for no great reason a Black guy on a plane started yowling and it was presented like some vaudevillian routine where he'd dropped a cigarette on his lap and the whole thing took a weird left turn for yucks. The story called for a distraction to delay the narration, but the author chose to use a historically racist approach. So when the story starts with Asian and Black stereotyping when it gets into the horror of the story by exoticising a culture and a people it put me in a place where I was feeling uncomfortable with having a mysterious generically evil boogeyman monster that was just a black native whose lips were so big that they made a horn who has no motivation other than to break into people's homes and kill them.
Some stuff was also so ambiguous, that if there was no foundation for weird othering of cultures that maybe you'd think he wasn't saying a mysterious Asian character was a pedophile, but who knows after all the other stuff that was said prior.
The lead story (Children of the Kingdom) focuses on a character terrified of Black people, and as an upper middle class guy in Manhattan he's forced to interact with the melting pot. And while the story is told from his perspective, outside of the persistent descriptions of squalor attributed to Black people, the "lazy" black security guard, and Black people being the only guilty party vandalizing/ rioting in NY it felt like the author was injecting his own bias into the story. I felt like the story was supposed to be cathartic for him where he is confronting his own racism and working through it, acknowledging the flaws in the way that he is thinking, but still thinking and living it.
The big problem for me is that everyone paints Black people as being the issue, and that the twist is that there are white monsters running around raping women. But the author is issuing a point counterpoint saying while it looks like Black people are the monsters of this story, the real monsters are these imaginary things. What he does is just paint Black people in a terrible light trying to use his perception of reality. Presenting imaginary monsters as a counterpoint doesn't work for me because, well, they aren't real. So the take away from the story might be there are worse things than Black people, but we haven't found it in the real world yet.
Both of these stories rely heavily on a Lovecraftian pastiche, but of all things to emulate why prop up the racism? The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle takes all the worst elements of the racism of Lovecraft's Horror at Red Hook and turns it on its ear beautifully. If an author isn't going to tackle it full on it's going to just sound like Joe Rogan justifying why he can say the "N" word over and over again.
I think Children of the Kingdom also suffered a bit because it opens with what I'm assuming is a rape quip buried in with the opening author quotes, and then kind of sexually fridges one of the characters. As a side note I thought the ending was kind of lame and didn't make any sense in the context of the story.
That said I really liked two of the stories quite a bit. Strangely, they are the two stories that aren't usually lauded in the collection: Petey and Nadelman's God. I thought they were finely crafted cosmic horror stories.
Contrary to that, Petey really struck me, I thought it was a perfect little tale. I loved how it developed and revealed itself as people milled around each other. It was like one of those plays where all the actors are interacting with each other in a house and audience members can move from room to room to see what's going on with all the different characters.
Nadelman's God was kind of absurd, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Again there was some weird minor incidental racism in it with the weird fetishizing of a "negress". But nothing like the other ones. It had a great pace and sense of mystery.
Is this collection important? I think so. Is the writing great? Yes. But on whole, I have to put a big fat asterisk by any recommendation I'd give.
So, I guess I should just jump into talking about the biggest elephant in the room: the racism.
First, I totally get writing all sorts of characters. I don't think that an author should be limited to only writing about good people, or avoid writing characters that think or act a certain way. I also totally get that authors are conditioned by the times that they live in. Again, I also get how an author might want to emulate a style or form overriding the consideration of a segment of their audience. BUT, I feel like these can be used as excuses to facilitate an author's biases, even if they are self-aware or even self deprecating.
In two of the four stories we get two main characters who are pretty racist. In horror, I'm used to seeing someone cast in a negative light so that you don't mind when they get offed. But that's not what's going on here.
In a lot of ways T.E.D. Klein is laying the groundwork for a lot of contemporary horror stories where they are more personal mundane storytelling with the occasional monster or impending doom to apply pressure. I would say he's a vanguard in the change of form. When you compare him to someone writing weird tales like Robert Bloch where you get a touch of character, you get supernatural conflict and then a twist or reveal at the end, the point is the supernatural. With Klein he's really character focused, and the mysteries kind of reveal themselves in the background. Honestly, he's a very compelling storyteller because he lets you live in the space of the characters for a while, he throws in a little mystery, and then whammo. This is something that I feel Laird Barron, Jon Lanagan, and Nathan Ballingrud adopted from Klein to their benefit.
