Bryan Camp’s new novel Gather the Fortunes is the latest in his Crescent City sequence of dark urban fantasy tales set in New Orleans, and in this short piece to mark its publication by Titan, he looks at the tricky subject of what defines the good and the bad guys…

 

We know it’s not true, not in the real world anyway. Two clicks, three at most, and you’ll have evidence that the bad guys win, win often, win big. Corporate greed pays off, authoritarian political figures win elections, climate change deniers obfuscate science, and the refs screw the Saints out of a Super Bowl. And yet, when we pick up a work of fiction, especially fantasy fiction, we want this cliché to be true. Call it escapism, call it simple yearning for a better world, but outside of the rare exceptions that prove the rule, the majority of fiction concludes with some sort of victory, however pyrrhic, for the protagonist. I’m reminded of Neil Gaiman’s eloquent misquoting of G.K. Chesterton, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” As a writer, this aspect of fiction is a thing I’m always aware of. Often, that’s the heart of the thing that you’re writing. “How does this person triumph? How can this evil be beaten? Why, in short, should we hang on to hope?”

When I was in the very early stages of drafting Gather The Fortunes, though, it was at the tail end of 2016. The U.S. election, well, you know what happened. Hope wasn’t exactly thick on the ground. I knew that I wanted to focus the narrative on destruction deities, in the same way that my first Crescent City novel had focused on tricksters. Since I was making one of my favorite characters from that first book the main character of the next one, I also knew that my protagonist was a pscyhopomp (the guides who leads the dead into the Underworld). I even knew that I wanted this book to be a missing person mystery, in the same way that my first book had been a murder mystery. I had just about all the main ingredients, but something very important was missing. I was finding it very, very difficult to conjure up an antagonist. My instinct was to find the sort of villain that I loved seeing in fiction. The charismatic and compelling sort, the one who might be a hero if they’d only managed to avoid that sharp left turn into nefariousness. But with every day giving us another indication that we were, in fact, in the darkest timeline, it felt facile, myopic, even dishonest, to create any sort of antagonist who could be finally and resolutely defeated.

For a brief, ugly time, I considered letting the despair of the moment have its way. If the bad guys win in life, then maybe that should be reflected in my fiction. Maybe I was struggling to define my antagonist because what the narrative really needed was an inversion, not an almost-hero but an absolutely despicable villain who would triumph in the end. Like if the Marvel movies let Thanos win in Infinity War and then never made Endgame. It would be a twist of genre conventions if nothing else, and it might even provide some sort of catharsis to hold up a mirror to how I felt. Eventually, though, I realized that letting the bad guys win in a fictional world where I was in total control was just a different kind of wrong. It felt too much like giving up. Fiction, I told myself, especially fantasy, ought to be true and unflinching, but that didn’t mean abandoning hope. I needed to find a balance between squeezing my eyes shut and pretending that the real world didn’t have unsolvable problems and wallowing in my own feelings of defeat.

The solution, I discovered, was to confront the problem head-on. I tried to come up with every sort of antagonistic force that, to my admittedly cynical mind, would never be truly beaten. All the -isms, of course, fascism and racism and sexism and their ilk. Greed, the bottomless kind that devours everything. Selfishness, the sociopathic kind that builds border walls and for-profit-prisons and sweatshops. Rage, the kind that is really just fear set aflame. Hatred, in short. I made my antagonist hatred itself. And since I’m a fantasy writer, I didn’t have to be metaphorical about it. I gave hatred a face and a name, and suddenly, I had a bad guy. Someone for my protagonist to strive against, someone she couldn’t beat, because no matter what World War II documentaries or old school epic fantasies or televangelists tell you, hatred just can’t be beaten.

In doing so, I learned something important. Something that I think is useful in these times of ours.

The good guys aren’t the ones who always win. They’re the ones who stand up to the bad guys, in whatever form they take, knowing that they can’t.

 

Gather the Fortunes is available now from Titan Books; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk