One-year-olds have very strong feelings about their bedtime stories. Annamaria’s current favorite is The Imagination Song. It’s based on a Sesame Street tune Ernie sings to overcome his fear of the dark. It’s a great song for the Winter Solstice on a clear cold night when you can see your neighbor’s Christmas decorations glowing through the bedroom window.

Or it would be, if I could stop thinking about the twenty first-graders who were gunned down in Connecticut a few days ago. And if the book didn’t end with Ernie sailing off in an imaginary boat into an imaginary sunset, singing:

Tonight I make it through without choking up, without pausing, without imagining my daughter screaming behind a closet door. She is here in her crib, and her eyes are heavy as I kiss her goodnight; she is not clinging tightly to her classmates as bullets rip through her.

That was in December 2012, a week after Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed twenty children and six adults. I was still grappling with the atrocity. I don’t know if I ever stopped. Others insisted, and continued to insist, that it never happened at all.

The “Sandy Hoax” craze was hardly America’s first dance with conspiracy theory. The aptly named Know Nothing Party became a major political force in the 1840s and 1850s by “exposing” secret Roman Catholic shenanigans. In 1920 Henry Ford serialized an English translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his Dearborn, Michigan newspaper as part of his series entitled The International Jew. A few days after 9/11, people were already insisting that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel girders.

Conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie, baseball, and robber barons. But those theories usually sought to expose the hidden hands behind events. The Sandy Hook deniers weren’t arguing that Adam Lanza was coerced into shooting children by FBI agents, Communist infiltrators, or Zionist operatives. They claimed that the entire event was staged. The victims, parents, witnesses, police officers, teachers, and even the school itself were recast as part of an elaborate plot to push through new gun control laws.

A traditional conspiracy theorist would look at Sandy Hook and suggest some secret government cabal or foreign spy ring groomed Lanza into committing the massacre. The theory would involve many leaps of faith, alternative interpretations, and questionable conclusions. But it would still be an attempt to explain a horrible tragedy. The Sandy Hook theory did not attempt to explain reality so much as deny it.

Alex Jones was the first major media figure to call Sandy Hook a crisis actor event. He certainly deserves criticism for his years-long campaign to discredit the grieving families and eyewitnesses. But there is another, more important question, to consider. How did a bombastic talk radio host and political entertainer who sold vitamins and sexual enhancement drugs between rants about aliens, conspiracies, and frikkin’ gay frogs become more credible to a wide audience than teachers, parents, law enforcement officials, and eyewitnesses?

Alex Jones was not America’s first political entertainer. Morton Downey, Jr. and Rush Limbaugh had won wide audiences for their loud and inflammatory commentary decades earlier. Nor was he the first celebrity conspiracy theorist. Art Bell was discussing aliens, government cover-ups, and secret conspiracies on Coast to Coast AM while Alex Jones was still in middle school.

Art Bell was more playfully curious than Jones. He might make outlandish claims about Roswell or secret alien bases, but always with a sense of wonder and speculation. He was more interested in creating a strange, fascinating world and expanding listener horizons. Limbaugh and Downey were provocative, partisan, and pugnacious. But they generally operated within conventional political frameworks.

Alex Jones started from a different place. He built his worldview around the idea that our political system was largely a façade. Republicans and Democrats argued in public, but they were part of a show put on for public consumption. Behind the scenes secret elites, bankers, globalists, and intelligence agencies pulled the strings and ran the show. These secret elites were behind everything from Waco to 9/11.

His message was not “there are aliens among us” or “bad people are running the government into the ground.” It was something far more radical: the government itself is not to be trusted.

By 2012, Americans had lived through Watergate and the many deceptions and cover-ups surrounding the Vietnam War. We had learned that Iraq possessed no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. We had watched Enron collapse despite the assurances of the smartest guys in the room. We had witnessed a series of intelligence failures before 9/11. And while the worst of the 2008 financial crisis was behind us, much of the recovery seemed to favor investors and multinational corporations more than the working and middle classes.

It’s not surprising that Jones found an audience that shared his distrust for the establishment. We had little reason to trust the government, academia, or multinational corporations in 2012—and many reasons not to. But many Jones followers, like Jones himself, turned justified skepticism into a worldview. They no longer argued about whether a particular official statement was true. Instead, they assumed immediately that anything that came from official sources was false.

According to Pew Research, 39 percent of Americans were getting their news from their smartphones and tablets in 2012.[3] The information gatekeepers were still there, and most Americans still relied on newspapers and television. But the internet gave many alternative thinkers a voice and a megaphone. Cranks, kooks, and conspiracy theorists who would have been confined to zines, public-access television, and photocopied newsletters twenty years earlier now had websites and Facebook pages.

Most Americans kept their institutional distrust in check. They had no problem believing the government lied about a war; corporations concealed financial problems; intelligence agencies made catastrophic mistakes. But when twenty children were murdered in an elementary school, they still accepted the reality of what they were seeing. For Jones and many of his followers, these limits no longer applied.

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The Sandy Hook “crisis actor” theory is unfalsifiable. The death certificates and school records might be forged, and so Sandy Hook deniers assume they must be forged. If a grieving parent smiles when recollecting a happy moment with their child, that is proof they are faking their grief. If they cry, as parents who have just lost a seven-year-old to an assassin’s bullet are wont to do, that is proof they are trained actors. If witnesses describe the event, they are lying. If they refuse to speak, they are being silenced by powerful interests.

Skepticism demands evidence. For Sandy Hook deniers, every piece of evidence proves their theory, and every contradiction proves the querent is either unwilling to see the truth or actively working to suppress it. This is not skepticism; it is a closed belief system. No evidence can ever count against the conclusion. It is an idée fixe. One can no more debate it rationally than one can reason with a man convinced the CIA has installed microphones in his teeth.

Why was the Sandy Hook shooting staged? The most common response is that it was an effort to build support for gun control laws. But no major federal gun control legislation was passed after Sandy Hook. By that standard, this elaborately constructed hoax failed spectacularly. Not only did a sexual health supplement salesman and his followers see through it immediately; it never achieved its goal. Of course, deniers would tell you that their backlash prevented those gun confiscations from taking place.

Adam Lanza was a disturbed young man. Grooming him into slaughtering a classroom full of elementary school students would be easier and less expensive than staging an elaborate crisis event. A staged shooting requires hundreds of participants, thousands of silent witnesses, and fabricated records. What did they gain from a staged shooting over a real one involving a troubled twenty-year-old and a few handlers?

Deniers would tell you that a staged massacre gives conspirators total control over the narrative. George R.R. Martin could tell them that the more complicated the plot, the more likely it is to collapse under the weight of its own moving parts. If a man of Martin’s obsessive talents can’t keep Westeros running smoothly, how have a bunch of bureaucrats managed to coordinate over a decade of flawless deception?

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The Sandy Hook hoax theory arose as part of a broader shift in how Americans evaluate evidence and authority. In 2018 a YouGov survey of over 10,000 respondents found that around 17.5 percent of millennials and 19.2 percent of those ages 25-34 agreed with the statement “I have always believed the world is round.”[4] In fairness, only 2 percent expressed a firm belief in a flat earth. Even so, the survey suggests a willingness to entertain ideas that earlier generations—meaning anyone born after the eleventh century or thereabouts—would find absurd.

In 2024 Will Duffy, a Colorado pastor, took four flat-earthers to Antarctica, along with some “globers” who accepted the Round Earth hypothesis. He intended to show them the 24-hour sun during the Antarctic summer—a phenomenon that is easily explained by the tilt of a round earth but difficult to explain on a flat earth.

The flat-earthers acknowledged that the 24-hour sun was real but remained unconvinced that the earth was round. Other flat-earthers claimed that the shadows left by Duffy and his team proved their “expedition” was filmed in a studio. One Alabama pastor, Dean Odle, suggested that Satan accompanied Duffy to Antarctica and then created a fireball in the sky to deceive unbelievers. Only one flat-earther, a popular YouTuber named Jaren Campanella, acknowledged that after the trip “the flat Earth doesn’t work for me.”[5]

In 1976 former rocket engineer Bill Kaysing published a booklet entitled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. In 1978 the science fiction film Capricorn One depicted a fake Mars mission staged in a Hollywood studio. In the era of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, this skepticism felt understandable. Today the available evidence makes it untenable.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the crew brought retroreflectors—small mirror arrays that can be used as targets for laser beams. With these retroreflectors, scientists were able to get precise measurements of the Moon’s orbit and shape. Scientists still use these lunar retroreflectors today. We could claim that those ongoing experiments are fakes designed to prop up our standing in the “space race” with the Soviet Union. Except, of course, for the awkward fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists.

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The Antarctica trip doubters and moon landing denialists are products of our post-epistemological world. The scientific worldview begins with true skepticism; what evidence supports this claim, how was it acquired, and are there alternative explanations for this phenomenon? Skepticism is not a set of conclusions but a method for reaching them.

What we increasingly see today is not skepticism but distrust. Skeptics are open to contrary evidence and willing to change their worldview when new facts emerge. Those who dismiss contrary evidence as fraud, manipulation, or deception cannot make that move. Their beliefs are insulated from correction. Their question is not “What is true?” but “Who do I trust?”

Most of us have a strong negative reaction to people who harass grieving parents, and rightly so. Sandy Hook deniers led many to fear and mistrust alternative media sources and conspiracy-oriented thinking. But often their reaction was simply Sandy Hook denialism inverted. Deniers claim that government and official sources were lying by definition. The warriors against “misinformation” and “fake news” assumed the opposite: government and official sources were trustworthy by definition.

Skepticism evaluates claims, not tribes. Blind distrust and blind trust are mirror images of each other. As John Michael Greer often says, the opposite of a bad idea is generally another bad idea. True skeptics take all claims with a grain of salt and verify facts from alternate sources, even if they disagree with some of their conclusions. They are willing to live with a certain degree of uncertainty and to shift course when they discover an error. The desire for absolute certainty is understandable, but reality rarely grants us that luxury.

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[1] Joe Raposo, Imagination Song. New York: Random House, 2001. 32.

[2] Elizabeth Williamson, “Here’s what Jones has said about Sandy Hook.” New York Times, September 22, 2022.

[3] Pew Research Center, “In Changing News Landscape, Even Television is Vulnerable.” (September 27, 2012). https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/09/27/section-2-online-and-digital-news-2/.

[4] Craig A. Foster and Glenn Branch, “Do People Really Think Earth Might Be Flat?” (August 21, 2018) at Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/do-people-really-think-earth-might-be-flat/.

[5] Noelle Phillips, “A Colorado pastor thought he could make flat-Earthers see the light in Antarctica. It didn’t work.” Chicago Tribune, January 17, 2025.

While he is often remembered as a political theorist, Spengler is better described as a cultural diagnostician. Politics interested him only insofar as it revealed a civilization’s inner character. He wanted to understand the worldview that produced its art, religion, mathematics, architecture, and institutions. Elections, constitutions, and revolutions were important to Spengler as evidence that revealed the condition of the culture beneath them.

Spengler began working on the first volume of Decline of the West in 1914. It was largely finished by 1917 and published in 1919. The book was forged amidst the slaughter of the Great War and published for a civilization that had seen its faith in progress collapse alongside several great empires. The Victorian era looked forward to a future shaped by science, industry, reason, and democracy. Those ideals died in muddy trenches to the sound of gunfire and the sweet stink of chlorine gas.

Nietzsche declared God dead. Conrad exposed civilization’s conscience as a fraud. Spengler diagnosed Western civilization as terminally ill. Our dreams of endless progress—the cornerstone of our Faustian worldview—were doomed to fail. Like the Apollonian civilization of Greece and Rome before it, the West had passed from Culture to Civilization. Our age of faith, creativity, and expansion was now giving way to bureaucracy and mass politics. The decline and fall that overtook every previous high culture now awaited us as well.

No civilization wants to hear of its own decline. For the West, the prospect feels particularly terrifying. Faustian cultures are drawn toward the infinite in the way that Apollonian civilizations sought the mysteries of form and proportion. We are driven to look toward the horizon and wonder what lies beyond it. Faustians build Gothic cathedrals reaching to heaven; tall ships that sail across oceans and discover a New World; science that measures the weight of the atom and the breadth of the universe. Our worldview is based on the idea of limitless frontiers.

Spengler’s ideas of inevitable decline seemed positively quaint in a postwar era of computers, moon landings, and a burgeoning middle class. The Decline of the West was largely dismissed as the gloomy predictions of a defeated generation. Then the late twentieth century brought us Vietnam, Watergate, oil shocks, and the end of the Space Age’s grand ambitions. As Americans grappled with rising crime, stagflation, and declining trust in institutions, they began to notice ever-encroaching limits to their limitless frontiers.

Readers today continue to wrestle with the questions Spengler raised. What if civilizations, like people, grow old? What if history is cyclical rather than linear? What if progress is not inevitable, but decline is?

You may assume that civilization is a culture’s highest expression. For Spengler, civilization is what happens after culture begins to die. Culture is youth; civilization is old age. Culture creates; civilization administers. Culture believes; civilization organizes. Civilization is not the flowering of culture. It is culture’s autumn and will soon give way to winter.

Hellenic culture arose in a world filled with gods, monsters, and heroes. Homer wasn’t analyzing courage when he sang about Achilles; he was telling a beloved tale about a great warrior. Hesiod wasn’t analyzing the gods as symbols or literary devices. For him those divine forces were immanent. Later generations would preserve, debate, and explain these myths. Homer and Hesiod simply believed them.

Plato and Aristotle examine these traditions rather than living wholly within them. Homer sang of heroes. Aristotle explained why people enjoyed hearing about heroes, and Plato worried that poets like Homer might undermine the social order. These thinkers emerged from a Greece that had grown wealthier, more sophisticated, and increasingly self-conscious. Homer preserved the memories of a historic age. Sophocles used that memory as raw material for art. Classical Hellenic culture was no longer creating its foundational myths. It was reflecting upon them.

We see the same pattern in the Arthurian tradition. The legend of Arthur begins in early Welsh tales and stories of a warlord who held back the Saxons at Badon after Roman Britain’s collapse. Centuries later, Geoffrey of Monmouth combines those stories with material gleaned from histories, chronicles, and his imagination. His Historia Regum Britannae (History of the Kings of Britain) was widely distributed into Latin and vernacular languages and introduced the world to King Arthur and his trusted advisor Merlin.

Later Chrétien de Troyes and the troubadours add courtly romance and the Grail Quest. Malory synthesizes those tales into a national epic at a time when England is wracked by the Wars of the Roses. Tennyson transforms them into a meditation on Victorian morality. John Boorman’s Excalibur recasts the Arthurian legend into a modern myth about sex, power, and spiritual decay. Each used those memories as raw material for literature, philosophy, and social commentary.

The earliest storytellers preserved the memories of a heroic age. Their successors interpreted it. Culture created the myth. Civilization reflected upon it.

Faustian culture gave us Gothic cathedrals reaching toward the sky; Dante’s journey through heaven and hell; Shakespeare’s probing of the human soul; Mozart and Bach’s soaring music; the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Each reflected a shared culture, a shared faith, and a restless desire to push beyond limits.

Faustian civilization gave us megacities, bureaucracies, multinational corporations, mass politics, and global empires. The same impulse that once drove us to build cathedrals now produces skyscrapers and office towers. Our stories are increasingly adaptations, sequels, reboots, and reinterpretations of inherited legends. We no longer create myths; instead, we reflect on them.

As civilizations become larger, wealthier, and more bureaucratic, they also become more difficult to govern. Spengler notes that declining civilizations often turn toward strongman rule. As a civilization enters its period of decline, faith in traditional institutions declines while pressing problems multiply. Parliamentary debates, constitutional procedures, and political parties come to seem slow, ineffective, and detached from reality. An increasingly disillusioned populace begins looking for leaders who can restore a sense of purpose and direction.

People do not initially seek a ruthless tyrant, the stock villain of modern political imagination. They search instead for a capable, charismatic figure who can get things done. The strongman promises action where others offer procedure. He offers certainty where other politicians hedge their bets and promises results where they deliver excuses.

The late Roman Republic was wealthy and powerful. But the Senate was increasingly ineffective and political factions paralyzed government. Civil wars, corruption, and economic inequality undermined public confidence. When Julius Caesar, a popular military hero, crossed the Rubicon and promised to restore order and competence, the people rallied around him. They saw him not as an aspiring tyrant but as the Republic’s savior.

The French Revolution promised liberty, equality, and fraternity. It delivered war, guillotines and political factionalism. When a young and brilliant soldier named Napoleon Bonaparte presented himself as the defender of the Revolution, many French citizens welcomed him. In place of the Terror and political squabbling, he promised order and unity. And when he crowned himself emperor, he did so with broad public support from people who just a few years earlier had cheered at the death of a king.

Caesar and Napoleon were separated by nearly two thousand years, but their rise followed a remarkably similar pattern. Citizens lost faith in legislatures, parties, and governing institutions. A charismatic military leader emerged promising competence, unity, and action. For Spengler, this is a recurring feature of civilizations entering their final phase. Caesar and Napoleon were not historical accidents. They were symptoms.

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Spengler may have seemed out of touch in the postwar world. But those who read through his notoriously dense prose found remarkable parallels between his views of a civilization at the edge of decline and the postwar West. They would see that our society had become increasingly cosmopolitan, sophisticated and rootless. Local traditions and regional identities were being subsumed into the culture of the world-city. To Spengler New York and Los Angeles would be, like Rome and Alexandria before them, symptoms of a civilization entering its final phase.

They would have been surprised to note that Spengler saw growing irreligiosity as a sign of decline rather than sophistication. As traditional faith weakened, people continued searching for meaning, purpose, and belonging. Buddhism, Stoicism, Christianity, and Socialism each arose and flourished during the later phases of great civilizations. Inorganic or dead forms wither away. Beliefs change. The need for belief endures.

Readers in the post-Soviet world might have raised an eyebrow at Spengler’s prediction that liberal democracy would eventually give way to stronger, more centralized forms of rule. Communism had collapsed across Eastern Europe. China was becoming integrated into the global economy. History appeared to be moving toward free trade, democratic institutions, and international cooperation.

These readers were not so optimistic as their postwar predecessors. But for a brief decade or so it appeared that strongman politics had finally become passé. The idea that voters would willingly embrace powerful leaders who challenged liberal norms seemed as implausible as the notion that terrorists might fly passenger jets into skyscrapers.

Globalization and free trade survived September 11, 2001. Optimism did not. Two decades of wars and financial crises shook public confidence in politicians and institutions. Voters across the developed world turned toward populists, nationalists, and political outsiders who vowed to challenge the existing order, to return their battered nation to glory, to drain the swamp. Many who had once cheered for liberalism now called for “saving democracy” by non-democratic means. Some were shocked by this turn toward authoritarianism. Spengler readers saw it coming.

Civilizations are not trees; history does not always move in predictable cycles. The West may yet find solutions to problems that earlier generations thought insoluble. New technologies may create opportunities that Spengler could never have imagined.

Or they may not.

Spengler did not get everything right. He predicted a Russian-led civilization that has not yet emerged. He underestimated the resilience of liberal institutions and the transformative power of technology. But we keep coming back to him because he forces us to confront questions we would rather avoid. No civilization imagines itself in decline until it is forced to consider the possibility. Whether Spengler was a prophet, a pessimist, or merely an observer with an eye for uncomfortable patterns, his questions remain difficult to ignore.

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[1] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. (Charles Francis Atkinson, Tr). At Project Gutenberg,

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Nietzsche suggested the only way through a world stripped of certainty was to stare unflinchingly into the abyss. It was a dangerous voyage, but one worthy of a Superman. Joseph Conrad wrote about those who stared and failed. One of his greatest characters, Kurtz, descended into that abyss without flinching and found not wisdom but horror. Nietzsche feared what would happen after God’s demise. Conrad feared what would happen after we stripped away our comforting illusions and confronted ourselves as we truly are.

Marlow, the narrator of Kurtz’s story, has sailed around the world not for money or power but for the thrill of visiting new places. As a child he was fascinated by the empty spaces on old maps. As the twentieth century dawned, those unexplored places had largely been measured, mapped, and colonized by one power or another. But Marlow was fortunate enough to find a steamboat job that would take him into King Leopold’s Congo, up a river he remembered as a winding scrawl through one of those mysterious blank spaces.

The first thing Marlow notices when he arrives in Africa is a grove of desperately ill and dying laborers. They have been worked to exhaustion building a railroad and then abandoned to fend for themselves. During his stay at the Outer Station, he hears stories about a remarkable ivory agent named Kurtz. Every story presents a different version of the man, but all agree on one point: Kurtz is extraordinary. The Company’s chief accountant praises him with near-religious admiration as a scholar, speaker, and civilizing influence.

Marlow has heard many tales about the benevolent European leaders who are working to civilize the natives. He has always taken them with several grains of salt. Most of the Europeans he meets are more interested in wealth and power than in any humanitarian mission. They call themselves civilizers because they do not want to see themselves as opportunists exploiting a foreign land. But the legends about Kurtz have piqued Marlow’s interest. Curious to discover whether the man lives up to the stories, Marlow resolves to make his way to Kurtz’s station.

Planning for a visit to the African interior and getting there are two very different things. Marlow arrives to find his steamship has been badly damaged, and repair parts are nowhere to be found. He is struck time and again by the utter incompetence of the European bureaucrats who have been put in charge of this land. Amid this chaos, he comes across one of Kurtz’s relics: a seventeen-page report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs:

The report begins with uplifting phrases about how whites must approach their African charges with “the might of a deity” and promises that we can exert a “power for good practically unbounded.” Marlow is inspired by his eloquence and carried along by his beautiful prose. Then, at the bottom of the final page, scrawled in a shaky hand, Kurtz reveals the real plan behind all his lofty words:

“Exterminate all the brutes.”

As they venture toward Kurtz’s camp, the stories begin to change. Many of the bureaucrats who once praised Kurtz for his efficiency are now concerned about his sanity. One manager claims that “his methods have ruined the district.” When Marlow reaches Kurtz’s station, he discovers their fears are well justified. The yard surrounding his crumbling mansion is lined with severed heads mounted on stakes.

Whatever lofty ideals Kurtz once held have now been stripped away. He is no longer concerned with the pretenses of civilization, progress, and humanitarian uplift. He has followed his own scrawled directive. The man who once dreamed of civilizing Africa now rules through terror. He has discovered that the line between savagery and civilization is far thinner than he imagined. As Marlow puts it, “The wilderness had found him out.”