Because of that when you have characters that are racist, you live in their head and you feel what they think. But, what's important is to create a distinction between the internal world and the reality of the world that the author is creating. I feel like Ballingrud pulled it off in North American Lake Monsters: Stories with his neo-nazi failed recruitment story. But Klein regularly fails for me because in addition to character's language and actions, he is also injecting racism into the stories himself as an author.
One story about a racist author (Black Man With a Horn) has him throwing out Asian slurs, but then also has a scene focused around the Asian spilling Chinese duck sauce on a plane, as if Asians just carry duck sauce around (and the person in question was Indonesian, yet they had Chinese Food for some reason). There is a scene where for no great reason a Black guy on a plane started yowling and it was presented like some vaudevillian routine where he'd dropped a cigarette on his lap and the whole thing took a weird left turn for yucks. The story called for a distraction to delay the narration, but the author chose to use a historically racist approach. So when the story starts with Asian and Black stereotyping when it gets into the horror of the story by exoticising a culture and a people it put me in a place where I was feeling uncomfortable with having a mysterious generically evil boogeyman monster that was just a black native whose lips were so big that they made a horn who has no motivation other than to break into people's homes and kill them.
Some stuff was also so ambiguous, that if there was no foundation for weird othering of cultures that maybe you'd think he wasn't saying a mysterious Asian character was a pedophile, but who knows after all the other stuff that was said prior.
The lead story (Children of the Kingdom) focuses on a character terrified of Black people, and as an upper middle class guy in Manhattan he's forced to interact with the melting pot. And while the story is told from his perspective, outside of the persistent descriptions of squalor attributed to Black people, the "lazy" black security guard, and Black people being the only guilty party vandalizing/ rioting in NY it felt like the author was injecting his own bias into the story. I felt like the story was supposed to be cathartic for him where he is confronting his own racism and working through it, acknowledging the flaws in the way that he is thinking, but still thinking and living it.
The big problem for me is that everyone paints Black people as being the issue, and that the twist is that there are white monsters running around raping women. But the author is issuing a point counterpoint saying while it looks like Black people are the monsters of this story, the real monsters are these imaginary things. What he does is just paint Black people in a terrible light trying to use his perception of reality. Presenting imaginary monsters as a counterpoint doesn't work for me because, well, they aren't real. So the take away from the story might be there are worse things than Black people, but we haven't found it in the real world yet.
Both of these stories rely heavily on a Lovecraftian pastiche, but of all things to emulate why prop up the racism? The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle takes all the worst elements of the racism of Lovecraft's Horror at Red Hook and turns it on its ear beautifully. If an author isn't going to tackle it full on it's going to just sound like Joe Rogan justifying why he can say the "N" word over and over again.
I think Children of the Kingdom also suffered a bit because it opens with what I'm assuming is a rape quip buried in with the opening author quotes, and then kind of sexually fridges one of the characters. As a side note I thought the ending was kind of lame and didn't make any sense in the context of the story.
That said I really liked two of the stories quite a bit. Strangely, they are the two stories that aren't usually lauded in the collection: Petey and Nadelman's God. I thought they were finely crafted cosmic horror stories.
Contrary to that, Petey really struck me, I thought it was a perfect little tale. I loved how it developed and revealed itself as people milled around each other. It was like one of those plays where all the actors are interacting with each other in a house and audience members can move from room to room to see what's going on with all the different characters.
Nadelman's God was kind of absurd, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Again there was some weird minor incidental racism in it with the weird fetishizing of a "negress". But nothing like the other ones. It had a great pace and sense of mystery.
Is this collection important? I think so. Is the writing great? Yes. But on whole, I have to put a big fat asterisk by any recommendation I'd give.