And again
I find myself sitting on the fence. This
time around: was it a respectful usage of personal problems, i.e. something
that raises awareness about contemporary psycho-sociological issues? Or just a means to a way, i.e. an
inappropriate usage of said personal issues to achieve commercial success? But I get ahead of myself. It’s best I describe the things I do know
about Daryl Gregory’s 2014 We Are All
Completely Fine, first.
We Are All Completely Fine outlays the mental and
social issues of five people dealing with trauma in engaging, generally
realistic (if not extreme) fashion. A
video game channeled through his sunglasses, a teenage boy has grown dependent
on the zombies and post-apocalyptic background details the game overlays upon
his view of the world. An elderly man
with hoarding problems was de-limbed by a family of cannibals and now lives in
resentment in a wheelchair. Images
carved on her bones, a woman is haunted by a scrimshander—a bone etcher. A writer wrestles with demons not only in his
fiction, but in his real world, as well.
And a young woman with ornamental scars covering her body, attempts to
deal with her past in a cult. Meeting
once per week in group session, the five slowly open themselves up, revealing
their backstories to the others, all the while the trouble from their traumatic
pasts leaks through into the real world.
On a word
by word basis, We Are All Completely Fine
is highly readable. Gregory does a great
job not only describing events, but capturing a lot of contemporary society’s
post-post-postmodern angst and paranoia; the psychological issues the
characters are dealing with come straight from 21 st century western media. Almost all are turned up one notch beyond
realism toward sensationalism, but it’s fiction, and individually, the events
have probably happened at some time in history.
The slow reveal, leading to the intense climax, and into the denouement,
really grab the reader.
Where the
novella goes astray is in its usage of the setup. Approaching the narrative fork in the road
(How do I resolve the character’s stories I’ve created: in meaningful or pulp
fashion?), Gregory chooses pulp. With
this decision, the novella veers from potentially relevant to just more
entertaining, purposeless horror. The
empathy one has for the five people quickly fades once they realize they are
part of a fabulation intent on inducing discomfort and fear in the reader
rather any sort personal of resolution; it’s just an intrusion of the
supernatural into the real world. Yawn…
I realize
for some readers Gregory’s decision to go the (irrelevant) horror route is a
positive one. There are those who don’t
want fiction to intrude upon their real world; they want the cheap thrills of
fear. Thus, if you are such a reader,
take my critique as a recommendation; Gregory wrote an engaging horror story,
and you can stop reading this review now as I take the critique one degree
further.
We thus go
back to the fence: do Gregory’s sympathies truly exist with his characters and
the real-world issues they are dealing with?
Or has he simply taken advantage of them to sell a story? I can’t help but think the latter given We Are All Completely Fine arcs from
relevant to irrelevant. From another
perspective: if I were to write about a person suffering from down syndrome,
and then in the course of the story parallel their suffering to demons with no
purpose beyond sensationalism, e.g. allegorical value, etc., what would you
think? Would you think me
empathetic—that I was offering some kind of artistic salve to those dealing
with down syndrome? Or that I was just
trying to make a buck?
I’ll let
you read the novella for yourself... and if I missed something - that indeed the story shows compassion to the issues it utilizes - do inform me.
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