Change is in the air for NITMON
Also, a deep dive into trickster heroes, final girls, noble grifters, and stories in the margins.
To say things have been a bit chaotic online lately would be a tremendous understatement. Between the ongoing dumpster fire of “X” to Patreon spontaneously unsubscribing people, it’s been a month of looking deep inside to figure out what I actually want out of my life online. And that’s before we even dig into anything going on in my personal and professional life that may be affecting my time, energy, desire to produce content, and so forth.
Whew.
I’m working on some plans and strategies and I’m actually pretty excited about what some of these look like long-term, but in the meanwhile, a few housekeeping notes:
I am no longer using Twitter/X and will shortly be deleting Instagram. The platforms aren’t serving my needs, and I’m not a fan of the tech companies behind them, so I see no point in keeping them around.
I have joined Bluesky and have some invite codes available — hit me up if you’d like one of them. And if you’re on the platform, come find me!
There’s some more changes in the works, but I’m not quite ready to announce that yet, so watch this space :)
Death in the Mouth, an illustrated horror anthology featuring BIPOC and other marginalized authors, is up on Kickstarter and could use your support!
Sunny Moraine’s book Your Shadow Half Remains, a post-apocalyptic tale about deadly eye contact from Tor Nightfire, is up for pre-order.
Open call for Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors is still taking subs through the end of August, so get those stories in there!
Speaking of open calls, Moonstruck Books is taking submissions for Nightmare Diaries through December.
Bonus: a round-up of all the good scary books coming out in August. Enjoy your never-ending TBR stack :)
Speaking of a never-ending TBR, what the heck am I reading lately?
Last month’s book club theme was “narrative nonfiction” and I picked the self-help-memoir The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, which was well worth reading. I followed her blog back in the day and found a lot of really useful, practical advice as well as some very funny moments in the book. I plan to share with with my mom, who’s having a real tough time adjusting to widowhood and might see some value in the sort of systematic approach to problem-solving the book offers.
This month’s theme is “own-voices, disability” and I may be slightly bending my own rules but I really, really wanted to read Turtles All the Way Down by John Green because there’s never enough good OCD representation in fiction. While that’s on hold at the library, I’m snarfing down Out by Natsuo Kirino.
From Africa’s story-spinning spider Anansi to Sun Wukong of China, Norse Loki to North America’s Coyote, just about every culture has some kind of mythological trickster figure.
But this archetype, once a prevalent folk hero and champion of the common man, is decidedly under-represented in modern American pop culture. And where he does show up these days, it’s rarely as the hero of the tale.
…With a couple of notable exceptions.
Let’s get into it.
What Is a Trickster, Anyway?
Before we can talk about trickster heroes, we first need to establish what we mean by “trickster.”
In their authoritative 1997 scholarly book Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms, William Hynes and William Doty lay out the following six traits for tricksters:
fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous
deceiver and trick-player
shape-shifter or master of disguise
situation-inverter
messenger and imitator of the gods
sacred and lewd bricoleur
Not every trickster figure needs all six traits, but they need a majority of them to qualify.
Meanwhile, Alex over at The Afictionado blog lays out these criteria:
emphasis on cleverness and trickery
moral ambiguity and self-motivation
magic and shapeshifting
gender fluidity/ambiguity
Contradictions and paradox (selfish culture hero, clever dumbass, sympathetic bastard, sacred figure who does profane things)
Liminality (existing on the fringe, outsiders in their story world)
Boundary crossing (social, physical, magical, spiritual, etc.)
Agents of change (make a mess of pre-established systems and power structures)
Dirty jokes (breaking taboos)
However you slice it, it’s pretty clear that being a trickster is about more than joking around. Tricksters are all about crossing boundaries. They exist outside the status quo, challenging authority and exploring the limits. That’s what makes them sacred figures for a lot of cultures — they’re an essential check-and-balance to the forces in power.
Okay, but what About the Hero Part?
In folklore, tricksters aren’t always nice. Sometimes they’re villains who cause mischief through deceit. Sometimes they’re chaotic neutral figures of self-interest who are out doing their own thing. But sometimes they’re the heroes, and those are my favorite — because trickster heroes save the day through cunning and creativity rather than strength and valor.
One of the best-known trickster heroes of Western culture is Odysseus. The first we see him, he’s trying to weasel out of being summoned for war by pretending to go mad. Later, when he can’t get out of it, he engages in some crossdressing to talk Achilles into joining the effort. He acts as strategist and resident smart-ass in battle and is the mastermind behind the whole Trojan Horse scheme.
He’s also kind of a dick. He calls for the death of a child and has an old man stoned to death over a grudge. He insults a god by overstaying his welcome, resulting in 20 years of bullshit for his companions (many of whom don’t survive). He cheats on his wife repeatedly (although his consent in some of that is dubious) and by the time he does make it home he concocts a whole scheme to re-seduce his wife and test her loyalty even though he probably doesn’t really have to. It’s certainly more fun that way, though.
Some of folklore’s other great trickster heroes are youngest sons or merchant-class fellows. In other words, people for whom class mobility normally wouldn’t be on the table. Puss in Boots is one of those stories — a youngest son with no inheritance charms his way into the monarchy through charisma, trickery, and one supremely clever talking cat. The Brave Tailor follows a similar trajectory — a nobody sets out to become a heroic knight, winning time and again through cleverness and deceit.
