Understanding Magic

A couple of years ago, I read a book that went something like this:

Villain creates a doppelganger of a girl.  In order to survive, the doppelganger must devour the girl’s possessions: this restores the doppelganger’s power and likeness.  The villain tells the doppelganger that in order to live a full life, the doppelganger must devour the girl.  Instead, the doppelganger teams up with someone who has a convenient magical watch who can extend her life.  It works, the villain has a Disney death, the end.

I was appalled by this solution.  In addition to being unsatisfying and full of plot holes, I said to myself: This author doesn’t understand magic!

Oh?  Then what should the solution have been?

The doppelganger should have eaten the villain!  We know she restores her power by eating, and the villain was the ultimate source of the magic that kept her going—and that would have satisfyingly defeated the villain in a way that made sense and wasn’t simply convenient.

Now, from a storytelling perspective, I stand by this.  But what a strange thing to think: “This author doesn’t understand magic!”  Understand magic?  Magic isn’t real!  Why am I treating it as a universal?

Contrast this to a book I just finished rereading for the first time in years: Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always.  I don’t usually do this, but while reading it, which approaching the climax, I thought: This author understands magic.

Again, what a peculiar thing to think!  Why do I feel that I (or anyone else) can understand magic in the same way I understand weather or seasons or food?  Magic isn’t real! 

And yet I do find that I have a very solid and stubborn understanding of what magic is and is not.  The rules change, but there the essence, the ultimate base underlying principal, does not:

Magic is a raw, wild thing, though it may sometimes seem tame.  It works by primeval laws.  The deeper and older the magic, the more this is true, and the more it demands blood and sacrifice—and not necessarily the kind you expect.

Where do I get this idea?  Because although my understanding is not uncommon, it’s also not universal.  Have I gotten it from the books I’ve consumed, especially those I consumed in my formative years?  The Narnia books have magic like this; so does Diana Wynne Jones.  So do so many other authors.  So do many of the books I had read to me when I was very small—Lawrence Yep’s Dragon Quartet, for example.  But I don’t get my idea of magic only from words of the past century; it’s much older than that:

This is the sort of magic one finds in fairytales.

I’m not just talking about the Brothers Grimm here.  As a child, as today, I love reading fairytales from around the world.  The details change, but underlying them, the rawness is there: it is there in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Romanian, Norwegian, and Celtic folklore—and a great many other places besides, whose stories I have read less recently.  It is in the folklore of countries divided by time and culture and distance, individually developing their own versions of vampires, ghosts, tricksters, and child-snatchers—of the monsters that live in the forest and in the lake and under the bed; of the things that only come out at night. 

Magic is the power of fear given manifestation—and stories are the manifestation of hope and the human spirit given to defeat that power (and, sometimes, to harness it; and it often allows itself to be harnessed, though deep in its heart, it never fully forgets that it was once a wild thing).

So now I have put into words, however clumsy, my understanding of magic.  No wonder I write so many monsters in my books.

Ruined by the Reveal

Within the past few months, I’ve read two books that struck me because they very dramatically failed in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason.  One was middle-grade fantasy horror; the other was adult survival horror.  Both books went like this:

First half: extremely creepy build up, 4.5/5 stars.  Couldn’t put it down.

Middle: reveal of the big bad and thorough explanation of what’s actually going on.

Second half: fight/escape the big bad.  2/5 stars.  I had trouble finishing.

I don’t read much adult horror, but I do love middle-grade (and sometimes juvenile and YA) horror.  So I started thinking about the books in that category that I love:  Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s Apprentice, Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror, Jonathan Stroud’s The Screaming Staircase—and even things like Roald Dahl’s The Witches and the film Alien.

So what do all these books (and movie) have in common?

There’s no big reveal.

Beyond that, they fall into two categories:

     1. The reader is never given any real explanation of our villain, though we are given clues (Coraline, Alien).  This is tense because it plays on our fear of the unknown.  We know the villain is scary, but not the limits of their power—which means we don’t know how to defeat them.

     2. The reader is told exactly what we’re facing beforehand (The Spook’s Apprentice, The Screaming Staircase, The Witches).  This is tense because we know how scary the villain is—and that they might unpredictably come at us and overpower us from any angle.

In film critique, jump scares are generally considered cheap scares that do more harm than good, because after the initial jolt of adrenaline, the watcher is released from tension.  Anything that interrupts a story or takes the reader out of the moment will undo the previous tension build and force the tension build to restart—and, often, make it harder to restart.

(Note here that I’m not talking about things like humor that is part of the story and makes sense with the characters.  In The Screaming Staircase, the protagonists are cracking jokes and bickering during the tensest part of the book—and their doing so only increases the tension.  The Screaming Staircase is both the funniest book on my list and the scariest.)

So let’s go back to the initial two books and take another look at how they ruined themselves.  One at a time:

In the adult book:

BUILD: our protagonists are trapped in a creepy cave with limited supplies and horrifying but mysterious things keep happening.

RUIN: Reveal: it’s aliens building Noah’s Ark!

MY REACTION: That is so stupid, I just can’t take this book seriously anymore.

In the MG book:

BUILD: our protagonists are trapped in a creepy house by creepy old women who claim to be their grandmothers, and they’re beginning to lose their minds.

RUIN: Reveal: actually, the grandmothers are only minions for a big boss.  After the generic boss is revealed, both the grandmothers and the house are no longer in the story.

MY REACTION: So . . . I’m supposed to care about generic bad guy in generic bad guy location?  No.  You should’ve kept the interesting villains—the story I invested in.

This goes back to something I discussed in my last post: bigger is not always better, and more dramatic is often merely melodramatic.  If the villains in the first book had been never explained creepy cave creatures, the book would’ve kept its tension and gotten scarier.  If the second book had kept its creepy grandmothers and house, likewise.  But revealing them as aliens/ a fear queen just squandered the build.

Ultimately, both books simply made me sad.  They could have been so good—they were at first—but they relegated themselves to 3 stars each for me, and will soon be buried in my Goodreads history, never to be picked up again.  But I am grateful to them, because they revealed to me what I need to do—or not do—if ever I write MG horror of my own.

UPDATE: I've been in a little discussion about what makes a good reveal, since they do exist.  And I would put it this way: a good reveal does NOT change the story (in both the negative examples above, the books felt like two unconnected halves); instead, it shifts the camera.  It solves the mystery.  It shifts perception, of the reader or protagonist or (often) both.  It shows the reader what the reader already had all the clues to put together, and gives an "ah ha!  Now I understand!" moment.  The Sixth Sense does this very well.  I'm told both The Ring and Session 9 do as well, but as I've not seen either one, I cannot comment on them.