"The Harlequin and The Hatchetmen," Returns To Me After a Decade

Every horror author out there has stories they remember fondly. Tales that dug into dark places inside of them, and which came out in a rush of shadows and blood. Some of us are lucky enough that those tales will make their way into print, and in front of the eyes of readers who will remember those stories for years to come, even if they forget the name of the anthology, or even the title.

While my story The Harlequin and The Hatchetmen made its way into an anthology of stories many years ago, it sadly never found much in the way of an audience. After 10 years out on the market, though, it has found its way back to me... the question now is what should I do with this dark little drama?

After all, it's been in the dark long enough.

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There Are Several Possibilities...

This story was one of my first horror shorts to be published. A gruesome, gangland splatterpunk story, it deals with a bunch of local enforcers finding the remains of one of their erstwhile colleagues outside a condemned movie theater known as the Bad Place. Despite the rumors and spook stories all about the things that go on in there, and the whispers about what might lurk in the musty shadows, the crew goes in with gats in hand to find out just what it is that killed their boss's favorite strongarm. That decision costs them, as they come face-to-face with the entity known only as the Harlequin.

While I still love this story, the collection it was part of never seemed to move all that many copies. I stopped bringing it to cons years ago, and now that it's gone out of print, my final (and only) royalty check for it was $1.35. So, it's safe to say that only a handful of people have ever seen this story.

But now that it's back in my hands, I'd like to put it back out on the market somehow... hopefully in a way that will garner a few more eyeballs than before.

 

I could, for example, make an audio drama version of this story, and put it up on the audio drama channel The A.L.I.C.E. Files, just like I've done with other short stories like the dark modern fantasy tale of an angel tracking a child stealer in Suffer The Children, or the story of a gambler haunted by his past in the weird Western story Dead Man's Bluff. I could publish the story on Vocal's fiction platform, right alongside some of my other shorts like the Weird War II story Where The Red Flowers Bloom. I could also do both of those things, and make it a kind of package deal where one compliments the other.

Of course, I could also hold onto it, and keep it in my back pocket for a sequel to my short story collection The Rejects. I've reached a point in my career as a writer where a lot of my older stuff is going to start going out of print or working its way back to me... maybe something like The Returned? Or maybe Second Wind: A Collection of Short Stories?

Might have to workshop the title a bit.

Anyway, I wanted to reach out to my regular readers to see if there were any opinions about what you would all like to see done with this story... especially if you're a fan of my darker, bloodier tales. So if you have thoughts about what you'd like to see me do with this story, please leave your thoughts in the comments below so I can tally up the results, and give folks what they want to see!

Lastly, there are still a lot of my earlier horror short stories out on the market, for those who have an interest in them. From the collection of bloody 1950s horror Americana that is American Nightmare, to the big top spook show of Noir Carnival, or even the black ops terror of SNAFU: A Collection of Military Horror, there's all sorts of nasty little numbers out there. So drop by my Amazon author page, and take a look around before another of the titles goes out of print!

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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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What is The Difference Between Tragedy and Grimdark?

Labels are important, both for readers as well as for writers. How you classify a story helps libraries and bookstores sort which shelf it goes onto, and it can act as a big, red sign for readers who have a taste for particular fiction. Sometimes those labels can be helpful, like when a sub-genre emerges and grows into its own distinct category. Sometimes these labels can be used to pour shame onto books though, labeling them as surely as a big, scarlet A.

One of those labels is Grimdark, and it is still a battleground for readers and writers alike.

In the gutters of the genre ghettos there can be only one heir to the fantasy throne.

What Is Grimdark?

Before we get too far into the conversation we should all be on the same page. The phrase Grimdark, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, began with the quote, "In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war," which comes from the Warhammer 40,000 game. For those not familiar with the game it features a bleak, dystopian future where all races and species are locked in bloody, eternal conflict across the stars, and the millions of bodies and oceans of blood are justified by nothing so much as a need to feed the war machine.

The label has expanded beyond the war game and its brethren though; today it refers mostly to speculative fiction (a broad term encompassing sci-fi and fantasy alike) where there is A) a grim and dark tone (natch), B) a sense of realism, and C) the agency of the characters involved in the story.

For example, say you were writing a fantasy story. Let's say that this story depicted a world where deaths are visceral, and the politics behind wars are realistic. Kings are not noble, divine rulers but rather spoiled children or iron-fisted tyrants who took the throne by the sword and keep it the same way. The heroes of your story have flaws, and there is no guarantee that their actions are noble or good. There is, in fact, no guarantee that the protagonists will succeed (or even survive), or that in succeeding they will enact any real change.

Does this sound familiar?

Brace yourself... Martin is coming.

George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has become the standard-bearer for grimdark fantasy. It is, in its way, an anti-Tolkien where the world is full of human complexities, evil is present in the hearts of men rather than in some outside force that must be defeated, and where vicious killers and tortured souls can exist in the same character.

Grimdark has its detractors though. People who claim that this kind of fiction glorifies brutality, and that in its pursuit of "realism" it's simply creating soulless pornography. Where is the hero's journey? Where are the morality tales where knights in gleaming armor fight against the evils that plague humanity in the form of dragons, demons, and evil wizards? Lastly, and the most often asked question, who the hell gets catharsis out of this?

I have an answer to that last one, actually. Humans, and they have since the dawn of Western civilization.

Tragedy's Rockstar Child

The Grimdark sub-genre is seen by many as an unnecessary attempt at edginess. It's fantasy in a black leather jacket with bad boy shades, out to make you think he's going to change before he fucks your girlfriend, blows smoke in your face, and roars out onto that highway to hell with flames shooting from his tail pipe.

The catharsis in watching terrible things happen, and in seeing characters try to fight against overwhelming forces, goes back a long, long way though. According to the Wiki gods it goes back to about the 6th century BCE.

A couple thousand years before this fellow, if you're counting.

Greek tragedy is, in its basest form, watching fundamentally flawed characters struggle against things too big for them to beat. Oedipus fights against fate, and his quest for truth opens his eyes before he shuts them forever. Antigone doesn't fare much better, struggling against generations of tragedy before smashing against the rocks of her own. Watching a world where one wrong decision, or one perilous action can wreck bloody ruin on everything you held dear has been the preferred entertainment of people for more than a millennium.

Grimdark is just the latest child of this human desire to watch everything fall apart.

When Everything Ends in Blood and Tears

There will always be people who prefer happy endings and black-and-white stories, just as there were people in Ancient Greece who preferred comedy to tragedy. Some people like to pick up whichever mask most suits them that day, satisfying the need they have at the time. Some people, readers and writers alike, just can't get enough of that sensation of meeting a character just as flawed and lost as they themselves are, reading through that character's choices and adventures, and riding that roller-coaster all the way down until their Icarus smashes to paste on the rocks below.

Speaking of which...

To answer the question I posed in the title of this blog post, Grimdark and tragedy are related. Dark overtones and dystopian horrors are certainly right at home under tragedy's big tent, but not all tragedy is Grimdark. Some tragedy sneaks up on you, getting its fingers under your skin and gently caressing your heartstrings before it uses them as an instrument to play you a sad song. Sometimes it looks like everything's going to be all right, and you let yourself hope, before the sad mask brings down the curtain on another broken ending.

If you're a fan of tragedy, but you can only take Grimdark in small doses, check out my latest book New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam. Take a tour of a place where the brilliant light of science casts shadows dark enough to get lost in, and where down every alley there's a new story itching to be told. The first two tales, along with the introduction are free to all, so step up and take the $2 tour.

You've got nothing to lose but a few tears... and that's a small price to pay, don't you think?

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