Nobody left alive

I've been hard-pressed to find a book to read on my to-be-read pile which doesn't involve wholesale slaughter of characters. When the so-called news gleefully reports the number of people who've died from the virus during the last day, I don't need to read about this kind of large-scale death in my fiction.

For the last decade the world has championed this kind of story, and even given it a label.  Grimdark, they called it.  And the King of grimdark has to be GRR Martin, with his doorstep Game of Thrones books.  

I managed to struggle through the first one, but I soon lost track of who was who among the far too many viewpoints.  And when the inventive ways of killing people started towards the end of the book, that dictated I'd read no more.  I've always been disturbed by people who revel in gruesome killings and big battle scenes where no-one is left alive. And how can I care about characters if I suspect none of them are going to make it to the end of the story?

A lot of my writer friends are crime writers, so you might think that I come across gruesome deaths in their stories.  I do, but they're off the page.  The writers don't revel in those deaths.  Their books are about bringing killers to justice.  There is morality in my friends' stories.  They are not grimdark.

Now that the brutality of the real world has matched up with the fictional brutality of a lot of stories, people are, thankfully, turning away from grimdark.  Thank you, Alexandra Rowland, for inventing the term hopepunk, which is, as she says, "the opposite of grimdark".

Now here's the controversial thought.  Anyone who has studied metaphysical texts will have come across The Law of Attraction.  Simply put, it means we get the world we want to see.  So if we're sending out vibes of revelling in huge death scenes, guess what we're going to see in our world?  The universe is energy, and responds to our thoughts.  Quantum physics meets metaphysics.

Which is why we have never needed hopepunk more than now.  Reading stories of characters based in hope, people fighting against the darkness, defending the natural world and its species, showing us that there is another way, is just what we need right now.