Nietzsche believed we would create new gods to replace the dead one. Kurtz achieves the might of a deity. The myths paint him alternately as inspired and brilliant or mad and terrifying, and each contains some measure of truth. He has not only stared into the abyss; he has seen it inside himself. And with his dying breaths he describes the experience to Marlow:

“The horror! The horror.”

A lesser writer might have explained Kurtz’s descent as a civilized man becoming a savage after living among savages. Conrad comes to a more unsettling conclusion. The heart of darkness does not lie in interior Africa. It can be found in every human heart. Marlow has learned that lesson and seen that abyss. He, like Kurtz, is now set apart from his peers. He can no longer take comfort from the myths that explain everyone else’s world. He has crossed a threshold and returned, but he did not come back unscathed.

From 1885-1908 the Congo Free State was the private corporate property of King Leopold II of Belgium. With the invention of inflatable rubber bicycle tires and the growth of the automobile industry, global rubber demand was skyrocketing. Belgium hoped to profit from this demand by tapping the wild rubber vines found throughout the Congolese jungle.

Many Belgians believed they were bringing progress, commerce and Christianity to Africa’s dark heart. Leopold presented himself as a philanthropist and benefactor to the African people. With his assistance, they were going to move out of their mud huts and become part of the civilized world. It was the same message of uplift and enlightenment that Kurtz used in his report. And as with Kurtz, the reality of Leopold’s mission was considerably darker.

Supplies were scarce, expensive, and difficult to transport into the African interior. Belgian officers expected every bullet to be accounted for. For every shot fired, native troops were required to present a severed hand to prove the bullet had killed its intended target. This “hand quota” was intended to prevent soldiers from wasting ammunition or using Belgian bullets for hunting. But to keep their ammunition books balanced, soldiers began cutting the hands from living victims.

The hand quota later became intertwined with the rubber quotas imposed on Congolese villages. To meet the rubber demand, Belgian authorities demanded forced labor from villagers living near rubber vines. Communities that failed to meet production targets were subjected to mutilation and collective punishment. A trade emerged in severed hands, which were smoked and preserved so they could be presented to colonial authorities when rubber quotas went unmet.

Heart of Darkness was set during the 1880s, when the Congo Free State was trying, and failing, to profit from ivory. If anything, Kurtz is more rational and honest than the administrators and speculators who came to Africa during the rubber boom. He may have cut off heads, but he never got involved in smoking and trading amputated limbs. Kurtz was a madman. The officials who instituted the hand quota were an administration. They told themselves that the Africans were committing the atrocities; they were simply using the hands for bookkeeping.

Diplomats and missionaries had been sounding the alarm for years about starvation, forced labor, and mass murder. Statistics can be ignored. Stories are harder to dismiss. Heart of Darkness transformed those atrocities into a deep and disturbing myth. Conrad’s novel was not a sentimental potboiler like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it stirred up interest and concern among Europeans who for years had greeted missionary exposés and diplomatic reports with apathy.

In 1908, after years of international criticism and pressure, the Free State of Congo was annexed by Belgium. King Leopold II was no longer the sole owner of the territory and the new administration curtailed many of the worst excesses. Leopold talked of civilizing Africa; the new Belgian administrators built schools and hospitals for the local population.

But many of the administrators and officials responsible for those atrocities remained in place as the Free State became the Belgian Congo. The colonial charter’s prohibition on forced labor had an exemption clause for “public utility” purposes like bridges, roads, and government buildings. There were still laws against trade unions and working conditions in the mines and railways were often appalling. While it was less overtly brutal than the Free State, the Belgian Congo was still built by Belgians to extract money and raw materials from the native population.

Heart of Darkness was written in response to current political and human rights issues. When Francis Ford Coppola decided to bring it to screen, he changed the setting and time to focus on a recently-ended conflict that was still an open wound for many Americans. The Congo River became the Nùng River. The Free State Congo became Vietnam. Heart of Darkness became Apocalypse Now.

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Today Apocalypse Now is considered one of our greatest war films. During production, many expected it to be an expensive, self-indulgent disaster. Marlon Brando arrived in the Philippines grossly overweight and unfamiliar with the source material. Martin Sheen struggled with serious alcoholism and suffered a near-fatal heart attack during filming. Expensive sets were destroyed in a hurricane. What was supposed to be a five-month shoot stretched out to over a year and generated more than one million feet of film footage.

The movie was supposed to be released in the spring of 1977. On May 19, 1979 an unfinished cut entitled Apocalypse Now (A Work in Progress) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Reviews were mixed. Some critics hailed Coppola’s film as a masterpiece, while others dismissed it as an overlong and self-indulgent spectacle. The jury was leaning towards awarding the Palme d’Or to Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum. But after much argument, the jury declared that both films would receive the festival’s highest honor.

The movie opens with Captain Willard (Sheen) drunk in a Saigon hotel room. His latest mission has him seeking out a rogue Special Forces colonel, Walter E. Kurtz (Brando). Kurtz has set up a private kingdom in eastern Cambodia, surrounded by Khmer, Montagnards, and AWOL American soldiers. There he has been waging a brutal, highly effective war against NVA, Viet Cong, and Khmer Rouge forces.

Like Conrad, Coppola first introduces Kurtz through legends, myths, and fragments of information. Kurtz is clearly an excellent tactician—far more capable than the men currently directing the war. But he has stopped responding to orders and is no longer communicating with his superiors. Unsure of what Kurtz might do next, the Army has ordered Willard to “terminate his command…with extreme prejudice.”

Coppola also gives us a memorable character who did not appear in Conrad’s book, Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall). Kilgore helps escort Willard and his team with an air assault and “Ride of the Valkyries” blasting on speakers. He also gives us one of the film’s most famous lines: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It’s the smell of victory.” Viewers watching the film four years after the fall of Saigon would have caught the irony immediately.

He also has ulterior motives for helping the crew. Lance (Sam Bottoms) is a former professional surfer; Kilgore is a talented amateur. He conquered the beachfront so the crew could set sail safely—and so Kilgore could get a chance to surf with one of his heroes. Kilgore’s dream of surfing with Lance, like his dream of an inevitable American victory, goes unfulfilled.

Twenty-first century audiences often remember Kilgore as a charismatic if eccentric hero. Audiences in 1979 remembered friends who came back in wheelchairs or body bags. For those theatregoers, Kilgore was a satire of the idea that bigger explosions, more helicopters, and greater firepower could compensate for a flawed strategy. They knew the cost America had paid for that error. Like Conrad’s officials, Lt. Col. Kilgore clings to myths despite clear evidence to the contrary.

At a Khmer temple turned jungle fortress, Willard finally meets Kurtz. He is surrounded by people who adore him. Colby, the first soldier sent out to terminate Kurtz, has joined his team. He may be equal parts prophet and madman, but Col. Kurtz has recognized the Vietnam war for what it is and has acknowledged something that generals and politicians refuse to admit. He believes he has discovered a workable plan for victory in Vietnam. All it requires is the will to do whatever must be done, no matter how cruel or brutal.

His famous speech about the pile of severed arms is not an attempt to justify an atrocity. Kurtz knows very clearly what it represents. But he is also aware that the US military cannot defeat men who are willing to sacrifice their humanity in service to a cause. American leaders remain trapped in the old myths of freedom, morality, and just wars. Kurtz has looked into the heart of darkness and he has seen the truth. He does not hate his enemy. He simply wants to win the war no matter the cost.

Nietzsche believed that in a world without inherited certainties, the new man would have to create new values for himself. Kurtz has rejected the certainties he inherited, the comforting myths of progress, patriotism, and morality. Nietzsche hoped this confrontation would produce stronger, more honest humans. Conrad was less optimistic. The abyss has not merely stared back into Kurtz. It has spoken, in his final dying words, of the horror.

Every generation produces new ideologies and new promises of redemption. The names, geography, and technology may change. But we still tell ourselves that we are acting in the name of some convenient myth, ideal, or slogan. We pretend the heart of darkness is located in a distant jungle, and we are only there for the most noble of reasons. Some of us can distract ourselves with our illusions. A few can no longer bear the lie. They walk in terror and they walk in blood. But they also walk without delusion. Every generation also produces its Kurtzes.

The Congo and the Nùng are separated by continents, oceans, and nearly a century of history. Yet Conrad’s tale still inspires pity and terror. Marlow and Willard looked into the heart of darkness and became people set apart; the myths that once brought them comfort now only inspired revulsion. Willard saw the heart of darkness in a Cambodian temple. Marlow saw it in an African outpost and at the mouth of the Thames. Both knew that the darkness did not make its home in Africa or Vietnam or anyplace else. It made its home in us.

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[1] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. (1899). At Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm.

[2] David Van Reybrouck. Congo: The Epic History of a People. (Sam Garrett, Tr). New York: Harper-Collins, 2014. 39.

Sade is easy to understand. There is no god, morality is an affectation, and strength comes from cruelty. Many assume Friedrich Nietzsche holds a similar philosophy: God is dead, the only worthwhile morality is that of the master, and the Übermensch cares only about gaining power, no matter the cost in bloodshed and suffering. They see Nietzsche’s writings as proto-Nazism, celebrations of violence that undergirded the fascist movements of subsequent decades.

They are wrong.

Nietzsche is one of our most readable philosophers. His pithy aphorisms and clean prose can be followed by a smart, angry fifteen-year-old. But reading and understanding are two different things. Young intellectuals who read Ayn Rand often see themselves as Howard Roark. Teenage Nietzscheans dream of being the Superman. They rarely stop to think that these authors might be criticizing their behavior rather than praising it. And I say this as a former fifteen-year-old who dreamed of being Howard Roark, Nietzschean Superman.

Today we largely understand Nietzsche as a caricature. He is condemned as a Nazi, though he broke with Wagner over his German nationalism and anti-Semitism. He is celebrated as a philosopher of cruelty, though his last sane act was to throw his arms around a beaten workhorse’s neck and shield it from a whipping. He is alternately praised and reviled for his vision of the Superman by readers who forget that the will to power was first and foremost a call for self-mastery.

The heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy is not cruelty, atheism, or brutality. It is the desperate search for meaning in a world whose certainties have collapsed.

In 1882, when Nietzsche released The Gay Science, atheism was coming out of the closets and into the streets. Two decades earlier, Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species had challenged the underpinnings of Christian creation mythology. Ludwig Feuerbach’s atheistic 1841 The Essence of Christianity led a young Karl Marx to write in a note “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Many intellectuals of the time were celebrating the Industrial Age and the triumph of Reason and Science over Superstition and Mythology. Nietzsche recognized something they missed. He saw that mythology was not simply soothing lies savages told each other to explain things they could not understand; it is the gestalt upon which we construct our worldview. Christianity had been the foundation of European civilization for centuries. Its assumptions shaped European law, morality, ethics, and cosmology. And now we had unchained the earth from its sun.

Today, many angry atheists treat “God is dead” as a cry of celebration. For Nietzsche, it was a shriek of horror. He foresaw that we would replace our dead faith with something new and terrible. The masters and supermen imagined by later generations were not his ideal. They were the shadows cast by a civilization struggling to find its way after the death of God. Nietzsche was not rooting for tyranny; he was pointing out that a civilization without gods will inevitably seek out new idols.

The year The Gay Science was published, Marx and Engels wrote a new preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto; they argued that Russian peasants might “serve as the starting point for a communist development.”[2] Six years earlier, a former rabbi named Felix Adler founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York. This secular society schooled children, brought doctors and nurses to the sick, and fulfilled many of the duties traditionally assigned to church organizations.

The Soviet Union may have fallen but billions of people still adhere to communist-inspired philosophies. Americans have come to expect the government to fulfill many of the material needs once met by the church. Secularism has become our default setting, and we have almost grown accustomed to a world without religion.

Or have we?

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20^th century pulp magazine readers devoured space operas and tales of star-spanning empires. Science became for many what religion had once been. It was no longer a toolkit for understanding phenomena but a force that would heal the sick, feed the poor, and lift us up to the heavens in rocket-powered chariots. Who needs angels when you have benevolent aliens?

This flavor of scientism became especially popular in post-WWII America; it reached its apex with the moon landings. Those old space operas seemed positively prescient. We were certain the moon was just our first stop; in a few decades, we would be colonizing space, eradicating disease, and eliminating hunger and poverty. Progress was the future and the future was progress.

Those dreams were challenged by an oil embargo, Watergate, and ongoing stagflation. By the 1980s, the future was looking less like Star Trek and more like Blade Runner and Alien. Technology was no longer a savior that was going to bring us into a new utopian age. It was a powerful tool, but one that could be and often was used for nefarious purposes by powerful interests. We didn’t lose trust in science, but we started looking askance at scientists. And even this was nothing new: we’ve seen “mad scientists” since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Mid-20^th century Scientism got a second wind with COVID-19. Once we would have gone to church in the face of plague rumors. During the epidemic, many declared they “trusted the science,” advertised their vaccination status, and called for the sternest punishments against heretics who spread “disinformation” about the virus.

On the other side, many declared adherence to yet another popular religious substitute—conspiracy theory. They not only declared the vaccines ineffective and possibly dangerous; they insisted the COVID vaccinations were part of a depopulation plan that was designed to kill millions. Some looked to public health officials; others relied on internet prophets. Both sought certainty in the face of fear and confusion.

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The two great Founding Fathers of Existentialism could hardly be more dissimilar. Søren Kierkegaard saw a complacent Christianity deteriorating into atheism. In response, he called on us to make the “leap of faith.” Nietzsche saw a world where faith was losing its authority. He asked us what we were going to do now that God is dead.

Kierkegaard’s role model was Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice Isaac despite his fear and trembling in response to God’s command. Nietzsche’s model was Zarathustra, coming down from the mountain with a prophecy of godlessness—a prophecy that he found every bit as horrifying as Abraham standing before Isaac bound to the altar.

Zarathustra’s Superman was not about superiority, domination, Aryan strength, or any of the other twaddle that often gets credited wrongly to Nietzsche. Rather, he was the man who was willing to look in the godless abyss and turn away toward the earth rather than denying it in search of a new phantasm. That Superman understands that we are tasked with creating our own meaning, and he sets about the difficult work of doing so.

Nietzsche contrasts the Superman to come with the “last man”—not a tyrant or a monster, but one whose highest aspirations are peace and comfort. As Zarathustra describes them:

Abraham is willing to sacrifice the son he loves for God. The Übermensch is willing to carve meaning out of uncertainty and build order out of chaos. The Last Man is unwilling to risk anything at all. He has chosen safety over growth and comfort over creation.

We can see traces of the Last Man in those who refuse the burden of creating meaning for themselves. Some lose themselves in entertainment and distraction. Some surrender their judgment to political movements or ideological tribes. Still others adopt ready-made identities and wear them like uniforms. Each path promises the same thing: certainty without struggle, belonging without self-examination, and meaning without creation.

If you listen closely, you can hear them all whistling past the graveyard. If you’re wise, you’ll take a long and hard look in the mirror.

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If we must create our own values, where did our old values come from in the first place? Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil sought to answer that question. Traditionally, we believed our ethical codes came from on high, carved in stone tablets or revealed by the Holy Spirit. But now that God was dead, we needed to take a closer look at the moral codes we once considered divine commandments. If morality did not originate in Heaven, where did it come from?

Nietzsche’s goal was not to replace Christian morality with “might makes right.” He wanted instead to understand how we arrived at the ideas we inherited from religious traditions—and whether those traditional ideas could still survive in a Godless world.

Even today many atheists who reject Christian theology still cling to ideas about compassion, equality, dignity, and human worth. Nietzsche might well agree that some of those ideas had merit. But he raised two unnerving questions: how long can they last after the religious framework that supported them no longer exists, and what will replace them?

Nietzsche realized that ethical philosophers offered “eternal truths” that squared with their pre-existing personal values. The internet has let us see the rise and growth of different ethical systems up close and personal. The death of God has done nothing to stop online tribalism, political grandstanding, and religious wars without religion. Our godless society still demands orthodoxy, punishes heresy, and excommunicates those who ask inconvenient questions.

He further believed that many moral systems, particularly Christian morality, arise not out of strength or wisdom, but ressentiment. Ressentiment is a way by which the disempowered transform weakness into virtue and power into vice. I have questions about this interpretation; for one thing, it doesn’t account for the many canonized warrior saints. But I cannot deny that there is a special kind of spiteful virtue that you find only in the most loudly moral people.

This spiteful virtue has become a hallmark of online political discourse. Many try to prove themselves to be “decent human beings” by wishing death and disease upon their opponents, by cheering when members of the other team are wounded or killed, by gloating at the other side’s distress and suffering. Nietzsche would have recognized this pattern immediately. The language of morality often conceals emotions that are anything but moral.

Nietzsche believed Christianity wrapped ressentiment in pious language and divine justifications. Modern politics dresses it in different costumes. Sometimes it appears wrapped in rainbow flags; sometimes it wears a MAGA hat. The symbols change, but the underlying impulse remains. God may be dead, but we still cling to old behaviors as we bow before our new idols.

Like Marx, Nietzsche was a diagnostician of modernity. Both understood that the old certainties were collapsing beneath industrialization, secularization, and social change. Unlike Marx, he had deep concerns about our ability to rebuild a better new world from the wreckage of the old one. Marx thought that religion was the opiate of the masses and that we would build a more just and fair society once we got clean. Nietzsche realized that the collapse of traditional beliefs was not something you could paper over with slogans, political theories, or economic reforms.

Nietzsche did not kill God; he simply wrote the obituary and warned us all of what we had lost. Over a century after his death, we are still grappling with his funeral speech. He knew that a civilization stripped of its old gods would inevitably create new ones. We would replace the old truths with new orthodoxies, new prophets, and new heresies. We have not escaped religion so much as scattered it into thousands of competing faiths. We have declared ourselves our own gods, only to discover that we have neither creed nor congregation.

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. (Walter Kaufmann, tr.) New York: Vintage Books, 1974. 188.

[2] Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: Preface to the 1882 German Edition. At Marxists.net. https://www.marxist.net/marx/m2frame.htm?communist.htm.

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. (Thomas Common, tr). Available at Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm.

[4] Ibid.

A few minutes after the World Trade Center attack, a man in a business suit handed NYPD Detective Yuk H. Chin a passport issued to Satam al-Suqami. Later investigations revealed that al-Suqami was one of the hijackers on Flight 11, the jet that crashed into the North Tower.

It seems counterintuitive that a passport would survive such a fiery crash. From the beginning the al-Suqami passport was taken as evidence that 9/11 was a controlled demolition, with the passport conveniently “found” to shift attention and blame to a group of terrorists. You would expect a paper passport to be shredded by the blast force and seared to ashes in the fireball.

The 9/11 Commission held on January 26, 2004, displayed four hijacker passports. One was found intact; Abdul Aziz al Omari’s luggage did not make it from his Portland flight to the Boston/NYC leg of his trip (Flight 11). Two badly damaged terrorist passports were recovered from the Pennsylvania crash site of Flight 93. And inspectors found the UA 175 boarding pass of Mohand al-Shehri, one of the hijackers, amidst the wreckage of the South Tower.

But in some circles, the 9/11 Commission findings only served to make its case less credible. Doubters noted, quite rightly, that governments often lie. Politicians are infamous for telling prospective voters what they want to hear and making promises they have no intention of keeping. Espionage is a notoriously dirty business and disinformation gets passed out like Halloween candy.

But their justified skepticism hardened into an absolute principle: if the government says it’s true, it must be false. They were no longer taking official sources with a grain of salt; they were salting the fields. Distrust of government sources became distrust of anything that challenged their conclusions. Their beliefs could no longer be falsified, because contrary evidence was not questioned but rejected outright.

So do I believe 9/11 was an inside job?

Honest answer: I don’t know.

The people who came on the train as I was going home that morning all appeared traumatized. Several said that they saw planes strike the Towers. Everyone I spoke to who had witnessed the attacks described planes. I never encountered anyone who claimed to have seen explosions in the absence of aircraft. I’m inclined by the law of parsimony to think that those eyewitnesses were describing what they saw, especially since it aligns with the available photo and video evidence.

Staging a fake event in downtown Manhattan and convincing thousands of eyewitnesses they saw planes would be an enormously involved and costly undertaking. Even then, you would have at least a few people coming forward to say everyone else was wrong. Sure, the government could silence them with threats or assassinations. But since they haven’t yet done so with “9/11 Truth” movement leaders, I’m not sure they’re that dedicated to their Big Lie.

Before 9/11, we had a very clear image of what an airplane hijacking looked like. The plane was diverted to a different airport. There the passengers endured long hours of boredom until the hijackers made a deal or until authorities stormed the plane. We didn’t imagine hijackers turning jets full of passengers into guided missiles. Osama bin Laden did. Don’t underestimate the capabilities of nineteen men who found a security loophole and who are willing to die for their cause.

Is it possible that bin Laden received help from other governments? Absolutely. There are lots of governments who have tense or hostile relations with America, including major players like Russia and China. There may have been elements within the Saudi government who looked the other way while bin Laden recruited his team. Many have noted America got more pro-Zionist and anti-Palestine after 9/11, so Israel may have had a vested interest in bin Laden’s success.

More than a few have even suggested that American agents helped bin Laden. 9/11 helped American politicians get the PATRIOT Act through with little debate. It provided the military-industrial complex with lucrative contracts for our Afghanistan and Iraq wars. If we were reading an Agatha Christie novel, we’d note that all our suspects have credible motivations, and few have airtight alibis.

Alas, governments are rarely so logical and well-organized as an Agatha Christie mystery. Few historical catastrophes are wrapped up in a few chapters with the villains punished and the village restored to its usual peace and harmony. Political events often involve reams of conflicting and contradictory evidence, partisan interpretations, and a final report with lots of possibilities but very little certainty.

We were storytelling apes before we were toolmaking apes. We like tales that resolve with a clearly defined beginning and end. We sort our characters into good guys and bad guys by ethnicities, flags, religions, political affiliations, or (occasionally) ethical codes. But the world only rarely provides us that degree of clarity. Lacking that, we find ourselves searching for answers—and constructing our own when reality refuses to provide them.

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Did social disintegration lead to our increased interest in conspiracy stories, or did conspiracy stories lead to our ongoing social disintegration? Ultimately, what divides us is not conspiracy stories so much as the fact that we’re suddenly faced with many different stories—so many that it becomes difficult to determine which ones we find believable. We no longer have to rely on our television or our local newspaper to tell us what’s going on in the world; in fact, we don’t even have to rely on journalists.