It probably says something about me that these were my favorite childhood fairytales.
Perhaps the last of the truly well-known culture heroes that fit the trickster archetype is Bugs Bunny, a character whose roots might trace back directly to African-American Br’er Rabbit folktales. Bugs embodies all of the characteristics: trickery, cross-dressing, smart-assery, and always managing to somehow come out on top.
But the original Bugs Bunny run ended in the 1960s, and the prevailing trend in children’s cartoons right now is toward softness, kindness, and collaboration. Not that there’s anything wrong with the likes of Steven Universe or My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic or whatever else the kids are watching these days — only that it sure seems like pitching a modern series with a cheerful boundary-crossing asshole like Bugs in the hero spot is a tougher sell.
The Noble Grifter
There’s one alive-and-well archetype that embodies many, if not all, of the trickster ethos — and that’s the grifter.
You know the type. He’s a guy who’s down on his luck through no fault of his own, who desperately needs money for an unselfish purpose, who has some experience with shady business but who wants to keep his nose clean. He’s got a crew of colorful friends with looser morals (and a much higher likelihood of being killed for plot reasons). He needs to get the crew together to do One Last Job, after which he’ll never need to do crime again!
Or, a variation: The grifter gets to have a bit more of an edge. He’s a cipher, full of mysteries that are probably tragic, not that he’ll share them. He doesn’t want to get clean — instead, he wants to drag somebody else into his trouble.
But here’s the thing about heist stories. They are tremendously fun. But they’re also doomed from the start. With a tiny handful of exceptions, crime doesn’t pay. Grifters get caught, or lose all the money, or have a last-minute change of heart, or die tragically but heroically at the end of a redemption arc. But they don’t really get to win, certainly not at the rate of trickster heroes of yore.
As with many things, we can probably thank the Hays Code for some of this. Guiding film production from the 1930s through the 1960s, the Motion Picture Code self-censored movies from all manner of “immoral” behavior, from homosexuality to deep kissing to profanity…and, indeed, bad guys getting away with dastardly deeds.
Although the code was lifted and we enjoy a great deal of nudity, profanity, violence, and other Hays-Code-Disapproved content in our storytelling today, its Puritanical moral fingerprints are smudged all over our intrinsic American view of what makes storytelling good.
But I think Hays is just the tip of the iceberg — more symptom than root cause. Because before we move on, we’d best confront the elephant in the room…
The Devil as Trickster
We don’t get to the Hays Production Code without Puritanical views, and we don’t get Puritanical views without Puritans — and, more broadly, Christianity.
The word “Devil” comes from the Greek diabolos, meaning “accuser.” His other common name, Satan, comes from the Hebrew “Ha-Satan” meaning “adversary.” We could spend a day unpacking the history of the Devil as a character — here’s a great article as a primer — but suffice to say that as Christianity spread and subsumed many other religious traditions, the Devil began absorbing a variety of familiar trickster-like traits. Here is a figure capable of shapeshifting, who deals in trickery and deceit, and who transgresses against God.
But Christianity is a religion that rejects and disavows evil and chaos, rather than accepting the necessary duality. Sometimes, trickster-like storylines show up in folklore under the guise of characters deceiving the Devil (such as the Bluebeard-like story “How the Devil Married Three Sisters,” or the Polish story of Pan Twardowski which culminates in a “take my wife, please” punchline).
Other times, successfully seeing through the Devil’s tricks and sticking to the straight-and-narrow is the theme of the day. Not so much room for a boundary-breaking culture hero in a framework where so many trickster traits are bound up into The Evilest of All Evildoers.
The New Wave Final Girl
Academics for decades have claimed to crack the code of horror survival. Just ask Randy in Scream for his rules and he’ll spell it out for you — play it safe, avoid drugs and sex, and walk the thin and narrow. Good girls survive and bad girls get murdered.
Except, well. That hasn’t been the case over the last decade or so. And frankly, that hasn’t been the case in older stories half as often as your neighborhood Film Studies class wants you to believe.
What is Hellraiser’s Kirsty Cotton doing, if not surviving by her wits as she solves puzzles and brokers deals with demons? And Nightmare on Elm Street gives us the thoroughly resourceful, out-of-the-box thinking of Nancy, who engineers traps and keeps trying third ways to worm out of trouble from a reality-bending opponent. Erin in You’re Next turns the tables on home invaders in an alarmingly competent way — she’s not trapped with them, they are trapped with her.
Personally, my favorite recent example for this particular trope is Anya Taylor-Joy’s character in The Menu, who manages to survive and walk away from the story through an act of boldness and cleverness that is 100% fairytale logic.
Lovable grifters may not be able to survive their heists intact, but horror — the genre of transgression — gives us a glimpse into heroes who face off against impossibly strong adversaries and come out on top through their cleverness and moxy. They may not have the blithe self-assurance of the archetypal Trickster, and they may engage in less bawdy tomfoolery and gender-bending hijinx, but at least they’re standing up to power with something other than their fists.
And hey, who knows. Maybe we’ll start seeing some final girls who go all-in on embracing their wild, chaotic, rules-bending, gender-defying nature. If we work together, we can make it so…