There Is No Escaping Other Mommy

There’s a Terry Pratchett quote I love, about how all contemporary fantasy is written under the influence of The Lord of the Rings. “Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints,” Pratchett wrote. “Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.” I think this holds true for all genre fiction; there are giants of the genre, who introduced basically all of the tropes, fully formed, and anyone working in that genre is constantly in conversation with those tropes. Every ghost story is in communion with Henry James; every haunted house owes a debt to Shirley Jackson. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Cliches become cliches for a reason, and it can be rewarding as a reader to spot the influences. We are primed to expect the expected, just by picking up a ghost story in the first place. “Ghost stories might not all use the same words,” Malerman has one of his characters observe, “but they all sound like the same words because it’s the ghost we think about, not the words.”

Read it at Defector ↗

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