Today anybody with a ringlight, camera, and microphone can set themselves up as podcaster. Some have become very successful. An average episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast attracts between 11 and 15 million listeners. CNN averaged 683,00 total primetime viewers for the week of May 5, 2026; during that same period, Fox News averaged 1.57 million total viewers.

Some sort their way the all-you-can-eat buffet of possibilities by sticking to the tried and the true and rejecting “fake news” from “disinformation providers.” There is certainly lots of questionable information on the Internet, much of ranging from silly to actively dangerous. But the algorithms care primarily about one thing: does this story attract engagement? A false story that gets clicks, eyeballs, and comments will travel further than a true story that does not.

Mainstream media has been hemorrhaging cash for a couple of decades now. They have always relied on advertising, and now they know exactly what stories are most easily monetized. As a result, we’ve seen a shift away from the appearance of neutrality and efforts to appeal to readers across the political spectrum and toward greater polarization and segmentation. Journalists are starting to sound more like podcasters, because that’s what their listeners want to hear.

Viral stories draw subscribers and add dollars. That cold economic fact shapes the way even the most honest journalists and editors decide on what they write and what gets printed. Whether you choose NPR, Fox News, or your favorite podcaster, you’re still getting information from a source that has bills to pay. Donor priorities, advertiser concerns, and economic realities all shape what gets covered and how it is presented. But the greatest concern of all is audience expectations.

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We like to imagine ourselves as seekers after truth. More often what we seek is reassurance. We want truths that prop up our worldview, not raze it to the ground. We’re inclined to consume information that fits our preconceptions. And as our preconceptions grow increasingly shaky, we’re apt to start screaming at people who question them.

Let’s take a look at this entirely fictitious conversation between Jake Goldstein, DDS and Arturo Rodriguez, a pro-Palestinian activist and protestor. But before we get started, let’s make these characters something more than their beliefs.

Jake is a secular, left-leaning Jew. None of his relatives died in the Holocaust, at least none that he knows about. His family has been in America for around 150 years now; he visited Israel once but found the food mediocre and the people abrasive. He used to donate to Peace Now, but became more pro-Israel after October 7.

Arturo is not an anti-Semite; his partner Isaac is Jewish, and so are many of his friends in the pro-Palestinian cause. His family was Pentecostal Christian, and strong supporters of Israel by way of Left Behind and similar literature. His church disowned him after he came out, and visits to his family, as with many families, remain awkward but loving despite it all.

If they had met in Jake’s dental office, they would likely have a pleasant conversation, at least as pleasant as a dental visit can be. Alas, they met on the sidewalk where Jake is trying to get to the subway and Arturo is holding up a sign that says STOP THE PALESTINIAN HOLOCAUST. Arturo is a few inches shorter than Jake. The first thing he sees is the Star of David necklace; the second thing he sees is Jake’s contemptuous frown as he stares at the sign.

“That’s the most ignorant thing I’ve read all week. And I’m on Facebook.”

Arturo raises an eyebrow. “I guess you only care about certain genocides.”

“I guess you support genocides if they’re aimed at the right people.”

Jake storms away; Arturo shoots him the finger as he walks past, but Jake doesn’t turn around to see it. Each is now convinced the other is not just wrong but morally depraved. Both are wrong.

These three sentences are emblematic of most social media political discussions. Two reasonable, likable people are standing up for causes they believe in. Each believes they are fighting against evil. Their conversation ends after three sentences with each believing the other evil. There is neither room for nor interest in dialogue.

When you see the world as a Manichaean struggle against light and darkness, you’re going to find an awful lot of darkness. One of the great attractions of conspiracy theory is it provides you with a map and gives you the feeling you understand the monsters lurking in the shadows. The fact that powerful forces are working for your personal destruction is scary, but it also means you are important enough to attract attention from powerful forces. Gangstalkers are less painful than loneliness.

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If I found out tomorrow that the CIA and Mossad collaborated with Osama bin Laden in the 9/11 attacks, I would be outraged. Most Americans would. But after the initial emotional shock, my life would return to normal. If I discovered the actual Holocaust death toll was 600,000 or 12 million, I would take a hard look at how the claimant arrived at those numbers. If they proved compelling, I would change my worldview.

No change in the historical record will bring back the dead. The families kneeling in front of a ditch waiting for the bullets are dead. The workers who died when the towers collapsed are dead. Finding out precisely who was behind their murder, or renumbering their death tolls, will bring no resurrection.

Conspiracy theories give us stories, but they rarely suggest solutions. The Satanic pedophiles remain at large; the Elders of Zion maintain their stranglehold on world finance; the alien reptiles continue to rule over us. They give us the semblance of knowledge, but that knowledge does nothing to change your world. Thought without action is powerless; so is knowing without doing.

Jake and Arturo are not entirely wrong in their convictions. There are pro-Zionists who would happily see every Palestinian killed; there are pro-Palestinians who would happily see every Israeli slaughtered. Both men know such monsters exist. Their mistake is assuming they just met one. Conspiracy theories tell you those monsters rule over you, and anyone who says differently is either misguided or complicit. They give you a world with more villains than neighbors.

The opposite of conspiracy theory is not blind trust in the media, the science, or the government. It is the willingness to admit that we may be wrong and our enemies may be right. It is understanding that most people are neither saints nor monsters. It is neither certainty nor cynicism; it is humility.

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Four days ago, a group nobody had ever heard of knocked down the World Trade Center. Today we know who Al Qaeda is. We also know how a destroyed skyscraper smells: sharp and metallic, with hints of aerosolized toner cartridge, melted nylon carpet, burning hair, and other things you try hard not to identify. The stink is bad in Brooklyn. Here in Manhattan, it’s worse.

The subway is running again. Several stops are closed because they are now full of rubble. I was on the last train out of New York, on my way home from my third shift job. A stony-faced man got on the E train at City Hall and said two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. At the next stop, closer to the towers, the new riders were weeping. I had my head between my legs, trying not to faint, trying not to think about my girlfriend, who had just come into lower Manhattan for her first shift job.

Voltaire is taking the stage. It’s a Goth benefit. Lots of people are drinking, including Voltaire. I’m not. I’ve been sober for six years, and I know a drink won’t make me feel better. I keep telling myself that. Voltaire puts down his drink, picks up his guitar, and starts playing “Feathery Wings.” It’s one of his signature songs. So is “When You’re Evil,” but he isn’t going to be playing that one tonight.

Kathy isn’t here. She saw the second tower get hit and felt the Brooklyn Bridge sway with its collapse as she walked home. We usually go out every weekend, but she didn’t feel up to it tonight. I didn’t feel up to staying home.

Voltaire chokes back a sob at the second line, “And you, there on the wall, where will you go to once you fall?” He stops, tunes his guitar, and begins again. I’m choking back sobs myself. I haven’t cried since she got back to our apartment and I knew for certain Kathy was still alive.

I was back at the office yesterday. I spent my entire shift going through Outlook contacts and removing any with World Trade Center addresses. Every deleted address meant somebody had to find a new office. Or that they no longer needed one. I couldn’t stop thinking of Kafka. A dominatrix friend of mine is here. She told me over half her clients worked in the WTC and she’s still not sure how many she lost.

Voltaire gets all the way to

before the song breaks down to the sounds of crying. He pauses for a moment to catch his breath. On the third try he makes it through the song without bawling. Most of the audience does not. We stand in the dark mourning. For one brief moment, there is no history, there is no politics, there is no War on Terror. There is only grief.

In hindsight 9/11 seems inevitable. At the time it was unthinkable. The Soviet Union had been gone for a decade; America was now the world’s sole superpower. Business was booming in New York and jobs were plentiful. The Internet was redefining free speech; Usenet was home to Nazis, Communists, and everything in between. We had won the Gulf War handily; the 1993 World Trade Center blast was unnerving, but less bloody than the homegrown 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. On September 10, 2001, the future seemed brighter than it has since.

It’s difficult to explain how confident we were at the dawn of the 21^st century. We believed progress was inevitable as certainly as postwar SF writers believed we would soon be building cities on the moon. We expected that tomorrow would be better than today because, for years, it had been. There was plenty of cynicism among New Yorkers, as always. But on September 10, 2001, it was the cynicism of prosperity and comfort, more affectation than conviction. On September 15, we no longer had those soothing illusions.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani had never been popular among liberal New Yorkers. But on 9/11 he presented himself as a strong, assertive leader who helped guide us through the chaos. The club kids and limousine liberals didn’t necessarily like Rudy more, but they gained a certain degree of grudging respect for him.

The Big Apple continued, however, to look unfavorably on George W. Bush. In the weeks that followed, many Americans embraced the PATRIOT Act’s expanding security state as the price of safety. Left-leaning New Yorkers feared that the powers created to fight terrorists would eventually be turned on political opponents. But across the political spectrum we all agreed on one thing: the world no longer felt like a safe place.

The entertainment industry’s response to 9/11 was at first notable by absences. Spider-Man’s November 2001 release was postponed so producers could remove images of the Twin Towers. The Simpsons pulled its 1997 episode “The City of New York vs Homer Simpson” from syndication because it took place at the World Trade Center. Clear Channel circulated a list of “lyrically questionable” songs that included Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

Buildings disappeared from films. Television episodes vanished from rotation. Songs acquired meanings their authors had never intended. The country was still trying to decide which reminders were comforting and which were unbearable. For months, America seemed afraid of its own reflection. We could not make 9/11 go away, so we tried not to look at the empty space they left behind.

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According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Stages of Grief, Denial gives way to Anger. By October 7, 2001, we were at war with Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom led to two decades of insurgency while American troops kept a tenuous hold on Kabul. On March 20, 2003 we launched a “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign against Iraq that culminated in an eight-year occupation.

Whether these wars made Americans safer remains a matter of debate. What they unquestionably did was transform grief into action. We could not strike back at the nineteen hijackers, but we could invade countries, topple governments, and convince ourselves we were still in control.

By 2008, Americans were mired in a financial crisis and tired of the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Bush’s approval ratings had collapsed, and many Americans felt we had taken a wrong turn after 9/11. If Anger had failed to heal us, perhaps Hope could. Barack Obama made “Hope and Change” his slogan. Many Americans hoped that by electing the first Black president, we could close the books on both our troubled racial history and the politics of the post-9/11 era.

Kübler-Ross’s third Stage of Grief is Bargaining. Terminally ill patients desperately try to negotiate or make deals in an attempt to regain predictability and avoid pain. They promise to change their lives if only they can live to see their children graduate; they promise to be better people if only they can get through this crisis.

Nations bargain too. For many post-9/11 Americans, Obama was our promise to do better: by electing the first Black president, we hoped to move beyond the ongoing wars. Perhaps we could heal our racial divisions; perhaps we could recover from the financial crisis; perhaps we could repair what the post-9/11 years had broken.

But, as Kübler-Ross reminds, Bargaining is often futile. Under Obama’s watch the wars continued. Guantánamo remained open. The surveillance state continued to expand. The recovery from the financial crisis largely benefited corporations and high wealth investors, while working Americans continued to struggle. And so Bargaining gave way to the fourth Stage of Grief, Depression.

In 2001, the suicide rate was 10.7 per 100,000 Americans. By 2016 that number had risen to 13.5, a 30% increase.[1] In 2024 it was between 13.7 and 14.1. In 2015 Anne Case and Agnus Deaton, two Princeton University economists, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe deaths by suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease and cirrhosis. The phrase resonated because millions of Americans felt trapped between a future that had failed to arrive and a past that could not be recovered.

By the end of Obama’s presidency, the legislative branch was plagued by gridlock and the electorate had become largely polarized. Trump’s 2016 victory kicked those trends into overdrive. His voters hoped he would Make America Great Again; his opponents remembered his role in perpetuating the “fake Obama birth certificate” myth and his calls to execute the Central Park Five. That split has not healed to this day.

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September 11 did not “cause” the victories of either Barack Obama or Donald Trump any more than JFK’s assassination led to Watergate and the Nixon resignation. Historical events rarely have any single cause. But September 11, 2001 and November 22, 1963 both marked the death of an era and the birth of another. Both shattered assumptions America had come to take for granted and created the conditions for new cultural movements to arise.

There were many conspiracy theories floating around well before Lee Harvey Oswald carried his rifle to Dealey Plaza. Americans had spent decades worrying about Communist plots, and those fears were often justified. We knew the Soviets lied. But after the Warren Commission report, many Americans came to believe that our government was lying as well. Combined with mounting evidence that officials had misrepresented the course of the Vietnam War, this pervasive distrust set the stage for Nixon’s fall.

There had been questions about the role “hanging chads” played in George W. Bush’s 2000 victory. I remember seeing images Dubya’s head in crosshairs and the caption “Who Would Jesus Assassinate?” both online and in the East Village streets. 9/11 did not create political polarization; if anything, it briefly interrupted it. For a few weeks, grief overshadowed politics.

There were people who believed 9/11 was an inside job from the beginning, although not so many as today. Great catastrophes create a powerful temptation to find simple, easily digestible answers. The possibility that nineteen men with box cutters and determination can alter history is more frightening than a vast conspiracy. Conspiracies imply control. Randomness, incompetence, and vulnerability do not.

So when do we move on to Kübler-Ross’s final Stage of Grief, Acceptance? As often happens with grief, we have circled between the earlier Stages for years. We may come to terms with 9/11 only after we face down a new catastrophe, or after the World Trade Center fades from living memory like Pearl Harbor. Collective grief is part of our cultural birthright as much as collective joy. It never goes away; it simply changes shape.

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[1] Holly Hedegaard, M.D., Sally C. Curtin, M.A., and Margaret Warner, Ph.D. “Suicide Rates in the United States Continue to Increase.” NCHS Data Brief No. 309, June 2018. At National Center for Health Statistics, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db309.htm.

[2] Aurelio Voltaire, “Feathery Wings.” (2000)

Most great crime drama heroes have clear, distinctive, memorable personalities. Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Jack Carter, Tony Soprano—you know who they are and what they stand for. Patricia Highsmith’s Thomas Ripley is a protagonist who creates memorable characters to suit the occasion. You watch him with a horrified fascination and root for him despite your revulsion. Yet at the end of the story you know no more about Thomas Ripley unmasked than you did when you began.

When we first meet Tom in the 1956 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, he is sharing a furnished room with a friend, running a tax fraud scheme, and looking over his shoulder for police. Then he meets Richard Greenleaf, Dickie Greenleaf’s father. Tom was recommended through a friend of a friend; Dickie is in Europe and does not wish to come home, and Richard hopes that Tom can persuade him to return to the family business.

It is a simple errand that might lead to a decent paycheck and a free trip to Europe. But Tom is more interested in the possibilities than the money. He has reasons to be out of New York, though we never discover precisely what those reasons are. What is abundantly clear is that he considers his current circle of acquaintances to be a bunch of “crumbs,” and hopes to create a different life across the sea.

Tom’s ocean voyage takes him to the fictitious southern Italian resort town of Mongibello. He ingratiates himself with Dickie through charm, wit, and a few white lies. Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, distrusts Tom and suspects he’s “queer.” But Tom’s attraction to Dickie is more than simply sexual. He admires Dickie’s wealth, confidence and bearing and wishes not to sleep with Dickie so much as to become him. When Tom senses that he is wearing out his welcome, admiration gives way to desperation. He murders Dickie and assumes his identity.

With Dickie’s body safely weighted and underwater, Tom takes his clothes and purchases a fake passport in his name. He continues corresponding with Marge and the Greenleafs as Dickie, while scrupulously avoiding anyone who knew both of them. This works until Frederick Miles tracks down Dickie and discovers Tom living in Dickie’s apartment. Tom solves the problem with several ashtray blows to Frederick’s head, disposes of the body, and spends the next several chapters trying to mollify detectives who want to know who killed Frederick.

Ultimately Tom reluctantly realizes that Dickie must depart. Police have found the boat where Tom killed him. They know where Dickie is, but they can’t find Tom—and they are beginning to suspect that Dickie murdered him. While they are closer to the truth than they might imagine, Tom surprises them. He shows up as himself and clears Dickie of suspicion. He does, however, note Dickie seemed depressed when he last saw him, and hopes he hasn’t done anything rash.

But Tom becomes Dickie one more time when he creates a last will and testament that Tom later “discovers.” He can no longer withdraw money from Dickie’s bank account, so there is likely a bit of desperation behind his act. But Highsmith leaves open another interpretation: in turning over his trust fund to his dear friend Tom, the Dickie persona is re-establishing their friendship. The forgery is both financial and emotional. And, despite Tom’s fears, it works.

As the story ends, Tom has not only gotten away with two murders. He has enough income to spend the rest of his life as a man of leisure. He no longer needs to become Dickie Greenleaf, because he has inherited Dickie Greenleaf’s life.

In 1971’s Ripley Under Ground, Ripley is now married to a beautiful French heiress and living in a charming country estate outside Paris. Between Dickie Greenleaf’s trust fund and his wife’s inheritance, he enjoys a comfortable life supplemented by Ripley’s participation in an organized art fraud.

Several years earlier an obscure painter named Derwatt went missing. His disappearance sparked a new fascination with the reclusive artist and dramatically increased the price of his surviving works. Ripley and a few associates capitalized on that interest by creating new “Derwatt” paintings that were supposedly painted in Derwatt’s studio in an obscure Mexican village. Derwatt has only been seen once since his withdrawal from society. On that occasion, he was played by Thomas Ripley in a fake beard.

Duchamp gave us a urinal; Patricia Highsmith gives us the murder of an art collector who has discovered the later Derwatt works were forgeries. Both ask the same question: why is this not art? Bernard Tufts, the artist who has produced the Derwatt forgeries, does such a good job that critics praise the natural evolution of Derwatt’s style. People pay large sums of money for the new Derwatts; some even prefer them to Derwatt’s earlier work.

For Thomas Murchison, an art collector, authorship means everything. He is less concerned with the quality of the painting than with the fact that “Derwatt” didn’t use his signature straight cobalt violet paint. When Tom confesses and tries to explain, Murchison promises to bring law enforcement into the matter. And so once again Ripley finds himself in an unfortunate situation—unfortunate, that is, for Mr. Murchison.

To make matters worse, Bernard, the painter, is having an existential crisis. He refuses to make any more Derwatt paintings because he feels like he is becoming Derwatt. Tom, who has made a life out of becoming other people, can’t understand why this is a problem. Still, he genuinely likes Bernard and worries about his mental state. Even after Bernard tries to kill him twice, Tom remains more concerned with Bernard’s well-being than his own safety.

Once again Tom is forced to rely on his talents. Derwatt makes a brief public appearance to reassure everybody that those forgery rumors are entirely untrue. Tom takes advantage of Bernard’s suicide by cremating his corpse, then passing it off as the body of the suicidal Derwatt. The sequel ends on a more ambiguous note than the first novel; police are still asking questions, but Ripley is confident that he will make it through this awkwardness. He always does.

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Thomas Ripley is an illusionist who reshapes the truth to get what he wants. Edith Howland is an illusionist who creates alternate truths when reality becomes too painful. Ripley may be a con artist and sociopath—OK, he is a con artist and sociopath—but he never falls for his own lies. Edith Howland defends her lies desperately even as they carry her into madness.

Edith’s Diary opens in 1955, with Edith and her family leaving New York City for the suburbs. This is a typical mid-20^th century American dream, and the Howlands appear at first to be a typical family. Until you notice Cliffie, their 10-year-old son, trying to suffocate Mildew the cat.

Cliffie’s delinquent behavior continues as he steals a football within a few days of arriving at his new school. When he’s scolded for damaging the Christmas turkey, he runs out of the house and jumps off a bridge. Ten years later, he is a shiftless alcoholic. His father, Brett, has left the family to move in with his secretary, a woman barely older than Cliffie. Their suburban dream has come crashing down around them.

As her life comes crashing down, Edith takes solace in her diary. Cliffie is not an occasional waiter who steals his great-uncle’s codeine; he is an engineer in Kuwait with a wife and a child. The worse Cliffie’s behavior becomes in real life, the greater his accomplishments in Edith’s diary. And when Brett’s great-uncle George dies of a codeine overdose at Cliffie’s hands, Edith retreats further into her fantasy.

The diary begins as a refuge; she tries to forget her disappointment and heartbreak by imagining a more comfortable alternate timeline. But as pressures continue to mount, she finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. Cliffie the successful businessman and his loving family become more real to her than the drunk sleeping downstairs. Political arguments become dumping grounds for emotional toxic waste.

By the time she begins typing bizarre screeds about President McUlp and imaginary conspiracies, the diary has ceased to be a record of reality. Instead it has become a replacement for it. The final chapters of Edith’s Diary chronicle her slow descent into hell. Cliffie spends years mourning a woman he met on one awkward date; Edith creates statues of Diary-Cliffie’s wife and children. Efforts by neighbors and family to intervene are only met with hostility.

The story ends with Edith dead in the basement after she slips on the stairs while trying to escape imaginary guards who have come to take her to a mental hospital. In what may be the closest thing to hope in this story, Cliffie acknowledges that his mother is dead and his lost love is not coming back. Unlike Edith, he still has the power to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Highsmith was notorious for angry political screeds about Jews, race, politics, and international affairs. Numerous friends and acquaintances cut her off for her sharp and loud opinions. Like Thomas Ripley, she took their reactions and her emotions and asked “where does this road go if you follow it to the end?”

Many writers praise brutal honesty: few have the courage to turn that honesty on themselves. Patricia Highsmith did. She neither used Edith as a mouthpiece nor as a caricature. Instead, she followed Edith’s fears, resentments, disappointments, and fantasies to their logical conclusion—and the result is one of the most unsettling portraits of self-deception in modern fiction.

Tom Ripley survives because he knows his performances are illusions. Edith mistakes her illusions for reality and dies. Cliffie, the drunken fail-son, is the hinge between them. He stands on the brink of the abyss that claimed his mother but finds the strength to turn away. He may keep drinking; he may continue to drift between menial jobs; he may have a long string of dates that turn out no better than his first and, to date, last one. But Cliffie can still recognize the truth, and that is as close as you get to redemption in a Patricia Highsmith novel.

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[1] Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley • Ripley Under Ground • Ripley’s Game • The Boy Who Followed Ripley. London: Chancellor Press, 1994.18

[2] Highsmith, 217.

