Chuck Wendig: Blackbirds

Blackbirds, by Chuck Wendig

Fair warning, I disliked everything about this novel except for the original premise, which could have been written into a wonderful story if the author hadn't been obsessed with violence and grime and sadism and filth and blood and pain. But now I'll explain why.

None of those things are inherently interesting in themselves. Obsession with all of them together turned what could have been a fascinating Cassandra story into a boring and incredibly repetitive recitation of signifiers. I'm not even sure what he thinks these things signify, but I'm going to suggest that the idea is reality, grit, truth, being down to earth. Maybe that's not it. I honestly don't get why someone thinks being filthy (actual dirt, actual old dried blood and crust) makes a person more interesting than being clean. I do know this is a guy thing generally. They can keep it.

The core of the story itself really is fascinating. Miriam can tell with a touch when and how someone is going to die. Cool, right? But what does she do with that? Nothing. She is busy suffering, bouncing from place to place, stealing from people whose deaths she predicts then witnesses, tormented by this knowledge and by how helpless she is to do anything to change it, right up until the end of the book, where she discovers she can actually save someone if she's willing to kill someone else in their place.

It's a fantasy novel because there is no explanation for these rules. In science fiction, there would be something given to explain this, even if it's pseudoscience or futuristic to the point of magic. Here we get nothing. The closest we get is learning through backstory that Miriam had a rough life growing up with an awful controlling mother, rebelled by having sex with a boy, got pregnant, then suffered even more from that because he committed suicide when she rebuffed him, and then when his mother beat her with a snow shovel, she lost the baby. Okay. All bad things, but that still doesn't explain why she got this Cassandra death power.

Miriam's meaningless wanderings lead her to hitchhiking and filthy dive bars, where she can get beat up and risk her life and show off her impossible fighting skills, until she gets tangled up with an abusive asshole thief who stole from drug dealers. Great. This sort of thing is stock for a certain kind of men's fantasy novels and I don't know why. Is this what they would do in her place? Do they like imagining a woman being tough and getting beat up? Do they imagine this is the coolest, toughest thing in the world, because if a man did this, he'd just be another guy, but a woman doing it makes it even more dangerous and more intense?

Again, I really don't know. All I know is that reading this endless repetition of dirt, blood, bruises, alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, pain, bodily functions, and the occasional cheeseburger, feels like the book was written by an AI loaded with a specific set of fetishes. The story could have been wonderful if it hadn't been buried under all this obsessive nonsense.

It's not just men who write this sort of thing. I remembered some truly terrible novels that play on some of the same things, about a vampire hunter. I can't think of the name off hand but there's this same sense of a particular set of fetishes getting dragged out over and over and over. When you don't share those fetishes, they are boring and embarrassing. I suppose if you do share them, they at least distract from the lack of storytelling.

One of my old favorite books is C.J. Cherryh's Rimrunners, which features a down on her luck space Marine stranded on a space station. She keeps very clean on space station restroom soap, unlike Miriam Black, and she's in this situation for a vital story reason, not because she thinks it's fun. Things get violent and scary and Cherryh tends to hit all of the same black eye, broken rib, tough guy notes, but the difference is: it's for a specific plot-driven reason, not because it's fun for the author. That comes through very clearly. And Yeager turns things around on her own timetable, for her own purposes, while Black has no purpose in anything she does, which makes all the violence feel completely gratuitous.

Here's another genre comparison: all those terrible books on "faerie." The same problem happens there as in Blackbirds. Instead of telling a good story, a surprising number of authors (and therefore presumably readers) just hit a prescribed set of indicators about these faerie courts. They never actually tell a good story about this material, and since those signifiers mean nothing to me, it feels like a cardboard recitation. Maybe there's some ur-faerie text that you have to read to be interested in this stuff, but I can't imagine being motivated to find it when every single faerie book is so unrelentingly bad.

This is what it's like. Sit in a restaurant with two friends who have a long shared experience that you don't have. Get them to tell you about that one time when they went on a trip to Kansas together. They're always referring to it, so now you can get the whole story. They will devolve into just saying single words or phrases to each other and then dissolving into laughter. "The pool!" Gales of laughter. "The slide!" More laughter. Then they'll say together: "The buffet!" And they'll laugh until they cry, while you sit there with a polite half smile and alphabetize the sugar packets until you can pay the check and leave.

Did you get anything out of that Kansas story they told? No? They did. They had a blast. You probably just felt alienated. But that's because they didn't actually tell a story. They just hit a bunch of signifiers that mean a lot to them and nothing to anyone else.

That's how all that seelie and unseelie court nonsense reads in faerie books, like one person signaling another and saying, "This is our stuff." That's how this book felt. All I can think when I read yet another meaningless chapter about yet another disgusting motel room and coffee and whiskey and sudden violence is: "I guess that's what he thinks is cool." None of that repetitive nonsense tells a story AT ALL. It adds nothing about character, since she was established on page one. It doesn't even further the plot. The entire book was like this, with a few scraps of story here and there that could have been condensed into a literal short story without losing anything.

This is not to say the same thing doesn't happen with literary fiction, because it absolutely does, which is one reason I'm not a big fan of a lot of literary fiction. Miserable well-off people making each other miserable. Hurray. One more sighing unfaithful pre-divorce miserable white couple in one more great big exhausting house in the suburbs with one more broken down lawn mower/car/child/line of communication that signifies the banal repetition and aging of what was once young and exciting. WE GET IT. Or worse, another literary novel about an aging professor who falls for a young female student, oh lord. No.

What I love to see is someone telling a cracking good story and putting their own misery or fetishes off to the side. Don't just indicate to your audience or wave flags they will recognize, but live through the characters in their worlds. Otherwise it all feels like cheap button-pushing.

There was someone who used to read her autobiographical work to an audience and always included a passage where a beloved housepet died. It made me so angry to the point of walking out (I did) because it was so cheap and manipulative. And that's exactly the point. When your own animals die, it's the very worst thing in the entire world. But using that to yank your audience's chain should be beneath all of us. That's how I feel about all of this whiskey and cigarettes and black eyes and truck stops and coffee kind of writing. It's all cheap signifiers when that space could have been used for so much more.

I really hope I the next book I read doesn't do this sort of thing!