[3] Patricia Highsmith, Edith’s Diary. (1977) London: Little Brown, Company, 2015. E-book.

As an increasingly angry Paris protested against a decadent and corrupt clergy and nobility, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade watched from the window of his Versailles cell. The Marquis had already spent over a decade in captivity for his libertine excesses. But on that 2 July 1789 evening, Sade decided that he would once again break the rules that bound him.

Using part of his chamber pot as a megaphone, Sade screamed to the crowd that the guards were killing the prisoners. But despite his escape efforts, the rioters were unconvinced and the guards unamused. Two days later Sade was moved to an insane asylum at Charenton on the Paris outskirts. He was there on 14 July when the revolutionaries finally stormed the Bastille.

Sade had been held under lettres de cachet, a royal order of confinement. Under the ancien régime the king had the absolute power to enforce actions and confine individuals simply by writing a letter and sealing it with the royal seal (cachet). On March 1790 lettres de cachet were abolished by the National Constituent Assembly and Sade was released a few days later.

Given his noble lineage, one might expect that Sade was jumping out of the frying pan and on to the guillotine. But the Revolution’s militant atheists appreciated Sade’s attacks on the clergy and on Christian morality. They saw his debauched libertines as satirical attacks on the corrupt elite.

For his part Sade was happy to play the persecuted freethinker. But since “noble” was no longer an occupation, he needed a job. He had spent long years writing to amuse himself and was still mourning the manuscripts he lost when he was transferred from the Bastille. Pressed for money and fearful of going back to prison, the erstwhile Marquis reinvented himself as a man of letters.

Theatre was particularly popular in Revolutionary France, and it was easier to make quick money with a hit play than with novels that might take years to become popular. But try as he may to bowdlerize his writing for audiences, few playhouses were willing to risk Sade’s plays. When he was finally able to stage Oxtiern, or The Misfortunes of Libertinage, it was canceled after two performances and a review describing the lead character as a “revolting atrocity.”

As his career as a playwright crashed and burned, Sade turned the manuscripts he had been able to save. Revolutionary France was caught up in la foutromanie (fuckomania) and pornographic pamphlets were all the rage. But even the Revolution’s most ardent coomers weren’t ready for Sade. A review of his anonymously published 1791 Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue noted that “the imagination that produced such a monstrous work … is rich and brilliant in its kind” but went on to recommend:

As the Revolution entered the days of the Terror, Sade’s noble lineage became increasingly unpalatable. In 16 September 1792 Sade’s family chateau at La Coste was ransacked by the locals. And foutromanie was giving way to a new Puritanism as the sans-cullotes looked askance on libertinage.

On 8 December 1793 (18 frumaire II of the Revolutionary Calendar) Citoyen Sade was arrested. Robespierre was a deist who proposed a Cult of the Supreme Being and a state which would allow men to be free only insofar as they were good. Sade’s militant perversion and atheism were everything he opposed.

Robespierre’s men arrived on 9 thermidor II (27 July 1794) at the hospital where Sade was being held. They left with 23 of the 28 persons listed on their warrant. Sade was on that warrant but marked “absent.” That night 21 of Sade’s fellow convicts went to the scaffold. The next day Robespierre joined them. Sade had evaded Mme. Guillotine but would spend several more months in jail before his release.

For the next six years a free Sade would eke out a living in grinding poverty: by 1799 he was registered as an indigent. With the 1800 rise of Napoleon, Sade’s situation improved a bit: he was confident enough to publish Crimes of Love under his own name. But that led many outraged readers to connect his style with earlier anonymous works like Juliette and Philosophy in the Bedroom. By 1801 Sade was back at the Charenton asylum, where he would reside until his 1814 death.

Upon his death Sade’s works were largely suppressed as the vilest sort of pornography. But, as Sade might have guessed, suppression only served to spark underground interest. Nothing is quite so alluring as that which is forbidden, and so Sade’s texts continued to circulate among libertines and literary decadents. Yet it would be decades before his writings became an object of philosophical inquiry rather than private entertainment.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humans were inherently good in their natural state, and only turned evil once they became civilized. His vision of a society governed with the consent of the governed rested on that belief. Rousseau’s Social Contract was an enormous influence on America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence and France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Sade, in contrast, argued that humanity’s real natural drives were pleasure, self-interest, and cruelty. Christians who accept mankind’s fallen state would agree, though they would posit a workaround that Sade rejects out of hand. For Humanists, Sade’s claim is a blasphemous rejection of the very idea that humans can be enlightened.

Humanists thought we could make better people through social justice, education, compassion, and cooperation. But while they waxed rhapsodic about the natural man, Sade noted that in nature the strong eat the weak. Sadeans indulge their cruelty on whom they will and enjoy the pleasure of a victim’s pain. The fully liberated Sadean does not transcend cruelty but embraces it, finding pleasure not only in satisfying his desires but in exercising power over others.

It is not surprising that the revolutionaries who freed Sade ultimately found him as distasteful as the Ancien Régime had before them. They saw him not as the fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals but as their negation. You may, however, note that both Rousseau-inspired revolutions had a decidedly mixed record for encouraging good behavior and improving human morality.

Later thinkers have questioned the goodness of men. Looking at humanity from prehistoric to present times, they find precious little evidence of humanity’s inherent goodness. Many have turned away from Rousseau’s sunny optimism and found themselves wandering in the dark forest of Sadean thought. Few have accepted his answers, but all have found they could no longer ignore his questions.

In 1886, Sigmund Freud opened a clinic in Vienna. Freud’s clinical work developed into the Freudian school of psychoanalysis. Like Sade, Freud focused on the sex drive and considered sexual repression to be the root of many psychological and sociological ills. Human beings, Freud concluded, were driven not only toward pleasure and creation but also toward destruction, repetition, and self-annihilation.

In 1900 Freud recognized the Lustprinzip (Pleasure Principle) in his The Interpretation of Dreams. In the wake of World War I, he came to recognize the Todestreib (Death Drive) in 1920’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For Freud and those who came after him, Sade became not a libertine but a case study.

Sade’s fascination with cruelty suggests aggression turned outward; his themes of degradation, humiliation, and destruction hint at aggression turned inward. His recreation of scenes suggests Freud’s repetition compulsion—the mind’s tendency to return endlessly to unresolved conflicts and traumas. Sade’s works were now read not as sin but as pathology, as evidence that the civilized Self imagined by the Enlightenment was driven by darker impulses.

Albert Camus discussed Sade at length in his 1951 book The Rebel, which described the Marquis as an early supporter of totalitarianism in the name of unbridled freedom. Simone de Beauvoir expressed similar misgivings in her long essay, though she ultimately gave a qualified no to her question “Must We Burn Sade?” Yet not everyone approached Sade as a warning. While Camus and Beauvoir treated him as a problem to be explained, others celebrated him as a prophet to be embraced.

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Francophones consider Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) one of France’s greatest poets. You may recognize two words he coined: cubisme and surréalisme. Apollinaire numbered André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, and many other luminaries among his circle of friends.

Like many other creatives then and now, Apollinaire supported himself with a day job. His position as a librarian at the Paris national library gave him access to the enfer (forbidden) section. There he discovered and compiled selections from many of Sade’s works in a 1909 anthology entitled L’Œuvre du Marquis de Sade.

In his introduction, Apollinaire praised Sade for transcending his lengthy imprisonment and becoming “the freest man who ever lived” through his writings. His prediction that Sade would become a major influence on 20th century literature proved self-fulfilling. Apollinaire’s work introduced the great pornographer to the Surrealist movement.

Freud saw the subconscious as the primitive, savage id that lurked beneath our rational mind. The Surrealists envisioned the subconscious as a wellspring of creativity and freedom held captive by reason and social constraints. As Bréton put it in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism:

The Surrealists believed that bourgeois morality, conventional art, religion, and common sense restricted creativity. They wanted to shock audiences out of complacency and liberate the imagination from the prison of reason. Sade became a Surrealist icon of transgression taken to its furthest extreme, of a mind unwilling to accept any imposed limits. Freud looked at Sade’s writings and saw pathology; the Surrealists saw his work as liberation.

Man Ray, Hans Belmer, and René Magritte are just a few of the many Surrealists who drew inspiration from de Sade’s work. Whatever else you might say about the Marquis, you could hardly deny that he had broken free of mediocrity and dull conceit. He might have been a degenerate, a pederast, and a sex criminal, but nobody could call him a poseur. Freud catalogued perversions; Sade collected them.

Surrealism became passé after World War II. There were still Surrealist exhibitions and Surrealist artists like Salvador Dali remained famous. But, like everything in a capitalist society, Surrealism had become commodified. Images that once shocked were now used in movie dream sequences. Efforts to tie the movement to Stalinism and later Anarchism did more damage to Surrealism than to the Establishment. But while Surrealism became passé, a new group of revolutionaries looked to Sade for guidance.

The totalitarian state manipulates nations. “Just so,” replies the Prince in Sade to the speaker just quoted, “the government itself must control the population. It must possess the means to exterminate the people, should it fear them, or to increase their numbers, should it consider that necessary. And nothing should weigh in the balance of its justice except its own interests or passions, together only with the passions and interests of those who, as we have said, have been granted just enough power to multiply our own.”

The Enlightenment promised that liberation would free us from superstition and tyranny. Yet instead of ushering in an age of reason and freedom, we saw new and ever more virulent forms of oppression. In Sade’s libertines, Adorno and Horkheimer saw reason stripped of every moral restraint. Like Freud, they saw Sade as a case study. By exploring his work, they hoped to discover how a civilization founded on the Rights of Man gave way to trench warfare, atomic bombs, and concentration camps.

Sade’s characters are not irrational, but they are ruthlessly efficient. They see other human beings as objects to be manipulated, exploited, and discarded at will. They use reason not to restrain desire but to serve it more efficiently. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Sade’s philosophy foreshadowed a modern world in which human beings became raw material to be organized, managed, and consumed in pursuit of power.

Wilhelm Reich, their fellow Frankfurt School thinker, synthesized Sade and Rousseau. Like Sade, Reich believed that restrictions were bad and repression was pathological. But he also thought that by removing repression and “letting it all hang out” we could fornicate our way to a new utopia. Reich felt that sexual freedom would lead to political freedom; Sade felt it would simply lead to more sex.

The distinction proved easy to overlook. Many of the Sexual Revolution’s devotees embraced Reich’s optimism while indulging Sade’s appetites. In public they celebrated liberation, authenticity, and personal growth. In private, they honored Sade as a philosopher but treated him as a pornographer—an approach that would have brought him great pleasure. Michel Foucault had a deeper, darker understanding.

For Foucault, Sade was important not as a pornographer or a pervert but as a man who took the rejection of external authority to its logical conclusion: I will be my own god and my own law. The Sadean recognizes no sovereignty above himself and has no concern beyond self-interest and the fulfillment of desire. But where Reich and the foot soldiers of the Sexual Revolution felt this would lead to freedom, Sade saw only a more honest form of domination. The strong would continue to prey upon the weak. The difference was that nobody would pretend otherwise.

Many see Sade as an icon of whips, leather, and naughtiness. Very few accept his philosophy and live as true Sadeans. Yet modernity keeps coming back to his questions. What restrains power when all authority is suspect? What grounds morality in a godless world? What happens when we realize that commandments are merely social constructs? And what happens to a transgressive philosophy when it runs out of boundaries to violate and authorities to disobey? Two centuries after his death, the Marquis remains less a philosopher than a philosophical problem—one that modernity has never quite managed to solve.

[1] Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor. (Alphonso Lingis, Tr.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991. 21.

[2] Maurice Lever, Sade: A Biography. (Arthur Goldhammer, Tr.) New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. 385.

[3] Albert Camus, The Rebel (Anthony Bower, Tr.). New York: Penguin Books, 1982. 34.

[4] Andre Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) at The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andre-breton-manifesto-of-surrealism.

[5] Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. (Edmund Jephcott, Tr). Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2002. 70.

[6] Michel Foucault, Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature. (Robert Bononno, Tr). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 120.

When James M. Cain published The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, critics dismissed it as lurid, sensational, and lowbrow. Readers loved it. The novel became a bestseller; decades later, it would inspire Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Cain, then best known for his human-interest stories and satires in publications like the New York World and American Mercury, suddenly found himself branded as America’s pre-eminent “tough guy” writer—a label he disliked, though not enough to stop producing the hard-boiled crime thrillers that made him famous.

Frank Chambers and Cora Papadokis are not hardened killers. Frank is a drifter who stumbles into a diner owned by Cora’s husband Nick and finds himself with a job. Cora came to Los Angeles with dreams of stardom. After two years at a hash joint, she married Nick out of a desperate hope to escape. Now, married to a “greasy Greek” she finds physically repulsive, she seeks escape in Frank’s arms. What begins as a torrid affair soon turns to a conviction that murder is their only way out.

Nick loves Cora and trusts Frank, never thinking that they have any ill intentions. Even when their first attempt to kill him leaves him with a fractured skull, he accepts the explanation given by Cora, doctors and police: he simply slipped in the bathtub. Cora finds him loathsome, but most would look at him and see something different—a cheerful, optimistic, decent man married to a woman who does not love him.

Frank has a long history of petty crimes, but he has never been involved in a murder attempt. He skips town while Nick is still in the hospital, but his attraction to Cora is stronger than his fear. Ultimately, he returns, and Nick welcomes him back to the diner with open arms, never suspecting that Frank helped crack his skull with a weighted blackjack.

Cora is less thrilled to see him—she was just as rattled by their failed killing as he was and had decided that she was going to make the best of her marriage. Frank’s return ruined that fragile resolve. Their affair resumes, and they begin planning a second attempt on Nick’s life.

Their second effort—a quick blow to the head with a wrench, followed by pushing their car into a ravine—is initially successful. They run down to the ravine to stage the accident, but then the car tips over and Frank is badly injured. They arrive at the hospital after a stop at the mortuary, but Frank’s alibi becomes increasingly shaky under interrogation. Their perfect crime has begun to unravel. To avoid death row, each signs an affidavit declaring the other at fault.

Fortunately for Frank and Cora, the legal system is as corrupt and compromised as they are. Katz, a shrewd attorney, realizes the case hinges on economics rather than justice. If the insurance companies declare the crash a homicide, they owe Frank $25,000 for his injuries. If they declare it an accident, they only owe Cora a $10,000 payout.

Faced with that choice, the insurance companies conclude that Nick died accidentally. The prosecutor realizes that if the insurance companies reject the murder theory, a jury will be unlikely to convict. The case collapses. Cora receives a six-month suspended sentence for manslaughter, and both walk free.

But under the glare of an interrogation lamp, self-preservation proved more important than love. The beautiful mountain is gone and $10,000 won’t bring it back. Cora is once again trapped. Frank starts wondering if he could get away with murder a second time. But he resolves to stay just as Cora once resolved to make her marriage to Nick work, and with much the same success. The story ends on death row, after an accident that not even Frank can say was truly accidental.

Frank’s final punishment is not his death sentence. It is his realization that he will go to the gallows without fully understanding his own motives. In Cain’s fiction, murder is rarely the beginning of a character’s downfall. It is merely the moment when the downfall becomes visible.

Crimes provide the plot for Cain’s crime novels. The drama is fueled by psychological unraveling. His protagonists are brought down not by brilliant detective deduction but by lust, greed, and ambition. Cain would return to these themes throughout his career. In his 1943 novella Double Indemnity, insurance contracts, actuarial tables, and the promise of easy money become the machinery of another murder—and another descent into self-destruction.

Walter Neff is a very good insurance agent, with a keen nose for fraud and malfeasance. When Phyllis Nirdlinger, a client’s wife decides she wants accident insurance, he senses something is wrong. As Walter and Phyllis begin a clandestine flirtation, he makes his suspicions known. She storms out of his house. Then, when she returns, Walter lets her know he’s willing to help her get rid of her husband.

Frank and Cora were bumbling amateurs. Walter and Phyllis know exactly what they are contemplating. Walter methodically explains how insurance adjusters spot foul play, and how to maximize payout. If the policy holder dies on a train, railroad insurance provides double indemnity; a $25,000 policy becomes a $50,000 windfall. And where Frank was driven solely by lust, Walter has another motivation:

Phyllis offers him something more tempting than money or sex: the chance to prove he is smarter than the system itself. Like many of Cain’s protagonists, Walter mistakes intelligence for immunity. He believes that because he understands the game, he can beat it. Frank Chambers stumbled into murder; Walter Neff calculates it. He is more dangerous than Frank, but no less vulnerable—and no less doomed.

There is an unspoken rule of noir fiction: the more calculated your plan, the more certain it will fall apart. Walter dresses as Nirdlinger, down to the crutch and the cast. He breaks Nirdlinger’s neck, boards a train in his place, jumps off at a prearranged checkpoint, and—with Phyllis’s help—dumps the body beside the tracks.

Walter and Phyllis begin bickering almost as soon as they leave the crime scene, and the tension only grows when Barton Keyes, the best claims adjuster on the West Coast, reviews the case. Nirdlinger did not fall from the train. He did not commit suicide. Someone murdered him. Keyes has spent his career studying fraud without succumbing to the temptation to commit it. He knows every trick because he has investigated thousands of claims. Walter understands how to commit the crime. Keyes understands the people who commit crimes.

As he continues to dig, Phyllis and Walter continue to drift apart. Soon another suspicious snooper starts examining the case—Lola, the victim’s daughter. In Lola Walter encounters honesty, something notably lacking in his relationship with Phyllis. When he realizes that the investigation may ultimately turn toward her, he confesses everything. Walter may not be able to save himself, but he refuses to let Lola become a scapegoat for crimes he committed.

The insurance agency realizes this scandal could destroy their business and covers it up. Phyllis and Walter get one-way tickets to Mexico, on the same ship. Walter now knows that Phyllis, a former nurse, has been linked to multiple suspicious deaths; he had learned from her firsthand that she considers herself an angel of death. Yet when Phyllis suggests that they jump from the ship together, he agrees. Whether he still loves her, fears her, or cannot imagine life without her remains unclear.

Walter Neff believes he is committing the perfect crime because he understands the system better than anyone else. He knows how insurance fraud works because he has spent years studying criminals. Keyes understands criminals because he has spent years catching them. In Cain’s world intelligence cannot save you from consequence. Walter realizes too late that he has mistaken knowledge for wisdom.

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Mildred Pierce is not a crime novel; it is a story about social class in California. Like the Nirdlingers, the Pierces live in a Spanish Revival home with red velvet drapes and wrought iron furnishings. But while the Nirdlingers remain prosperous, the Pierces are struggling in the Great Depression. Once a prosperous land developer, Bert Pierce lost his shirt in the 1929 crash. He ultimately walks out of his marriage and moves in with his mistress.

Mildred, his wife, has taken charge of the family finances, selling pies, taking in boarders, and accepting work as a waitress job even though it is beneath her perceived social position. If Mildred is uncomfortable with the family’s declining financial position, her older daughter Veda is mortified. Mother and daughter share the same ambition: both believe they belong among California’s social elite. Mildred hopes that hard work and sacrifice will get them there. Veda believes beauty, talent, and breeding should be enough.

Many people read Mildred Pierce as the story of a dedicated, loving mother exploited by her ungrateful, sociopathic daughter. There’s a good bit of truth to that reading, but it misses a very important point. Both Mildred and Veda are intensely class-conscious, and both believe they deserve more than what they have. Bert Pierce’s prosperity played a significant—perhaps critical—role in Mildred’s decision to marry him, just as Veda later pursues affluent men who can fulfill her dreams of wealth.

The difference between mother and daughter is not their ambitions but the limits they place on themselves in pursuing them. The tragedy of the novel is not that Veda rejects her mother’s values. It is that she embraces them while discarding everything that tempers them. Mildred is the embodiment of the California dream—to make something better of your life and yourself. In Veda, that dream becomes nightmarish. Mildred sees Veda in herself and is inspired to obsessive love. Veda sees Mildred in herself and views her with contempt.

After her youngest daughter Ray dies, Mildred’s attachment to Veda grows even more obsessive. She spares no expense for musical training. Her relationship with Monty Beragon, an old-money Californian, makes her feel simultaneously awestruck and small—even when his stocks crash and he becomes financially dependent upon her.

Mildred sacrifices everything for Monty and Veda. She embezzles from her own businesses, overlooks repeated betrayals, and continually convinces herself that the next sacrifice will finally earn the love and approval she craves. Ultimately, she loses her restaurants, then comes home to find Monty and Veda in bed together.

Mildred is as besotted by the aristocratic life as Veda is, and as willing to go to great lengths to get a semblance of it. She supports Monty and Veda because they embody the world she has spent her life admiring. In the end, however, she discovers that neither considers her up to their standards. The only thing they needed her for was the money she earned by the hard work they loathed.

For years Mildred Pierce worked tirelessly to build a fortune big enough to win acceptance into a world she admired from a distance. Instead, she learns that money can buy neither happiness nor social status. In the end, she loses her fortune, her husband, and her daughter. Success bought her comfort and parasites. It did not buy her belonging.

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Frank Chambers mistakes desire for destiny. Walter Neff mistakes knowledge for wisdom. Mildred Pierce mistakes success for belonging. Each becomes obsessed with an idea of happiness and sacrifices everything else in its pursuit. The tragedy lies not in murder or betrayal, but in their stubborn insistence on clinging to an illusion that ultimately destroys them.

Cain’s women are less temptresses than mirrors. Cora reflects Frank’s longing for escape. Phyllis reflects Walter’s pride and desire to outsmart the system. Veda reflects Mildred’s obsession with status and social advancement. These women do not create the protagonists’ flaws. They expose them. The protagonists mistake them for salvation and, in doing so, find themselves damned.

Each of these protagonists pursues a distinctly Californian dream. Frank arrives as a drifter looking for something undefined. Walter thinks he is smart enough to game the insurance industry and win. Mildred thinks that her hard work and her daughter’s talent can open the gate to higher social status. Each turns their dream into an obsession, with tragic results.

Cain’s status as a genre writer obscures his true talent. His novels are certainly suspenseful, but their lasting power comes from his keen psychological insight. His characters build elaborate stories about who they are and what will make them happy. They build those stories into great towers that come crashing down on their heads. Cain’s fiction is not about murder, fraud, or adultery. It is about the human tendency to mistake desire for reality. The crimes are not the tragedy. They are the moment when the tragedy can no longer be ignored.

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[1] James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) in Three Complete Novels. New York: Wings Books, 1994. 64-65.

[2] James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (1943) in Three Complete Novels. 94.

[3] Ibid, 106.

[4] James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (1941) in Three Complete Novels. 185.

Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher (Wiedźmin in the original Polish) series has spawned a video game franchise, two movies, and a Netflix series. Yet when the first Geralt of Rivia stories appeared in the 1980s, they occupied an uncertain place in Polish literature. Science fiction, led by Stanisław Lem, enjoyed greater prestige than fantasy. Sapkowski’s stories won devoted fans, but they also puzzled readers who expected either heroic fantasy or philosophical science fiction. Geralt belonged comfortably to neither tradition.

The Witcher material is frequently labeled as grimdark, and it uses many of the genre’s conventions. Heroes die; good intentions fail; kings lie; blood is spilled and body parts cut off; war reduces ordinary people to refugees and scavengers. Sapkowski never spares the reader from the consequences of violence. But neither does he mistake cynicism for wisdom. Amidst his gloom we constantly see shimmers of light.

Like many modern heroes, Geralt’s first act of heroism is refusing to believe he is one. He spends over 3,000 pages insisting he is not a knight-errant: merely a neutral party who slays monsters for profit, a witcher whose emotions were stripped away by the Trial of the Grasses. But time and again he risks his life for others, protects the vulnerable, and follows the very ideals he claims to reject.

Geralt spares monsters that do not deserve death and protects strangers who do not pay him. He adopts Ciri despite insisting he wants no attachments. He gradually accumulates a fellowship while insisting he work alone. Arthurian heroes proudly embrace their role. Geralt reluctantly stumbles into it. And he is hardly the only character who engages in this kind of performative neutrality.

The Continent is a violent place full of people who claim to care only for power, profit, or survival. Yet a closer look often reveals something else. A dwarf who admits to robbery and possible murder also escorts refugees across a war-torn countryside. A cynical lawyer who prides himself on having no scruples deliberately misses an easy killing throw. A vampire becomes a monster hunter’s trusted companion.

Sapkowski’s world contains plenty of darkness, but its most memorable characters repeatedly prove better than they pretend to be. The moral tension comes not from the absence of virtue but from virtue surviving in a world that offers little reward for it. There is no shortage of depravity, betrayal, and outright evil. But there is also no shortage of decent people who are forced into difficult choices.

Medieval audiences saw their kings and nobles at a distance. They had no problem believing stories and chronicles of idealized lords and knights. And because war, border skirmishes and violence were part of everyday medieval life, those audiences had no problem believing in evil knights and cruel kings.

That pattern persisted into the modern era. Readers of the early 20^th century voraciously read and believed magazines and stories about silver screen stars, industrialists, and war heroes. Many of those accounts were carefully crafted by PR teams, just as medieval legends had often been shaped by court poets and bards. Public figures remained distant enough to become legends.

Today we get to see our leaders up close and in real time. We observe their mistakes and read about their scandals. We take pride in knocking heroes off pedestals, and we expect our heroes to be recognizably human. Geralt of Rivia is courageous, loyal, and self-sacrificing. Yet he is also stubborn and capable of enormous self-deceit.

Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table represented the essence of chivalry. We find that same essence in Geralt. He is not a brightly colored tapestry design or an archetype of knighthood. He is a great but flawed man trying, and sometimes failing, to do what is right. That is our knight-errant. He is neither a rejection nor a continuation of traditional heroism. He is, rather, a hero for an age that distrusts heroes.

Fifteen hundred years before Geralt’s birth, a Conjunction of the Spheres caused multiple dimensions to collide, stranding humans and monsters on the Continent. The Elder Races—Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes—initially paid little attention to the human newcomers. They were scattered among small nomadic tribes, many of which disappeared through warfare, intermarriage, or simple attrition.

A thousand years later, the first Nordlings made landfall. These humans were more warlike and more prolific than the Elder Races. They were also able to wield magic like the Elves. As a result, they were able to not only gain a foothold on the Continent but to take it over. As Yarpen Zigrin, a Dwarf, explains:

As protection against monsters, humans created a special class of monster hunters. These “witchers” were trained in combat and given special herbal and magical treatments that made them living weapons. The Trial of the Grasses killed more children than it transformed, but those who survived possessed heightened reflexes, superhuman endurance, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the creatures that stalked the Continent.

The witchers were very good at their job—so good, in fact, that by Geralt of Rivia’s time there were few monsters remaining. Many who sought Geralt’s assistance had fallen for old wives’ tales or stories. People still talked about ghouls, werewolves, vampires, strigas, and other dangerous creatures. But most went their entire lives without encountering one. In following their trade, the witchers had largely made themselves obsolete. The worst monsters Geralt encounters increasingly turn out to be human.

The Elder Races are becoming as rare as monsters. Human cities and towns have been built atop the ruins of abandoned Elf cities. Former temples have been dismantled to build roads, fortresses, and palaces. Elves, dwarves, and other nonhumans still live among the humans, but they are increasingly treated as outsiders in lands their ancestors once ruled.

Some Elders attempt accommodation and coexistence. Others join the Scoia’tael, guerrilla bands that attack human settlements and travelers. Their cause is aided by the Niflgaardian Empire, which happily exploits ethnic grievances to weaken its rivals. Yet should Niflgaard ultimately conquer the North, there is little chance the Elder Races will fare any better under them than with the kingdoms it seeks to replace.

Like the witchers, the Elders belong to a fading world. Geralt’s Continent is filled with such remnants. The monsters are disappearing. The Elder Races are dwindling. The witchers themselves are dying out. The old world is passing away, and no one is entirely certain what will replace it. The witchers and monsters accept decline. The Elder Races mourn it. The sorcerers and enchantresses conspire against it.

Magicians have used their powers to gain considerable wealth and power. But they are also becoming obsolete in a world where Oxenfurt University has opened an Institute of Technology. The mages still wield tremendous power, but they no longer stand unchallenged in a society that is on the brink of an Industrial Age. As a result, many cling to influence, intrigue, and political manipulation in a desperate effort to remain relevant.

Yennefer, Geralt’s on-again off-again lover, claims she has no interest in the endless intrigues of her fellow magicians. Like Geralt, Yennefer is prone to self-deception. She is as given to scheming and backbiting as her rival sorcerers. Yet she also has something many of her peers lack: a conscience. Her deepest attachment is to Ciri, the child she could never have after magic stripped away her fertility. Like Geralt, she repeatedly risks everything for someone she insists she does not need.

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The characters of The Witcher face an opponent that cannot be defeated by swords, magic, or intrigue. They stand against history. The monsters are disappearing; the Elder Races are fading; the witchers are dying out. Even the sorcerers sense that their age is drawing to a close. Every major faction in the saga is seeking, in its own way, to halt or redirect unstoppable forces.

They feel, as their readers often feel, that they are being carried by forces larger than themselves, forces that are sweeping away everything they once took for granted. They realize that they, like us, have become anachronisms. The question is not whether change will come, but how one lives honorably in its wake.

Geralt cannot save the old order. He cannot restore the past. He cannot save the witchers from their doom. All he can do is keep his word, protect those entrusted to his care, and try to distinguish between monsters and people. He cannot stop history, but he can at least remain human while history unfolds.

We meet Geralt as a professional monster hunter. But Geralt, like the reader, gradually discovers that monsters are often capable of mercy, loyalty, and love—while many humans are capable of cruelty, cowardice, and betrayal. The massacres that scar the Continent are carried out not by strigas, wraiths, or wyverns, but by ordinary men acting in the service of kings, causes, and ambitions.

Regis is a higher vampire; Geralt knows exactly how dangerous he is, and he understands that their traveling companions have every right to be afraid. Yet he also knows that Regis is a skilled doctor, a polymath, and a genuinely good man despite his penchant for verbosity. Three Jackdaws is a dragon, but one who is trying desperately to save his partner and their hatchling. Human raiders, not monsters, burn down fields and take peasants as slaves. Humans are far more prone to slaughter than ghouls, wargs, werewolves, wraiths, giant wyverns, or strigas.

Geralt regularly declares himself neutral and emotionless. Yet he repeatedly puts himself in harm’s way to save the innocent from harm. Dandelion is a skirt-chasing bard; Yarpen is a foul-mouthed, flatulent Dwarf; Cahir is a Niflgaardian whom nobody trusts; Yennefer is a sorceress with a quick temper and a talent for holding grudges.

None resembles a traditional hero. Yet they repeatedly sacrifice for one another, while kings, generals, and mages betray allies and rivals alike in pursuit of power. Sapkowski places far more faith in friendship than in institutions, and far more faith in loyalty than in ideology. Kings, mages, and generals fall. The bonds between the Geralt and his companions endure, though the bond between Geralt and Yennefer is sorely and frequently tried.

We no longer trust flawless heroes. We know too much about our leaders and institutions. Yet we have not abandoned the desire for heroism. We seek heroes who struggle, fail, doubt themselves, and continue anyway. Geralt embodies that ideal. Arthur is admirable, but distant. Geralt is admirable because he struggles. Arthur begins as an ideal and remains one. Geralt begins in confusion, spends most of the saga doubting himself, and repeatedly fails. Modern readers are more likely to recognize themselves in the latter than the former.

Even after he is officially knighted, Geralt rejects the role of knight-errant. He spends thousands of pages denying it even as he embodies it. He lives in a world that encourages cynicism, despair, and brutality. He cannot change that world. But he will continue to do what is right despite uncertainty, failure, and the knowledge that he will not be remembered kindly if he is remembered at all. That is what heroism looks like in an age that no longer believes in heroes.

Geralt spends the entire saga searching for monsters and discovering people. In the process, he learns that heroism lies not in slaying dragons or strigas, but in preserving one’s humanity when cynicism, fear, and history itself are urging surrender. He is not a hero despite his flaws. He is a hero because of them.

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[1] Andrzej Sapkowski, Witcher 1: The Last Wish (1993). E-Book Edition.

[2] Andrzej Sapowlski, The Blood of Elves. (Danusia Stok, Translator). Gollanz E-Book, 2008. 2721.

Were it not for one catastrophic act of overreach, Richard Milhous Nixon would probably be remembered as one of the 20^th century’s best presidents. There was no need to plant listening devices in the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters. Nixon would go on to defeat George McGovern in the 1972 election by a margin of 520 electoral votes to 17. His fall was like Macbeth’s; he created enemies because he could not trust his colleagues. Had he not struggled so desperately for power he already possessed, it would never have been stripped from his hands.

Nixon achieved détente with the Soviet Union and opened relations with China; he founded the Environmental Protection Agency and signed Title IX into law; he came into office as a war hawk but pulled American soldiers out of Vietnam when he ultimately accepted the battle was unwinnable.

Yet today Nixon’s name is synonymous with scandal and corruption. People have largely forgotten the details of the Watergate burglary, but they remember very well that Nixon was forced out of office in disgrace. The evil that he did lives after him; the good was interred with his resignation. And when he departed the White House in a helicopter, American trust in our political system left with him.

In 1922 the Harding administration was rocked by the Teapot Dome scandal. But ultimately Interior Secretary James Fall went to prison and Warren B. Harding fortuitously died of a stroke in 1923. His successor, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, was noted for being both taciturn and honest. Watergate was different. We had always known there were crooked politicians, but after Nixon we began to doubt that there were any honest ones. Corruption was no longer seen as an aberration but as an endemic part of the system.

Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868. Nixon resigned in 1974 in the face of a near-certain impeachment. Since his resignation we have seen three impeachments; Bill Clinton in 1998 and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. What was once used only in extremis has become political theater. Reagan faced investigation over the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987. Clinton was cleared on a vote along party lines; George W. Bush and Barack Obama faced repeated impeachment threats; Trump was cleared twice on votes along party lines.

So what does Richard Nixon have to do with modern grimdark? He helped create the audience. Writers can crank out stories of corruption, despair, and betrayal until their keyboards wear out. But if they can’t find people willing to read those stories, they’re soon going to seek out new genres. Nixon made grimdark’s pessimistic themes seem not only plausible but resonant. To a country reeling from the exposure of rot at the highest levels, movies like Taxi Driver and Chinatown seemed less theatrical and more realistic.

Nixon’s first run for the Presidency ended in a controversy over stolen ballots. The 1960 election was one of the closest in history, with John F. Kennedy receiving 49.72% of the vote to Nixon’s 49.55%. But many Nixon supporters believed Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic political machine used ballot stuffing to give the Kennedy-Johnson ticket a 51%-49% win. Earl Mazo, Nixon’s biographer, covered Nixon’s 1960 campaign in Illinois and later recalled:

Those claims of election fraud were hotly denied in 1960 and remain controversial today. What we know for certain is that Nixon chose not to contest the results. He told Mazo “our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis” and asked him to stop writing stories accusing the Kennedy campaign of voter fraud.[2]

Others credited JFK’s narrow victory to the televised debates. John F. Kennedy was a photogenic candidate with a winning smile. Nixon’s five o’clock shadow and shifty eye gestures made him look sneaky and untrustworthy. In his 1950 California senatorial race, which he won, ads urged voters to “Look at ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon’s Republican Record.” That label would follow him for the rest of his political career.

After losing the presidency in 1960, Nixon ran for governor of California in 1962. Many, including Nixon, believed his loss to incumbent governor Pat Brown marked the end of his political career. In an impromptu post-election speech, he railed at journalists for their perceived favoritism toward his opponent, closing with “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Leaving California, Nixon and his family moved to New York City, where he became a senior partner in a prestigious law firm. In 1967 he argued his first and only case before the Supreme Court, Time Inc. vs Hill, on behalf of a family suing over an inaccurate story in Life magazine. When Time Inc. won the case, Nixon said “I always knew I wouldn’t be permitted to win a big appeal against the press.” He also decided then to make a second presidential run.

In January 1968, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive; in March, Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew as a presidential candidate after a disappointing showing in New Hampshire; in June Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed just moments after winning the California primary.

Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president, was privately against the ongoing Vietnam war but was unwilling to speak out publicly against it. Antiwar protestors gathered outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention, only to be beaten and arrested en masse by Mayor Richard Daley’s police forces. While Humphrey began calling for peace talks as the campaign went on, he had lost the trust of many antiwar voters. Nixon won the popular vote by less than a percentage point (43.4% to 42.7%) but scored 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 46.

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In 1968, “bring us together” was a tall order. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had done little to ease tensions between America’s white and black communities. But Nixon genuinely wanted to heal those divisions. He had promised “peace with honor” in Vietnam, and vowed to uphold the values of the “silent majority” that loved America and wanted to see it rise above the riots, protests, and civil unrest consuming the country.

During his first term, it looked like he was largely keeping his promises. He had begun withdrawing American troops from Vietnam; he made huge diplomatic strides in China and the Soviet Union; he oversaw the first moon landing on July 20, 1969. His battles against inflation and high interest rates were less successful, as were his efforts at price controls. There was lots of grumbling, and many sarcastic Nixon impressions from comedian Rich Little. But he was still popular enough to win a landslide victory against George McGovern in 1972.

Behind closed doors, Nixon worried constantly about “leakers” who were giving out information. In 1969 he ordered wiretaps to discover who had tipped journalists off to a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. When Daniel Ellsberg released a 7,000-page study of the Vietnam war (the “Pentagon Papers”) to the New York Times in 1971, Nixon had G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt burglarize his psychiatrist’s office in search of blackmail material.

On June 17, 1972, five men were caught breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, DC. They carried wiretapping equipment and large amounts of cash. While they were clearly attempting some form of political espionage, the motivations behind the break-in remain disputed. It is entirely possible that Nixon, or the people he trusted, were uncertain as to what they hoped to accomplish and what they expected to gain from it.

What mattered politically was less the burglary itself than the atmosphere it created. Watergate confirmed growing suspicions that hidden surveillance, secret operations, institutional deceit, and political sabotage had become normal parts of American public life.

Nixon’s speech on November 17, 1973 did little to convince the public that he was indeed not a crook. Political cartoonists had a field day with “Tricky Dick” caricatures and “I am not a crook” became one of the most popular slogans of 1973. Viewers tuned in to televised coverage of the Watergate hearings and read transcripts of Nixon’s taped conversations. Nixon continued to maintain his innocence, but he soon realized that his battle was as unwinnable as Vietnam. On August 8, 1974 Richard Nixon announced his resignation. My family watched it on CBS.

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1974’s Chinatown brought a noir sensibility to 1930s California. But where Hayes Code noir films had to end with the villains punished for their misdeeds, the corrupt politicians and child-molesting tycoons walk away unscathed. Private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) tries to save Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) and Katherine, her sister/daughter, but to no avail. Evelyn is gunned down and a distraught Katherine leaves with Noah Cross, her wealthy father/grandfather. When he tries to save her, an associate tells him “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

In 1975 Robert Redford starred in the spy thriller Three Days of the Condor. Redford’s Joe Turner (codenamed “Condor”) was a bookish CIA analyst, not a stylish James Bond figure. He comes back from lunch to find his colleagues have been gunned down. He alerts his supervisor, who tries to kill him and then reports Turner as the murderer. By the time the movie ends, Turner has revealed the plot to the New York Times and insists that the paper will print the story. The final line comes from his superior officer, who yells back “How do you know?”

All the President’s Men (1976) sees Robert Redford teamed up with Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who broke the Watergate story in the Washington Post. They face an uphill battle in convincing their editors that the President was involved; why would Nixon endanger his position when he was certain to triumph against McGovern? But ultimately their conversations with “Deep Throat” pay off and the movie ends with Nixon’s resignation and Vice President Gerald Ford’s inauguration.

These films did indeed give 1970s Americans a McLuhanesque mosaic of their culture. Another 1973 film, Serpico, gave us a biographical crime drama about Frank Serpico (Al Pacino), an honest cop who tries and fails to fight endemic corruption in the NYPD. The movie ends as the real Serpico’s quest ended; a bullet to the face, fellow officers who deliberately fail to report the shooting, and a disability pension that spells the end of his time on the force. Corruption was increasingly seen not as an aberration but as the rule.

Hippies and radicals had been screaming about “pigs” and “the Establishment” for years. After Nixon’s resignation, many of those ideas percolated into the mainstream. But the radicals found themselves unable to use this new distrust as revolutionary leverage. America was exhausted after the Vietnam War, tired of political shouting, and unable to believe that our underlying problems could be cured. Instead of hitting the streets, Americans surrounded themselves in discos, drugs, and strange flesh.

Like jaded comrades waiting in 1970s Soviet breadlines during the Brezhnev era, post-Watergate Americans had lost hope in their government—and in the idea that it could be saved. You can’t have a revolution without revolutionaries you trust, and America was not in a trusting mood. The distraction of short-term pleasures appeared more tempting, and more real, than the struggle for long-term change.

The pessimism of grimdark would have seemed excessively cynical, implausible, and nihilistic before the 1970s. Audiences weaned on Philip Marlowe would find Travis Bickle a thoroughly unpleasant and unrealistic protagonist. The idea of Noah Cross walking off with his abused daughter would be disgusting. Of course, such things might happen in life—but you don’t put them on the big screen any more than you film your bowel movements.

Grimdark did not emerge because audiences suddenly became evil nihilists. It emerged because optimism began to feel naïve. Nixon did not create corruption, paranoia, or betrayal. In a different time he might have been cast as a tragic hero brought down by his own flaws. Instead he became a spark that set our confident postwar world afire and left us ruling over ashes.

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[1] Sami Moubayed, “Controversial elections in American History.” Al Majalla, November 4, 2024. https://en.majalla.com/node/322919/documents-memoirs/controversial-elections-american-history.

[2] Scott Bomboy, “The drama behind President Kennedy’s 1960 election win.” National Constitution Center, November 7, 2017. https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-drama-behind-president-kennedys-1960-election-win.

[3] Richard Nixon, “Remarks in New York City Accepting Election as the 37th President of the United States” (November 6, 1968) at The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-new-york-city-accepting-election-the-37th-president-the-united-states.

[4] Richard Nixon, “I Am Not A Crook,” (November 17, 1973). At Emerson Kent. https://www.emersonkent.com/speeches/i_am_not_a_crook.htm.

[5] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Glaser. University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 45.

Unless you’re a fan of 1940s and 1950s hardboiled fiction, you’ve probably never heard of Cornell Woolrich. Today he’s best remembered for the movie adaptation of his short story “It Had to be Murder,” Rear Window. French New Wave fans may recall Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black while admirers of Edward G. Robinson may remember his doomed psychic in Night Has a Thousand Eyes. More than thirty films in several countries were adapted from Woolrich’s fiction, though critics often dismissed both the films and their sources as disposable pulp.

In a May 1982 interview, Brian Eno said that while the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years, “I think everyone who bought one of those copies started a band!”[2] Cornell Woolrich had a similar influence on mystery and suspense writers, though he has not attained comparable fame with the masses. But many of the themes and emotional textures we commonly associate with grimdark can be traced back to Woolrich. And the originals were often much more powerful than the imitators who followed.

The classic murder mystery starts with a corpse and a handful of suspects. It ends with the guilty punished, the aberration explained, and order restored. Woolrich rarely gives you that kind of closure. His protagonists are lonely, frightened people trapped in dirty, dangerous cities. They are alienated, paranoid and teetering on the edge of emotional collapse as they drift through lonely days and sleepless nights. They reflect what will become a common grimdark trope; the chaos undergirding our illusions of certainty and stability.

Woolrich’s urban landscapes are filled with furnished rooms, hotel corridors, late-night diners, and strangers watching each other through half-lit windows. His characters remain isolated even when surrounded by people. Voyeurism replaces intimacy and fantasy replaces connection. Their greatest enemies are not flesh and blood but loneliness, grief, obsession, and lives they have built around fragile, doomed illusions. In the hands of lesser writers this approach often becomes bleak and nihilistic; Woolrich’s stubborn compassion makes it mournful.

Murder mysteries and police procedurals reassure us that reason and deduction can bring order out of chaos. His horrors are emotional rather than cosmic but, like Lovecraft, Woolrich understands that knowledge can become corrosive. His characters frequently descend into paranoia or fatalism because they have seen too much or understood too late. For the damaged characters walking through his rain-soaked streets, wisdom leads not to salvation but to alienation, dread, and emotional collapse.

On March 21, 1926 the New York Times reviewed Cornell Woolrich’s first novel, a Fitzgerald-inspired Jazz Age drama called Cover Charge. While the critic started with “Mr. Woolrich has done fairly: one would wish he had done better,” he also noted:

Later that year, Woolrich won a $10,000 windfall for his short story “Children of the Ritz.” He also landed a screenwriting job at First National Pictures in Hollywood. In December 1930, with five more Jazz Age novels under his belt, he married Violet Virginia Blackton, the daughter of Vitagraph co-founder J. Stuart Blackton. To most bystanders, Cornell Woolrich looked like a young man on his way to the top.

But for years Woolrich had been cruising the Los Angeles waterfront in a sailor suit seeking anonymous homosexual encounters. When his efforts to consummate the marriage failed, Woolrich left Blackton and returned to New York, where he moved into his mother’s hotel suite. He would stay in New York for the remainder of his life.

By 1932 Jazz Age novels were becoming passé as Depression-era audiences searched for darker, more grounded material. When efforts to sell his seventh novel, I Love You, Paris, failed, Woolrich reinvented himself as a crime and detective fiction writer. He produced stories at such a pace that he began using multiple pen names in various pulp magazines. In 1940 he published his first major crime novel, The Bride Wore Black.

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Mrs. Nick Killeen constructs a new identity for each assassination; an exotic blonde, a mousy kindergarten teacher, a mysterious redhead. She chooses new weapons with equal care—poisoned liquor, a shove from a balcony, a bow and arrow. Yet she also takes care to see that no innocents are caught in the crossfire or punished in her place. The detectives cannot understand her motivation or even agree if the murders were committed by a single woman. But her methodical approach and her moral code suggest this is something more than madness.

The men Mrs. Nick Killeen targets are not monsters. Bliss is an alcoholic whose life veers between “boy-I-feel-swell, I-wonder-what’s-up-tonight” and “God-I-feel-terrible, be-glad-to-get-to-bed.” Mitchell is six weeks behind on the rent for his furnished room with “framed photographs of girls galore.” Moran is a family man in an unsatisfying marriage. Ferguson is a skirt-chasing artist bouncing between beds. They appear to have nothing in common except two things: they were all lonely and emotionally adrift, and they were all killed by a woman.

When Julie Killeen is finally caught, she confesses readily. Her husband was shot outside the church as they were leaving the wedding. She caught the license plate of the car that sped past, tracked down the occupants, and systematically avenged her murdered husband. Yet in the end it was all for naught. The men she killed had nothing to do with Nick Killeen’s murder. And twice she spared Corey, the man who actually pulled the trigger.

In the 1967 screenplay, François Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard removed many of the more improbable plot twists. The story was more visually elegant and narratively coherent. Each of the victims was aware of why death was coming for them, and each insisted, to no avail, that Nick Killeen’s death was accidental. It was slick and stylish, but it lacked the aching loneliness that makes Woolrich’s book so melancholy and so memorable. Though its reputation has improved over time, La mariée était en noir was a critical and commercial flop upon release.

Woolrich often relied on improbable plots and coincidences. But readers are willing to overlook improbable plots if the characters are emotionally consistent. Truffaut could strip away details that appeared silly to a critical eye. But he failed to capture the exhaustion, longing, vulnerability, and urban melancholy that gives Woolrich’s best work its haunting power.

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In February 1942, Dime Detective Magazine published “It Had to be Murder” under Woolrich’s “William Irish” pen name. The story was popular enough to be republished two years later in the William Irish anthology After-Dinner Story.

Woolrich’s unnamed narrator is confined to his apartment with a broken leg. Unable to leave, he spends hours watching people through his rear window. In place of human connection, he gleans fragments of information from his nightly viewing. We glimpse a newly married teen couple, a young widow raising a child, and a working man caring for his sick wife. But ultimately the narrator understands their lives no better than Woolrich’s readers.

As he continues watching, the narrator develops a growing conviction: the working man has murdered his wife. He has seen neither murder, arguments, nor blood. He has simply noticed the man give a “peculiar, comprehensive, semicircular stare at all the rear windows around him.” As he keeps watching, he notices other gestures and routines that he interprets as signs of murderous intent. But when he contacts Hal Jeffries, his friend on the force, he learns that suspicion and intuition are not enough to get police involved without some kind of concrete evidence.

Jeff (Jimmy Stewart), the protagonist of Hitchock’s 1954 Rear Window, is also laid up with a broken leg. But he has Lisa Fremont, a glamorous, emotionally engaged partner (Grace Kelly). Hitchcock also provides us with more information about the people Jeff sees from afar by showing them onscreen. They are now fully visible presences rather than silhouettes assembled from prose. The movie is witty, suspenseful, and polished, but it is entertaining rather than mournful. Hitchcock transforms Jeff’s neighbors into objects of entertainment rather than pity.

Woolrich’s story is ultimately less about murder than about urban alienation and the limits of observation. The narrator watches endlessly, trying to assemble routines, gestures, and tiny irregularities into a coherent narrative. Yet he is forever a viewer observing the action from the balcony. For a director like Hitchcock, this viewpoint is endlessly fascinating. For a reclusive writer like Woolrich, it is also heartbreakingly lonely.

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In 1945, under the pen name “George Hopley,” Woolrich published Night Has a Thousand Eyes. In 1948 Paramount released a movie based on the novel. Today that movie is best remembered for its main theme; it has become a jazz standard that was covered by John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Horace Silver, and many others. Edward G. Robinson’s performance as the doomed clairvoyant won praise and the film has been praised for its atmosphere. But the screenplay substantially altered Woolrich’s plot and characters.

Both the movie and the book begin with a woman named Jean saved from suicide. The movie has her prepared to jump in front of an oncoming train; in the book she is prepared to throw herself into a river. Both feature a tormented psychic who sees the future even when he doesn’t want to. But the movie transfers the action to Los Angeles, while the book is set in New York.

In the movie John Triton (Edward G. Robinson), a vaudeville mentalist who found himself developing genuine precognitive abilities, helped Whitney Courtland, Jean’s father, amass a fortune in the stock market. In Woolrich’s novel, Jean is introduced to John Tompkins, a broken man living with two childhood friends in a tenement. His second sight has brought him only misery; his friends gave him a place to stay after they stopped him from hanging himself.

Tompkins refuses at first to help Harlan Reid, Jean’s father. Finally, he gives a few portentous hints that help Reid amass a great deal of money. But his predictions upend the Reids’ comfortable world. Harlan tries at first to explain Tompkins away as a fraud. But he soon grows increasingly dependent on Tompkins as an advisor—until Tompkins finally tells him he will die “on the seam between the fourteenth and fifteenth of June. At midnight on the stroke.” In the film, Triton instead foresees Jean’s death.

The film ends with Jean saved from murder by Triton, who is then killed by police who mistake him for an accomplice. In his pocket investigators find a note stating that he foresaw his own death, but it was the only way to save Jean. Woolrich’s novel is far less comforting. Tompkins is shot by an embezzling accountant who was trying, unsuccessfully, to blackmail Tompkins into manipulating Reid. And despite the best efforts of a police team to prevent it, Harlan Reid dies exactly as Tompkins had foretold.

In Woolrich’s world, wisdom rarely brings salvation. More often it isolates, corrodes, and destroys. His characters long for meaning but find that it becomes a trap; they seek knowledge only to learn they can do nothing with what they have learned. Woolrich’s noir is not stylish and snappy; it is an existential wasteland that owes more to classical Greek tragedy than pulp fiction.

We see Woolrich’s emotionally damaged protagonists and lonely urban streets in modern grimdark material. We less often see Woolrich’s compassion. Many readers find his writing bleak and despairing, and not without reason. But throughout that darkness Woolrich never loses compassion for the failed romantics, alcoholics, and voyeurs hiding in furnished rooms and walking through rain-soaked, garbage-strewn streets. He finds sorrow and admiration in their lonely search for some shard of meaning before the lights finally go out.

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[1] Sophocles, Oedipus, King of Thebes at Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27673/27673-h/27673-h.htm.

[2] “Quote Origin: Everyone Who Bought One of Those 30,000 Copies Started a Band” (March 1, 2016) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/01/velvet/at Quote Investigator.

[3] “IN THE JAZZ MANNER; COVER CHARGE. By Cornell Woolrich. 286 pp. New York: Boni & Liveright. $2” (March 21, 1926) at New York Times Archive. https://www.nytimes.com/1926/03/21/archives/in-the-jazz-manner-cover-charge-by-cornell-woolrich-286-pp-new-york.html.

[4] Cornell Woolrich. The Bride Wore Black. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940. 34.

[5] Cornell Woolrich, (as William Irish) “It Had to be Murder” (1942). At City Tech Open Lab. https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/profscanlan-english2400-o552-fall2020/files/2020/09/it_had_to_be_murder_story.pdf

[6] Cornell Woolrich (as George Hopley), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1945. E-Book Edition.

Lovecraft’s protagonists stared into the abyss and went mad. Conan the Barbarian reached for his sword. His interest in Holy Grails usually ended with how much gold he could get for stealing one, and he only trusted wizards when they were headless. Nearly a century after he first sprang like a panther from Robert E. Howard’s pen, Conan still reminds the world that barbarism is mankind’s natural state.

Howard’s Conan stories are not just sword and sorcery adventures. They are violent anti-civilizational fantasy. While Conan occasionally makes exceptions for a stout-hearted few, he generally holds civilized folks in contempt. They are rude because nobody ever put the fear of a good skull-splitting into them; they are soft because they have the luxury of pretending the world is a safe and stable place.

Tolkien’s The Hobbit, released two years after Howard’s “Beyond the Black River,” tells the story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures stealing rings and fighting dragons. But when his wanderings end, Bilbo returns to his comfortable hobbit-hole in the Shire. Conan would have found the place unbearably dull, though he might have admired the hobbits’ skill with slings and arrows. And if he realized how much Bilbo’s mithril shirt was worth, we never would have had a Lord of the Rings.

Westeros would not have led Conan to reconsider his views on civilization. He might get on well enough with the Hound, and he certainly wouldn’t have been foolish enough to approach the Mountain after running him through. Conan would almost certainly have wound up beyond the Wall at some point, though he would be just as likely to join the Wildlings as the Night’s Watch. And he would have absolutely no patience for Martin’s sprawling web of political alliances, betrayals, and dynastic intrigue.

Tolkien laments lost civilizations; Martin catalogues a decaying civilization; Conan distrusts civilization altogether. He assumes that every high culture, no matter how noble its rhetoric, will eventually sink into corruption and decadence. Readers of The Silmarillion may have to grudgingly admit that Conan is on to something. Violence is the natural state of mankind; civilization is only a thin veneer that always peels away. He distrusts soft-handed nobles and trusts only cold steel—two instincts that echo throughout modern grimdark fantasy.

Robert Ervin Howard spent his early years traveling rural Texas with his father, a country physician. He came of age to tales of lynchings, blood feuds, and Indian raids. The oil boom transformed the old frontier almost overnight. It gave former cattle drivers new work while the growing railways carried cattle more efficiently to meatpacking centers. But prosperity also brought a great deal of violence and corruption financed by rail barons and aspiring oil tycoons.

Howard also witnessed constant strife at home. Tensions between his mother and father simmered for years before his father abandoned life on the medical circuit in 1915 and settled in Cross Cut, Texas. Four years later the family moved to a house in nearby Cross Plains, where Robert E. Howard would live for the remainder of his life.

When they arrived, the oil boom was still raging. Prostitution, gambling, and street fights were ordinary features of life in their small town. Howard would later say of the experience, “I’ll say one thing about an oil boom: it will teach a kid that life’s a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of.”[2] But when the boom ended, the roughnecks and speculators moved on and Cross Plains once again became a sleepy Texas town. This boom and bust helped shape Howard’s realization that civilization was temporary and conditional.

Cities in Conan’s world are dens of thieves, corrupt priests, and decadent aristocrats. Conan has a grudging respect for the more capable criminals and is never above earning a living as a thief when mercenary work dries up. But the pampered inhabitants of these decadent cities are portrayed as weak, parasitic, and hypocritical. Life among barbarians, rogues, and warriors is harsher, but also more honest.

From an early age Howard was a voracious reader. His mother, Hester Howard, encouraged his literary ambitions. She regularly read poetry aloud and enthusiastically supported his writing. Classmates were impressed by his reading speed and his ability to memorize long passages. But Robert was an indifferent student who chafed at authority. He studied enough to get by but dedicated most of his reading time to Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Sax Rohmer, and the pulp magazines that would eventually publish his own stories.

Howard later explained why he became a writer:

Like his creator, Conan distrusts institutions and despises hierarchy and bureaucracy. He sees civilization as spiritually deadening and prefers work of his own choosing to obeying another man’s orders. That obsession with autonomy became a foundation of many grimdark heroes. Like Conan, the heroes of grimdark prefer freedom to comfort and stability. Unlike Conan, they are rarely able to achieve it.

From 1923 to 1927 Howard made a few sales to Weird Tales, but since the magazine paid (poorly) upon publication money remained tight. To support himself, he worked a series of temporary jobs as a stenographer, oil geologist’s assistant, and soda jerk. Finally, he enrolled in a bookkeeping course at Howard Payne College, promising his father that if writing didn’t work out, he would find a bookkeeping job.

By early 1928, however, it became clear that Howard could indeed make a modest living as a writer. Weird Tales and several other magazines eagerly purchased his prose and poetry. Alongside Conan stories, Howard sold tales featuring the grim Puritan Solomon Kane, Kull of Valusia, the jovial sailor Steve Costigan, a variety of westerns, and numerous stories featuring ghosts, violence, and boxing. He also helped care for his mother, who was steadily deteriorating from tuberculosis.

Conan’s eternally grim outlook on life was inspired by yet another source: Howard’s lifelong battle with depression. Friends later recalled frequent conversations about suicide, and Howard openly declared he did not wish to outlive his mother. As Hester Howard fell into her final unconsciousness, Howard borrowed a .380 Colt automatic from a friend. Dr. Isaac Howard had already locked away the family firearms as Robert’s emotional state deteriorated.

On the morning of June 11, 1936, Hester Howard’s nurse informed Robert that his mother would never regain consciousness. He then walked out of the house, climbed into his 1935 Chevrolet, and shot himself above the right ear. Howard died later that afternoon at 4 pm. His mother died the following day. On the 10th, Robert had traveled to Brownwood Cemetery and purchased a lot for three burials, with perpetual care. His father died in 1944 and was buried alongside his wife and their only child.

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Howard’s Conan fundamentally changed fantasy’s moral landscape. There were monsters, beasts, wizards, and scantily clad women in medieval bikinis long before Conan pillaged Hyboria. But the heroes were generally good guys who fought and triumphed over the bad guys. Conan was a violent pragmatist surviving in a corrupt and dangerous world. He was certainly heroic, but you couldn’t exactly call him virtuous. He trusted cold steel more than noble destinies and was more comfortable destroying order than restoring it.

Conan is at various times a thief, mercenary, pirate, and killer. He is never a moral exemplar. He is not given to wanton slaughter, but he does what he must in a world where violence is constant and unavoidable. Conan survives because he understands reality clearly. He values autonomy above almost everything else, and his loyalty is always conditional. Personal strength and individual freedom matter more to him than moral codes imposed by priests, kings, or civilized society.

Howard’s stories helped establish many of the defining conventions of modern dark fantasy. Decaying kingdoms and ancient ruins; monsters lurking beneath forgotten cities or summoned by evil sorcerers; corrupt priests and decadent nobles; wilderness ever encroaching upon civilization. Howard made violence less stylized and more immediate—less like legend and more like survival. He gave fantasy writers permission to create worlds that were sweaty, bloody, and unstable rather than mythically distant.

George R.R. Martin inherits Howard’s pessimistic view of civilization. Yet unlike Howard, Martin remains firmly ensconced within civilization and modernity. He can imagine a cold, muddy, pre-technological world, but he cannot understand how uncivilized people think. Both writers understand that power corrupts and politics is merely violence draped in ceremony; they both understand that heroism often fails. But Martin still thinks in terms of dynasties and systems, while Conan would rather have as little to do with them as possible.

Like Aragorn, Conan ultimately becomes a king. His path to the throne is a bit more direct; he kills the mad monarch and places the crown on his own head. Yet once in power Conan, like Aragorn, proves to be a capable and surprisingly just ruler. Nobles who prey upon their peasants are warned to stop. If they refuse, Conan stops them himself. He is very much a hands-on and heads-off kind of king.

But where the people of Gondor adore Aragorn, Conan finds himself ruling over a restive kingdom whose subjects miss the oppressive madman who once ruled them. Even under a better king, Howard suggests, civilization remains psychologically attached to hierarchy, decadence, and cruelty. Indeed, civilization is so corrosive that not even the mightiest of barbarians can resist its charms.

In one revealing moment, Conan refuses to slay a poet who is stirring up the people against the barbarian king, stating “A great poet is greater than any king. His songs are mightier than my scepter; for he has near ripped the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me.”[4] Conan’s newfound love of poetry nearly costs him his kingdom and his life. Many fantasy writers speak of saving civilization; others dream of restoring it. Howard questions whether it deserves saving.

Modern grimdark writers declare, as Howard declared before them, that civilization is fragile, comfort is temporary, and violence always lurks beneath the surface. Nearly a century later, today’s dark fantasy writers still walk in the Barbarian’s shadow; sword in hand, distrustful of kings, and well aware that civilization can crumble at any moment. Conan endures because Howard understood something grimdark would later make explicit: civilization does not eliminate violence. It merely teaches violence better manners.

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[1] Robert E. Howard, “Beyond the Black River.” Weird Tales, May/June 1935. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42254/42254-h/42254-h.htm.

[2] Rusty Burke, “A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard” (2023) at the Robert E. Howard Foundation. https://rehfoundation.org/biography/.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Weird Tales, December 1932. At Gutenberg Australia. https://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600811h.html.

H.P. Lovecraft is one of the grandfathers of cosmic horror; Robert Bloch helped introduce the modern world to psychological horror. Bloch’s terror does not slither from the unfathomable darkness of space across vigintillions of aeons. It sits behind a motel desk and smiles nervously at the guests. If you glance up at his upstairs window, you might see the silhouette of an old lady. Stare a little longer and you’ll notice she is unnaturally still. Stick around a few days and you may see Travis Bickle pull up in the parking lot in his taxi, or Annie Wilkes may stop by to tell you she’s your greatest fan.

Gothic horror externalized evil. Dr. Frankenstein assembles a monster from stolen body parts in his crumbling castle. Dracula brings his ancient bloodlust from sparsely populated Transylvania into the teeming streets of Victorian London. There was a clear division between Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, and little danger of mistaking one for the other. With Norman Bates there is no dividing line. He is simultaneously terrifying and pitiful; both monster and wounded man-child. That emotional ambiguity would become one of the foundations of grimdark.

Bloch was inspired to write Psycho after reading about Ed Gein in the Milwaukee newspaper. Elements of Gein appear throughout the novel: an unhealthy attachment to an overbearing mother, cross-dressing, grave robbing. But while journalists portrayed Gein as a grotesque monster, Bloch’s Norman Bates is all too human—and, despite being fictional, perhaps closer to the real Gein than many of the lurid accounts seen in newspapers and detective publications. Newspapers cast Gein as a monster; Bloch made him something more terrifying—a man.

In fairness, we can’t blame the newspapers for seeing Ed Gein as a terrifying aberration. When we hear about somebody keeping body parts and a skin suit in his house, we tend to look at him in an unflattering light. It’s much more comfortable that way. Monsters are frightening, but they are also alien. Bloch asks a more unsettling question: what if the monster is not hiding in your house, but living inside your head?

The December 2, 1957 Life story on Gein included several quotes from neighbors. Some said they had always feared the odd, socially awkward Gein. But there were also accounts like:

Even many modern grimdark writers fear to go into Bloch’s territory. They make their murderers cool antiheroes like Patrick Bateman or vile beasts like Gregor Clegane. Norman Bates, like Ed Gein, is a socially maladroit but harmless-seeming fellow. At 5’7” and 135 pounds, Ed Gein was hardly a threat to your average strapping Wisconsin farmer. Bloch’s Norman Bates is pudgier but equally inoffensive. Neither is suave or savage; both come across at first glance as strange, perhaps a bit off-putting, but ultimately harmless.

A few sentences later, we see Norman is reading a passage about the Incas making drums from the bodies of their enemies and allowing himself “the luxury of a comfortable shiver.” But since we’re reading a crime novel, most of us have indulged in that same pleasure. We can tell there is something a little off about Norman, but he still seems well within the boundaries of ordinary human behavior. There are many immature Momma’s boys. Very few of them are killers.

We become even more sympathetic when his mother comes downstairs to belittle him. Mother goes on at length about Norman’s many failures. She knows the inside of Norman’s head as well as she knows the back of her own hand. She knows his fears, his desire for isolation, his dependency, his shame. It’s clear that Norman is also aware of his shortcomings. Before things get overheated, the bell rings. They have a guest.

Mary Crane also feels trapped in her day-to-day life. Unlike Norman, she has decided to change things with $40,000 in stolen money. She is understandably nervous, but the sweet, bespectacled desk clerk helps her relax. That changes when she suggests that his relationship with Mother may be a bit smothering and, perhaps, she belongs in an institution. Norman explodes in red-faced rage. Suddenly embarrassed and uneasy, Mary retreats to her room. Unfortunately, Mother has overheard the argument. What follows would inspire Hitchcock’s famous shower scene.

Mary is now missing, as is her boss’s $40,000. A private investigator stops by the Bates Motel and grills Norman. As Norman grows increasingly flustered, Mother once again steps in. Now there are two bodies in the neighboring pond. Mary’s fiancé Sam and her sister Lila go to the sheriff to report Mary missing. They talk about the private eye and how he told them he saw Norman’s mother in the upstairs window. This catches the sheriff’s attention. He informs them that Norman’s mother died twenty years ago, and that he was one of the pallbearers.

Norman, meanwhile, is growing increasingly panicked. After frantically scrubbing the rooms and recovering everything but a single earring, he moves Mother to the basement. She protests, but he promises he will look after her, visit regularly, and bring her meals. Mother remains unhappy, but Norman knows what must be done. Once this mess is settled, things can go back to the way they were.

Sam and Lila visit the Bates Motel and check in as a married couple. Sam sits down for a drink with Norman while Lila explores. She makes it up to Mother’s bedroom but finds no trace of Mother, only a strange collection of books on witchcraft, abnormal psychology, theosophy, and pornography.

She replaced the volume hastily and stood up. As she did so, the initial shock of revulsion ebbed away, giving place to a second, stronger reaction. There was something here, there must be. What she could not read in Norman Bates’s dull, fat, commonplace face was all too vividly revealed here in his library.[4]

With Mother in the basement, Norman realizes he must handle the situation himself. When Sam turns, Norman strikes him in the head with a whiskey bottle and knocks him unconscious. Then he hears a scream from the basement.

Lila is downstairs with Mother’s corpse as Mother rushes down the stairs, a “fat, shapeless figure, half-concealed by the tight dress which had been pulled down incongruously to cover the garments beneath.”[5] Sam grabs Norman’s wrist as he screams “I am Norma Bates!”

After Norman is institutionalized, his psychiatrist says that after poisoning his mother and her fiancé, Norman’s personality shattered into three fragments: Norman, a little boy who needed his mother; Norma, the mother who protected him; and a third personality who fronted for both when necessary—Normal. Normal no longer leads the triad; it now belongs to Norma, who insists that she is innocent and Norman was to blame. Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly...

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While Bloch got his start in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, he eventually found the genre constricting. For him, the vast unknowable world around us was less disturbing than the equally vast and unknowable world inside us. He was less frightened by unnamable beasts than by the quiet man next door who might have a torture dungeon in his basement.

At the time Ed Gein was arrested, a communist guerrilla army called the Viet Cong had begun fighting the Western-allied Republic of Vietnam. Three years after Hitchcock’s Psycho was released, the Gulf of Tonkin incident brought an official American military presence to a country that few Americans could find on a map. That war would soon be photographed and televised in all its blood and horror for an increasingly divided nation.

There was still a great deal of optimism in American life, but there was no Adam West waiting in the wings with Vietnam Pacification Bat-Spray. Then came the July and August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, and America found itself wondering if those cheery barefoot hippies were as harmless and inoffensive as they appeared. Optimism was increasingly giving way to doubt and skepticism grew as confidence eroded.

In the 1970s, many Americans were on a quest to “find themselves.” But you don’t have to search for something that hasn’t already been lost. The prosperous life of the postwar Boom was not only unfulfilling; it was also increasingly unprofitable. Stagflation and malaise had descended on America, and the utopian dreams of psychedelic rock gave way to punks sneering “No future, no future, no future for you.”

Bloody exploitation films had been making the drive-in circuit for years. 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre became a cult classic and Wes Craven’s 1977 The Hills Have Eyes revived Wes Craven’s career after his 1972 sadomasochistic flop Last House on the Left. But 1978 brought the film that would kickstart slasher cinema: John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Halloween brought terror to suburbia; Michael Myers has escaped his institution and is on a killing spree. It was soon joined by similar, e qually popular films like Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street. But where Bloch and Hitchcock explored internal horror, slasher films once again externalized it. Freddy Kruger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees are closer to Frankenstein and Dracula than to Norman Bates. They are clearly Other; instead of pity, the audience greets them with terror—and, ultimately, with cheers of approval.

1976’s Taxi Driver hews more closely to Bloch’s vision than the re-externalized horror of slasher films. Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro) has more agency and can inflict violence without letting Mother handle it. But like Norman Bates, he is a marginal man living in a marginal world. He drives through the dirty, crumbling streets of New York and makes awkward attempts at romance with little success. After his plan to assassinate a presidential candidate fails, he rescues a 12-year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster) by shooting his way in and out of the brothel.

Travis Bickle is one of the first fully modern grimdark antiheroes. He is rewarded for his heroism; had he succeeded in his original goal, he would have been institutionalized as a madman. He is a shard that gives you different reflections; savior, vigilante, loner, assassin. This kind of moral ambiguity would become a central feature of the grimdark ethos. Norman Bates desperately sought order in a frayed old motel; Travis Bickle drives through a city that is collapsing along with his mind.

Slasher villains and cool, hyper-competent psychopaths like Patrick Bateman and Dexter Morgan become icons and mascots because they are externalized. We have met the enemy, and we are relieved to discover that he is not us. Norman Bates remains disturbing because we can recognize his vulnerability, shame, loneliness, and humanity. We see traces of Norman in Travis Bickle, Misery’s Annie Wilkes, Joker’s Arthur Fleck, and Andy Serkis’s portrayal of Smeagol/Gollum as a broken addict searching desperately for a goodness he has almost forgotten.

These broken heroes remain unsettling because they never fully become “Other.” They provide Aristotle’s twin pillars of tragedy: pity and terror. We can sympathize with Norman’s embarrassment, with Arthur Fleck’s alienation, with Travis Bickle’s loneliness. Their suffering is part of the ordinary human experience, even as it drives them outside the bounds of ordinary human behavior. We get no comfortable shiver at their crimes, just the same catharsis we feel for a blinded Oedipus. Like him, they are driven to darkness by forces they can neither understand nor control.

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[1] Robert Bloch. Psycho: A Novel. (1959). New York: The Overlook Press, 2010 Edition. E-Novel.

[2] “House of Horror Stuns the Nation.” Life magazine, December 2, 1957. 28-29.

[3] Bloch, Psycho.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Paula Guran, “Behind the Bates Motel: Robert Bloch.” (August 1999). DarkEcho. https://web.archive.org/web/20120204134611/http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/horroronline/bloch.html.

In April 1893, Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. His son Howard was only three years old but already reading and writing. Five years later Winfield Lovecraft died. His death certificate listed the cause as “general paresis,” neurological degeneration caused by the final stage of syphilis.

Before his fifth birthday, Howard was told that Santa Claus was a myth. He had already figured this out for himself, but the open admission led him to another question: is God also a myth? A brief period in the First Baptist Church’s “infant class” Sunday school—a period that ended after he asked too many pointed questions—led him to conclude that was indeed the case.

A brief flirtation with Islam by way of The Arabian Nights led Howard to adopt the pseudonym “Abdul Alhazred.” By seven, he considered himself a “genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a half-sincere belief in the old gods and nature-spirits.”[2] But by 1902, after “reading much in Egyptian, Hindoo, and Teutonic mythology,” he found himself a complete sceptic and materialist.

In 1897, when Lovecraft was still half-clinging to his Pagan faith, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) estimated the world was between 20-40 million years old. By 1905, Ernest Rutherford had determined through radiometric dating that the world was over 1 billion years old. Lovecraft found himself reeling within a vast, ancient, and indifferent universe—an experience that would echo throughout his fiction.

Lovecraft owed a great debt to Gothic Horror in both aesthetics and his prose style. But he replaced supernatural monsters with indifferent alien gods and accursed grimoires with ancient texts like the sanity-shattering Necronomicon. Gothic horror writers like Poe, Stoker and Shelley feared the evils hidden within our civilization. Lovecraft asked a more unsettling question: what if civilization itself is meaningless?

In 1905, as Rutherford was plumbing the depths of geological time, Lovecraft wrote “The Beast in the Cave.” In the story, a man separated from his guide wanders through Kentucky’s vast Mammoth Cave. As his flashlight begins to fail, the man hears footsteps. But his relief soon turns to terror as he realizes that these footfalls were not like those of any mortal man.

Lovecraft’s narrator picks up rocks and begins throwing them toward the sound. One hits the target, after which he faints. When he comes to the guide is with him, having heard the sound of the rocks. They discover in the light of the guide’s flashlight what appears to be a dying “anthropoid ape of large proportions.” But when the beast turns, and they see its face, he realizes with horror that “the creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!”

When he was writing “The Beast in the Cave,” Lovecraft and his mother had recently moved to a small Providence duplex. His beloved grandfather Whipple had a stroke soon after losing the family fortune. In 1908 Lovecraft had a nervous breakdown severe enough to prevent him from receiving his high school diploma. That same year he wrote “The Alchemist.”

In that story Count Antoine de C., the narrator, is the last of his line. After Antoine’s noble ancestor killed a dark wizard the wizard’s son, Charles le Sorcier, swore revenge on him and all his descendants, cursing them to die upon reaching the age of 32.

Since that time, all his ancestors have died in some mysterious way at 32. He is now the last of his line, living in a crumbling tower with his poor servant Pierre. Pierre, the beloved servant who raised him, dies shortly before Antoine’s 32^nd birthday. Isolated, he begins exploring the ruined castle until he finds a trapdoor. There he discovers a man who attempts to kill him, but Antoine is victorious and kills the stranger.

With his last dying words, the failed assassin announces that “I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am Charles Le Sorcier!”[4]

While still reluctant to submit his writings professionally, Lovecraft was an avid reader who contributed regularly to the letters pages of several publications. By 1914 he had joined the United Amateur Press Association. Decades later, we would call such publications “zines.” In 1916, “The Alchemist” appeared in a UAPA journal; the following year he was elected UAPA President.

America’s entry into the Great War brought out Lovecraft’s patriotism and racial anxieties in equal measures. His efforts to join the Army were stifled by his mother Susie, who used family connections to have Howard declared unfit for service. In 1919 his mother was committed to the same hospital where his father had died. She would die there in 1921. The following year Lovecraft would submit “A Confession of Unfaith” to The Liberal.

After Susie Philips Lovecraft was committed, Howard found himself increasingly troubled by the nightmares that had plagued him since childhood. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (published October 1919) and “The White Ship” (November 1919) explored Dunsany-inspired dream worlds. Lovecraft would go on to write many more of these tales, but another November 1919 publication is most remembered as a harbinger of stories yet to come.

The narrator of “Dagon” is a sailor captured by the German navy during the Great War. Escaping in a lifeboat with a stock of provisions, he drifts for days before finding himself stranded on “a slimy expanse of hellish black mire.” Wandering across the muddy plain, he discovers a “Cyclopean monolith” covered with hieroglyphs of aquatic creatures, including “marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.”

Then the narrator sees a great being:

As the story ends, the narrator is preparing to commit suicide. He has run out of money and out of morphine, the only thing that grants his shattered mind any peace. It ends with “I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”

At first Lovecraft scorned writing for profit. But as his financial situation deteriorated, his outlook broadened. In October 1923 “Dagon” was republished in a popular pulp magazine. At the bottom of the page was the announcement “This is the First of a Series of Remarkable Stories that H. P. LOVECRAFT is Writing for WEIRD TALES.”

Weird Tales was notorious among literary snobs for its lowbrow fiction. It was notorious among pulp writers for its slow payments. The most popular authors received a penny per word: Lovecraft was never one of the most popular authors, so he received between a quarter-cent and half-cent per word. Yet he continued corresponding in the letters section and building relationships with other Weird Tales writers. To supplement his meager income, he also worked as a ghostwriter for other authors, notably Harry Houdini (“Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”).

The February 1928 issue introduced the world to “The Call of Cthulhu.” This is one of the first examples of “cosmic horror.” Its terror lies in the fact that the universe is unfathomably vast and humanity is very, very small. Cthulhu has lain dormant in his sunken city of R’lyeh for long aeons. Yet when he dreams sensitive people share his visions. Some are driven to create bizarre art; others go mad; still others join his cult and become murderers.

The late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston, followed scraps of dissociated knowledge and learned too much. As he tells us:

Our world is built on the foundations of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Reason and science have largely taken the place of medieval faith and prayer; knowledge is something to be sought after like virtue or piety. Lovecraft turns that idea on its head. Knowledge does not always bring wisdom or understanding. Sometimes it brings madness and death. We have been given the power of reason, but reason often shows us we are powerless.

Several of Lovecraft’s regular correspondents became forefathers of grimdark and dark fiction. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, a regular feature in Weird Tales, has always served as a counterweight to clean-cut high fantasy heroes. Robert Bloch’s “Shambler from the Stars” (September 1935) inspired Lovecraft’s final completed story, “The Haunter of the Dark:” Lovecraft named the protagonist “Robert Blake” in his honor. Bloch later went on to write Psycho in 1959. You may not have read the book, but you’ve probably heard of the movie.

Due to his lifelong fear of doctors, Lovecraft spent months living with severe untreated pain. When he finally went to the hospital, doctors discovered chronic kidney inflammation and intestinal cancer. A few weeks later, on March 15, 1937, he died. Yet, contrary to his wishes, he did not obtain oblivion.

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Grimdark often defines itself in opposition to high fantasy. It may be more accurately be understood through its kinship to Lovecraft. The Lovecraftian universe is indifferent and unassailable. Lovecraft taught that civilization was fragile and human life insignificant. These ideas are the pillars of the grimdark ethos.

Lovecraftian pessimism was transformed into grimdark agency by Robert E. Howard. Lovecraftian protagonists typically go mad. Conan the Barbarian gets even. Howard saw civilization as decadent and barbarism as mankind’s natural state. The same instincts later reappear in Frank Miller and George R.R. Martin. Lovecraft introduced grimdark to nihilism. Howard gave it its warriors.

Lovecraft’s insanity lay hidden beneath endless fathoms. Bloch put insanity behind the front desk at a roadside motel. Norman Bates was neither a hero nor an antihero, just a sad lonely man who had a troubled relationship with his mother. His madness was not cosmic; it was intimate and personal. Bloch’s vision of madness lurking beneath ordinary life helped shape grimdark psychological horror and serial killer fiction.

The world of Warhammer 40k is the Lovecraftian void translated into tabletop gaming. What remains of the human empire is surrounded by twisted monsters and alien gods. Their worshippers and spies would see what is left of humanity burned to ash. But, as Lovecraft could have told them, their prolonged proximity to cosmic corruption has left humanity as twisted and monstrous as the horrors it fights.

Lovecraft was a prophet of his age. He dreamed visions of what the present meant and what the future might hold. What he saw left him screaming in the dark and writing epistles for a quarter cent a word. His stories still resonate because they contain arcane truths. Their shards fascinate those who do not pry too deeply. Those who put the pieces together, those who see the true vision, will understand at last that we dance in the void.

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[1] H.P. Lovecraft, “A Confession of Unfaith” in The Liberal (1922). At Brown University Repository. https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/readers/set/bdr:709536/#page/1/mode/2up.

[2] Lovecraft, “Confession of Unfaith.” https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/readers/set/bdr:709536/#page/4/mode/2up.

[3] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Beast in the Cave” (1918) at Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Beast_in_the_Cave.

[4] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Alchemist” (1916) at Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_United_Amateur/November_1916/The_Alchemist.

[5] H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon” (1919). At Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_2/Issue_3/Dagon

[6] Ibid.

[7] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu.” (1928) at H.P. Lovecraft Archive: https://www.hplovecraft.com/WRITINGS/texts/fiction/cc.aspx.

The 1960s are known to comic aficionados as the “Silver Age.” At Marvel Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were busy creating the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the Avengers. Across town, at DC, Superman and Batman had teamed up with Aquaman, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and the Martian Manhunter to form the Justice League of America.

These comics were written and drawn under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority. The “Golden Age” comics of the 1930s and 1940s drew inspiration from hard-boiled detectives and pulp fiction. Blood was shed, bodies were buried, and cleavage was abundant. Then Fredric Wertham’s 1954 bestseller Seduction of the Innocent warned Americans that comics were not just tasteless—they were leading children into delinquency, depravity, and sexual perversion.

Under the CCA, comic books were forbidden from creating sympathy for criminals or showing disrespect toward policemen, judges, or government officials. Depravity, lust, sadism, and masochism were banned outright. Drawings of females were required to avoid “exaggeration of any physical qualities.” Illicit sex and “sexual perversion” were right out. Good must always triumph over evil and crime must always appear sordid—but never too sordid.

In the Golden Age, Batman was a brooding menace who had few qualms about beating information out of thugs. Yet even before 1954, DC Comics had begun moving away from Batman’s pulp roots toward lighter juvenile fantasy. After the Comics Code, Batman relied less on his fists and more on his ever-expanding arsenal of Bat-gadgets. Instead of mobsters and spies, he increasingly found himself battling aliens, colorful supervillains, and bizarre science-fiction threats.

It was this Batman that Adam West brought to the small screen in 1966. Multimillionaire Bruce Wayne and his teenage ward Dick Grayson (Burt Ward) lived together at Wayne Manor. But when the Bat-Phone rang, the Dynamic Duo donned their costumes, leapt into the Batmobile, and sped out of the Batcave to battle the nefarious villains threatening Gotham City.

The week’s first episode invariably ended with our heroes in an inescapable deathtrap. But those who tuned in the following night at the same Bat-Time and same Bat-Channel discovered that Batman had, as always, arrived prepared. Even a bomb-laden shark was no match for Shark Repellent Bat-Spray. West responded to the absurdity around him with perfect deadpan seriousness, though in moments of frustration he might suddenly blurt out: “You FIEND!”

The violence was theatrical. Audiences tuned in not for bloodshed but for a witty pop-art spectacle. Bright comic-book balloons announced “BAM!” and “OUCH!” while conveniently obscuring the punches. By the episode’s end, the villains were handed over to the police and moral order was restored to Gotham City—at least until the following week.

Ratings were down considerably by 1968. Not even the considerable charms of the new Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) could revive audience interest during the third season. NBC considered purchasing the series after ABC dropped it, then discovered that several key sets had been destroyed. Unwilling to invest in a new Batcave and Wayne Manor, NBC declined. Night fell over Gotham City.

In comic-book Gotham, Dick Grayson moved on to college in Batman #217 (October/November 1969). Bruce Wayne and Alfred relocated from Wayne Manor to a penthouse apartment above the Wayne Foundation. Longtime adversaries like the Joker were nowhere to be found as Batman returned to his roots as a street-level vigilante terrorizing Gotham’s criminals. Then, in September 1973, Batman #251 restored the Joker to his old murderous ways.

I was eight years old in 1973. I was more of a Marvel fan, so I missed the Joker’s return to homicidal form. In hindsight, it was inevitable. Adam West’s Gotham was a place where people could trust the police and elected officials to handle matters and summon Batman when things got too sticky. That world had been crumbling for a while. It finally collapsed in August 1974, when Nixon resigned the presidency and stepped onto the helicopter.

Watergate ended, but crime remained high, jobs remained scarce, and American cities remained what Desmond Morris called “concrete jungles.” Two months after Nixon’s resignation, Batman #258 (October 1974) introduced Arkham Asylum as Gotham’s new home for the criminally insane. The Joker was its first celebrity resident.

In The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Gotham is now overrun by criminals. Batman has not been seen for a decade. Bruce Wayne has not spoken to Dick Grayson in seven years. Jason Todd, the second Robin, is dead. A plastic surgeon has repaired the acid-scarred half of Harvey Dent’s face. The Joker has remained catatonic since Batman disappeared.

Days before Commissioner Gordon’s mandatory retirement, Bruce Wayne puts the suit back on and begins methodically reclaiming Gotham. A simple image of the Bat-Signal on a TV screen is enough to get the Joker talking again. But not everybody welcomes Batman’s return. Politicians denounce him as a dangerous vigilante. Journalists warn that he will inspire copycats. Liberal commentators condemn his hands-on approach to social problems.

In his first fight with the leader of the Mutants, Batman discovers that at fifty-five he no longer possesses the strength and reflexes of his prime. After a few weeks of recovery, a wiser and more cautious Batman returns to the dump for a rematch. This time, relying on strategy rather than brute force, he leaves the Mutant Leader face-down in a mud pit.

Gotham’s most vicious gang now renames itself the Sons of Batman. Having seen the light, they begin their own crime-fighting campaign. Petty thieves lose their hands. Three-card monte scammers get set on fire. Clerks who fail to resist armed robbers get their fingers chopped off.

As Gotham reels from the new chaos, Bruce receives a visit from an old friend. Superman has become effectively invisible. Mentioning his name on television—or even hinting at his existence—can jeopardize a broadcaster’s license. Clark accepts these restrictions because he understands that openly defying the government could trigger a conflict he might win only at catastrophic cost.

Batman now faces multiple arrest warrants, including a murder charge stemming from the Joker’s suicide. If ordered to bring Batman to justice, Superman will have no choice but to obey. He urges Bruce to lay low for a while. But, as Clark departs, both men understand that their confrontation is only a matter of time.

Gotham is plunged into darkness and bitter cold after a dispute over the island of Corto Maltese escalates into an American-Soviet nuclear exchange. Superman manages to divert the incoming warhead and minimize casualties, but the explosion leaves him badly weakened. Still recovering from the blast, he receives the order.

Bruce and Clark agree to meet in Crime Alley, the narrow stretch of pavement where Martha and Thomas Wayne died and Batman was born. But before that reckoning arrives, Batman and the Sons of Batman struggle to contain riots and mob violence spreading across Gotham after the blackout. Finally, the two old friends confront one another.

Batman puts up a surprisingly effective fight, but he is ultimately no match for Superman’s power. Then Miller reveals Bruce Wayne’s final contingency plan: years spent and millions invested in synthesizing Kryptonite.

As Superman lies battered and bleeding on the pavement, Batman suddenly clutches his chest. Wayne Manor erupts in flames as the charges Bruce planted earlier detonate. Alfred, his life’s work completed, dies with characteristic dignity. But, of course, Batman has planned for this as well. His heart attack is staged. Superman hears Bruce’s heartbeat inside the coffin and responds with a swollen-eyed wink toward the new Robin.

The story ends with Batman, like Superman, driven into invisibility. From the depths of the Batcave Bruce Wayne, Robin, and several Sons of Batman gather as the seeds of an army “to bring sense to a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers.” This will be a good life, Bruce thinks to himself. Good enough.

The same year he released The Dark Knight Returns, Miller also collaborated with David Mazzucchelli on Batman: Year One. 1988 brought Alan Moore and Brian Bolland together for The Killing Joke, a grim Joker origin story that left Barbara Gordon permanently paralyzed. Technically these stories were “one-shots” outside the official DC Universe. But since DC had earlier reset its sprawling multiverse with the Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, darker reinterpretations of heroes and villains increasingly became the new Batman standard.

Miller’s Batman also gave other comic writers the courage to create darker and more morally ambiguous antiheroes. The Punisher was transformed from a one-off Spider-Man adversary into a traumatized ex-Marine waging a one-man war on organized crime after the murder of his family. Wolverine’s adventures became bloodier and more savage. Todd McFarlane’s Spawn introduced readers to a damned antihero clawing his way back from Hell itself.

Hollywood also followed Miller’s lead. Christopher Nolan not only borrowed Miller’s title for The Dark Knight. He also helped transform the Joker from a colorful prankster into one of the most disturbing villains in modern popular culture.

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When Christopher Nolan announced that Heath Ledger had been cast as the Joker in The Dark Knight, the initial fan response was overwhelmingly negative. At the time, Ledger was best known for playing a closeted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain and a charming teen bad boy in 10 Things I Hate About You. Critics and fans alike frequently dismissed him as a “poor man’s Brad Pitt.” Many expected that his Joker would be as disastrous as George Clooney’s widely mocked Batman.

The first promotional photos impressed some doubters. Early leaks, which were later proven true, described Ledger’s performance as intense and committed. But most still felt that he would be overshadowed by Jack Nicholson’s 1989 performance. Not until the December 17, 2007 release of the trailer introducing Ledger’s Joker would the skepticism finally melt away. Then, on January 22, 2008, six months before The Dark Knight premiere, Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose.

To prepare for his role, Ledger, a method actor, spent long hours alone with the Joker’s thoughts. For six weeks prior to filming, he locked himself in a London hotel room and experimented with the Joker’s mannerisms, voice, and laugh. He kept a “Joker Diary” filled with disturbing imagery and meditations on characters like Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange. During filming, he often remained in full costume and makeup all day.

Method acting alone does not explain Ledger’s impact. Jared Leto used similar method acting techniques for his 2016 Joker role in Suicide Squad, and his performance was almost universally panned. While Ledger captured the zeitgeist of cultural anxiety and social corrosion, Leto’s performance was seen as stylish but insubstantial: tattoos, affectation, and performative insanity that lacked thematic weight.

Ledger’s Joker sees the lunacy crawling beneath our thin veneer of sanity and wants to free it from bondage. He wants to shatter the world into fragments simply because it is still whole. He embodies one of grimdark’s central myths: civilization is a performance held together by rules nobody truly believes in. His vision of death and destruction is not performative; it is existential. As he tells Batman in the interrogation room, “When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other. You’ll see. I’ll show you.”

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In addition to Batman, 1966 also saw the debut of Star Trek. Like Batman, the Federation universe imagined an enlightened civilization guided by reason, justice, and institutional competence. When crises emerged, the Starship Enterprise arrived to restore order with diplomacy, phasers, fisticuffs, and the occasional Vulcan nerve pinch. Star Trek was less campy than Batman, but both inhabited the same optimistic mini-skirted universe.

The 1960s imagined liberation. We had reached the moon, and the stars were our future. With the passing of the Civil Rights Act, we had finally laid the Civil War to rest. Any speed bumps we might encounter along the way were simply the last dying echoes of a bad old world—something to be laughed at rather than feared. Warp drives and interstellar travel served the same narrative function as Shark Repellent Bat-Spray and were deployed with the same sober seriousness.

By the 1970s we were dealing with Vietnam, urban riots, rising crime, and growing institutional distrust. Ronald Reagan came to power by promising to tear down what remained of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. A process that had already been ongoing in the face of stagflation and economic decline accelerated with his election. Mental hospitals closed and urban disorder deepened. A growing number of Americans felt abandoned by the institutions they once trusted.

Instead of the brightly polished future of Star Trek, popular culture increasingly gravitated toward grimier worlds populated by smugglers, mercenaries, vigilantes, and survivors. The gleaming Enterprise gave way to the battered Millennium Falcon. Our new vigilantes looked more like Max and the Feral Kid than Batman and Robin, and their bloody violence was not censored with colorful comic balloons.

Like the colorful SF of the 1960s, grimdark can only thrive in a particular social environment. There must be widespread distrust of institutions and elites; skepticism about narratives of progress; a growing conviction that procedural morality is merely hypocrisy. There must be ongoing worries about violence, and nagging fears that collapse is already underway. As those fears recede, grimdark becomes less a style and more a cliché.

Every age creates the heroes it believes it deserves. Tolkien gave his readers an ancient world rooted in pre-Christian myth so they could lament its passing. Grimdark gives its readers heroes who rise above the chaos by embodying it and who bring back law and order by ignoring it. Neither vision is permanent. Both are mirrors.

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[1] Frank Miller. The Dark Knight Returns: Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: DC Comics, 187.

[2] Pauli Poisuo, “The Dark Knight Star Michael Caine Reveals His Reaction to Heath Ledger’s Joker,” at Slashfilm. https://www.slashfilm.com/1835816/the-dark-knight-star-michael-caine-heath-ledger-joker-reaction.

When we hear “post-apocalyptic fiction,” we are likely to think of films like Mad Max or George Romero’s Living Dead cycle. Those stories frame civilizational collapse as a purification ritual. Social constraints disappear. Moral limits erode. Chaos becomes a ladder. The weak are crushed while the strong inherit the earth. Those with the right combination of determination and ruthlessness become action heroes—or finger-steepling villains. The end of the world becomes a wish fulfillment fantasy.

For all their talk of imminent doom, most post-apocalyptic fantasies are at heart optimistic. The restrictions and decadence of our bureaucratic society are burned away to make room for a better, purer world. Survivalist fiction promises us the death of the Deep State. The end of civilization brings the demise of the parasites who have sucked it dry. Those who have kept the powder dry and their weapons clean are ready not only to survive but thrive.

With collapse comes a jubilee. Our debts are no longer payable and our oppressors are no longer in power. We can imagine ourselves beating enemies with chain-wrapped baseball bats or picking off the hordes with head shots from our bunker. Things may be rough for a time, but you can finally give that HOA board what it’s had coming for years.

In a world that feels lonely, morally uncertain, and spiritually dead, collapse can seem like a new beginning. The institutions we no longer trust, the symbols we no longer share, the spectacles that no longer thrill us—all can be cleared away, and our exhausted culture can finally be put to sleep.

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road strips away those comforting illusions and reminds us that collapse is not liberating: it is simply worse. McCarthy gives us a world where a good day means finding a few cans of food for yourself and your child. There are no epic battles, just crumbling buildings and desiccated corpses. Heroism comes not in glorious deeds but in the slow grinding determination to keep the fire going one more day.

The man has forgotten much of the world before the conflagration; his son was born shortly afterward. His wife chose suicide not long after the child’s birth. He keeps a revolver beside him with a single bullet should the boy’s death become preferable to what the world still has in store. Exhausted and starving, they carry everything they own in a shopping cart with a bad wheel as they wade through the ashes of a dead culture.

Apocalyptic fantasies generally begin with an explanation. Nukes, aliens, zombies, and plagues are among the most popular. McCarthy never tells us exactly what happened. There are ashes, mass deaths, and widespread crop failures. The man and his son pass burned corpses along the roadside, so perhaps it was nuclear war. Ultimately, the cause no longer matters. History and politics are luxuries for people with warm homes and full bellies. Their concerns are entirely immediate; food, shelter, warmth, and survival.

Amidst the dead forests and silence, some have resorted to cannibalism. One scene describes a mob carrying chain-wrapped pipes, followed by “wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant.” [2] Later, they walk past a camp where they find the remains of an infant roasted on a spit. Yet there are no spectacles and no scenes of righteous vengeance. The post-conflagration world has been depleted even of outrage.

Modern catastrophe narratives are entertaining. Violence becomes spectacle; think Negan’s “eenie meenie miney mo” slaughter in The Walking Dead or the Capitol Building blowing up in Independence Day. Bloodshed is aestheticized, villains become charismatic antiheroes, and mass death arrives in all its CGI-rendered glory. All these things are absent in The Road. The lives of his protagonists are tedious, repetitive, and cold.

Most catastrophe movies end on a hopeful note. The world is scarred, perhaps irredeemably so. But it will go on. McCarthy gives us no signs of rebuilding, no bandit camps, no towns gathering amid the wreckage. Fellow survivors are greeted with suspicion and with good reason; your supplies may mean my continued survival and vice versa. Scavenging and predation have become mechanical even for McCarthy’s protagonists.

The man still maintains a few hard limits—we won’t eat other people even though we’re starving. Yet he also turns away a wandering survivor rather than share the little food they have left, until his son acts as a moral compass and insists they share. McCarthy recognizes both morality’s inherent value and the difficulty of holding onto it in difficult times.

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The protagonists of post-apocalyptic fantasy find themselves suddenly blessed with new skills in first aid, foraging, shooting, and hand-to-hand combat. They become smarter, tougher, more assertive, and more charismatic. The characters in The Road have no fairy godmother to transform them into mighty warriors or brilliant engineers. They are filthy and emaciated. Early in the story the man notices blood on his hand after coughing. It soon becomes clear that he is not growing stronger but slowly dying.

When the book begins, they are following a crumbling map to the coast. This is a common trope in post-apocalyptic stories. The heroes are searching for a legendary sanctuary, for a gathering of survivors, for a scientist who knows how to stop the virus. The man and the boy are walking toward the sea because they have no better place to go; they are heading south because the weather continues to grow colder. And when they arrive, all they find is:

Catastrophe porn typically ends in resolution. The world may be gone but we have not only survived; we have learned how to survive in chaos and discovered our triumphant warrior self. McCarthy gives us a far more unsettling truth. Catastrophe does not make us greater. It reduces us to starving skeletons coughing up blood and pushing a shopping cart with a bad wheel.

When civilization collapses, so does universal morality. The man and the boy are each the other’s world entire. They live for each other and because of each other. They carry the fire, even if they do not know where, how, or if they will light it again. Their past and their future are ashes, but they are together in this present. The father cannot restore what was lost, but he can protect the boy for another day.

In most grimdark fiction, morality is treated as hypocrisy masking power. In The Road, morality is a fragile persistence that keeps his protagonists human. Their quest is doomed, but no less holy for that. Their world is a wicked place, but they, to the best of their ability, will choose the good. Even when hope is gone, the father does what he can. He acts neither out of optimism nor ideology but from duty driven by love.

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McCarthy’s novel refuses both despair and fantasy. His apocalypse is not spectacle but slow decay. He does not provide the reader with redemption, rebuilding, or triumph. The world as it was cannot be put back, cannot be made right again. But despite all that he reminds us of our duty to love and to care for another.

The man dies as he lived: exhausted, frightened, and diminished by a world slowly consuming him. He cannot save the world. He cannot even save himself. All he can do is preserve one small fragment of human goodness long enough to pass it on. Their world has been stripped of institutions, futures, and certainties. Love remains the one thing not entirely reduced to ash.

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[1] Cormac McCarthy, The Road. Picador Collection, E-Book.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Today Get Carter is considered one of Britain’s greatest films, certainly its finest crime drama. 1971 audiences reacted to its gritty violence with shock and disgust. Director Mike Hodges’ vision was unleavened by the wisecracking wit of Dirty Harry or the stylized ultraviolence of A Clockwork Orange or The Wild Bunch. Set amidst the smoldering scrap heaps and dive bars of Newcastle, Get Carter looked like it was filmed in a dirty ashtray.

Protagonist Jack Carter (Michael Caine) was a vicious contract killer, no better than the whores and ruffians he dispatched with steely-eyed efficiency. Most critics and cinemagoers dismissed Get Carter as a nasty film about nasty people doing nasty things to each other. A 1972 Blaxploitation version of the story, Hit Man, performed better in American theaters than the British film.

After its unimpressive release Get Carter sank into obscurity, forgotten by all but a few cinephiles. (Most notably two young directors named Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie). But as Swinging London gave way to Maggie’s Millions and Free Love was replaced by the Age of AIDS, it looked less like a dog-end in a punchbowl and more like a harbinger of things to come.

Get Carter is lauded as a Very Important Movie. Ted Lewis, the author of Jack’s Return Home and two subsequent Jack Carter prequels, is less widely remembered. Yet Lewis’s novels reveal more clearly that what many viewers still mistake for celebratory nihilism is in fact a parable that is as ordered and moral as a Greek tragedy.

Outside the confines of respectable society reside those who are neither respectable nor particularly social. This is the world Jack Carter inhabits, a place where he has earned some success as a foot soldier to a London mob boss.

Like many of the mercenaries slashing their way through sagas Carter has escaped both his humble beginnings and his earliest crimes. He has no reason to pry when his estranged brother dies in a drunken accident, no reason to go against the friendly advice his employer proffers like a velvet glove. No reason save that an empty whisky bottle was found in the wrecked car and his brother always hated whisky.

In the 1971 movie, we watch Jack Carter’s rampage with a detached fascination and horror. The 1970 novel tells the story from Carter’s point of view. We learn almost immediately that Jack had a dalliance with his brother’s fiancée, and that his niece Doreen may well be his daughter. The film withholds this information until a few moments before Carter sees Doreen in a pornographic 8mm reel.

We also learn that Frank was the good child while Jack was the black sheep. Frank studied hard and stayed out of trouble. Jack did neither, despite frequent beltings from his father—beltings that only ended when Jack beat him nearly to death. Frank stayed in their crumbling town (Scunthorpe in the novel, Newcastle in the film) and worked menial jobs while Jack rose through London’s organized crime circles.

The Old English “frith” became our modern “friend.” Frith is the responsibility you share with your fellows. By honoring these obligations, Hodge tells us, you become “free men towards the rest of the world.” Carter has achieved a measure of success by making himself a valuable player in the underworld. He is trusted because he is trustworthy; he gives and returns favors to preserve and strengthen his position. This moral code shaped the Anglo-Saxons who rose in Britannia through conquest, alliance, and reciprocal obligation.

Frith works in concentric circles; family, then clan, then tribe. His standing within the underworld is generally solid—save for the fact that he, like Lancelot, is having an affair with his boss’s wife. Carter’s relations with his family have been something less than ideal. But when Frank is murdered, Carter has no choice but to avenge his brother.

Lewis’ first-person narrative puts us in Jack Carter’s world as Carter sees it. We become complicit in his violence and soon come to treat it with the same detachment Carter feels when he’s on a job. He is neither a monster nor a glamorous anti-hero—just a flawed man who has internalized the moral and ethical codes of his community and who follows them with neither pity nor sadistic glee.

Carter is aware that his quest for justice endangers his mob ties, his life, and even his lover. Were he a mere nihilist who cared about nothing more than getting ahead in a cruel world, he would go back to London and let the dead stay buried. But the same codes that made him a successful gangster also lead him inexorably toward his doom. They are his tragic flaw—the thing which makes him a hero, and which ultimately destroys him.

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Most people would agree with Max Allan Collins: there is nothing remotely noble about killing a squealer to protect a criminal. But most people are not criminals. We have given the state a monopoly on violence; we expect law enforcement officers to protect us from people like Jack Carter. But those who live outside that world have different expectations. Ted Lewis’ second Carter book gave us a firsthand look at that world.

Jimmy Swann has disappeared from police custody and cannot be located. That can mean only one thing: Swann is cooperating with the filth to avoid a lengthy sentence. Since he has worked for Carter’s bosses for years, that means Swann’s testimony could send most of the organization to prison for a very long time. Including Jack Carter. Criminal organizations can only function when everybody involved is loyal to the group. Swann must be silenced both to stifle his testimony and to send a message.

For centuries the Mafia operated under a code of omertá (silence). Informing was punishable by death. Captured mobsters who refused to talk knew their families would be looked after while they were in prison; those who talked knew their families were at risk. Even if you were asked to inform on a mortal enemy or a member of an opposing family, you kept quiet.

In 1963, that silence was broken when “made man” Joseph Valachi testified before a Senate hearing. While in prison Valachi had murdered an inmate he thought was a Genovese family hitman. To avoid the death penalty, Valachi agreed to provide details about the Mafia’s history and organization. In 1991, testimony by Sammy “The Bull” Graviano sent John Gotti, the notorious “Teflon Don,” to prison.

Today the American Mafia is a pale shadow of what it once was. Mobsters who were a generation or two away from Sicily knew the code; after a few generations, the new mobsters had American values. They were willing to cooperate with police to save their own skins, especially once the Witness Protection Program offered informers better protection than the mob.

Carter despises Les and Gerald Fletcher, his bosses. He dreams of taking over the organization and running it properly with Audrey, his lover and Gerald’s wife. But when he is offered a chance to cut a deal with Hume, a crooked police inspector, and turn evidence on Les and Gerald, Carter refuses, saying “I’m going to play this the way I set out to play it.”[4] Within the confines of his moral world, Jack Carter behaves with honor even when it is to his personal disadvantage. His ethics may be alien, but they are coherent.

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When Ted Lewis was writing Carter’s Law, his marriage was falling apart, his finances were crumbling, and his heavy drinking had become full-blown alcoholism. By the time it was published his wife had left with their daughters and Lewis had, after a stretch in a psychiatric hospital, moved back in with his parents. Shortly before the release of 1977’s Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, he declared insolvency.

Carter and the Mafia Pigeon is a poorly done pastiche of Lewis’ earlier work. Lewis is clearly writing for a much-needed paycheck. His attempts at writing scripts for Doctor Who went nowhere; British audiences still preferred cozy mysteries and police procedurals to hard-boiled noir. In a 1980 interview to promote his final novel, GBH, Lewis said that the time for Carter had passed, noting “Since then, there have been so many spinoffs like The Sweeney that everybody knows all about the underworld.”[6]

GBH (an acronym for the term “Grievous Bodily Harm”) tells the story of George Fowler, a wealthy pornographer who has built an empire on torture pornography and snuff films. The story moves alternately between two locations: Smoke (London) and Sea (Mablethorpe, a seedy off-season seaside resort). Fowler is trying to determine who has been skimming money from his operation. After torturing and murdering several of his employees, he retreats into Mablethorpe and paranoia.

There is no frith here; what we see is a truly nihilistic world filled with people seeking unwholesome pleasures and trying to avoid inevitable pains. Jack Carter had a Dark Ages conscience; Fowler and his associates are as thoroughly modern as George R.R. Martin’s scheming nobles. In George Fowler’s decline into madness, we bear witness to the slow self-induced decay of Ted Lewis.

There is no escape plan and no hope of even tragic redemption. In his finest prose, Lewis gives us an account of his sad last days.

On March 27, 1982, Ted Lewis died in Scunthorpe General Coronary Ward 10 of a heart attack. He was also suffering from chronic pancreatitis and cirrhosis. Six months after Lewis died, his mother Bertha saw him at the bottom of the stairs, looking up as she readied to come down.

She reported later “I knew he was at peace.” [7]

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[1] Pauline Kael, “Get Carter” at Pauline Kael Reviews. https://web.archive.org/web/20120225154115/http://www.geocities.ws/paulinekaelreviews/g2.html.

[2] Winifred Rose Hodge, “Heathen Frith and Modern Ideals” at Heathen Soul Lore. https://heathensoullore.net/heathen-frith-and-modern-ideals/.

[3] Ted Lewis. Jack Carter’s Law (Kindle Locations 123-126). Soho Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Ted Lewis. Jack Carter’s Law (Kindle Location 3071). Soho Press. Kindle Edition. 1974.

[5] Nick Triplow. Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir. Exit Press, E-Publication. 2017.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

Do you want DOOM? I said, did you want DOOM!?!?!? Well, you’re in luck—Ahnaf Ibn Qais and Malcom Kyeyune are here to give five fresh hours of hot, steaming defeat, despair, and decline. Sit down, relax, embrace the decline and fall of Western Civilization, and don’t forget to like and subscribe!

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings transformed modern fantasy. Ursula LeGuin saw Middle-earth and gave us Earthsea; Terry Pratchett gave us Discworld; J.K. Rowling gave us Dumbledore and Voldemort. But these diamonds shone amidst a great pile of dung. Many lesser writers copied Tolkien’s elves, dwarves, and wizards while missing the elegiac beauty, mythic dread, and civilizational melancholy that made Middle-earth feel alive.

In 1977 the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien released the first major collection drawn from Tolkien’s unreleased notes. The Silmarillion gave us Middle-earth’s creation as Arda, explained the origin of the Elves, and revealed that Sauron was merely a servant of the first and greatest Dark Lord—the fallen Vala Melkor, remembered in terror as Morgoth. Over the next decades, the Estate released still more material from Tolkien’s vast Legendarium.

That same year Rankin-Bass released their musical version of The Hobbit. While it won a Peabody and a Christopher award, there were grumblings in many quarters. Some criticized the animation, produced by a Japanese studio that would later become Studio Ghibli. Others felt too much of the book had been cut. But as an adaptation of a children’s book, it succeeded marvelously.

In 1978, a year after The Silmarillion’s release, Ralph Bakshi released what was to be the first part of a two-part Lord of the Rings. The movie received mixed reviews. Bakshi’s rotoscoped Orcs and Nazgul were widely recognized as nightmare fuel, flickering through scenes like half-glimpsed visions of something unwholesome. But he struggled to convey the majesty of Rivendell and the tragic beauty of the Elves. Saul Zaentz, who held the film rights, ultimately declined to finance the second half.

1980 saw Rankin-Bass return to Middle-earth with The Return of the King. Today it is best remembered for the song, “Where There’s Whip, There’s a Way.” The gentle whimsy that made The Hobbit work was ill-suited for the darker themes of Lord of the Rings. We could see Tolkien’s influence in He-Man’s endless battles with Skeletor; in hits like The Neverending Story and flops like Willow. But for over twenty years Tolkien’s world largely vanished from the screen.

In December 2001, America was still reeling from the fall of its two towers. Peter Jackson’s highly anticipated The Fellowship of the Ring gave us exemplars of quiet courage in Frodo and Samwise, a king uncrowned in Strider, and deep wisdom and heroic sacrifice in Gandalf. Drawing on Art Nouveau and pre-Raphaelite influences, Jackson recreated Middle-earth with a grandeur nobody before or since has achieved. My first response upon leaving the theatre was “this is our generation’s Wizard of Oz.”

While he captured Middle-earth’s light, Jackson had difficulty capturing its shadows. His Nazgul were loud, heavy, and bestial predators where Bakshi’s Ringwraiths were accursed ghosts. His Orcs were brilliant examples of stage makeup, where Bakshi’s Orcs were a dimly glimpsed foulness. But as Jackson was recreating Middle-earth’s beauty, a new master was drawing inspiration from the darkness.

By 1990 George R.R. Martin was a well-established writer with three Hugo Awards and screenwriting credits on Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and Max Headroom. But he still yearned to write an epic fantasy trilogy like J.R.R. Tolkien, one of his childhood influences.

In 1991, while working on a science fiction novel, Martin suddenly envisioned a boy watching a man beheaded in the snow beside a litter of direwolf pups. He began sketching maps, genealogies, and family histories, but his work was interrupted by an offer for a television series that ultimately never aired. By 1994 he had completed the first 200 pages and sent them to his agent. But when the manuscript was finally complete, it stretched beyond 1,400 pages.

In August 1996, a 1,088-page version was released as A Game of Thrones. The remaining 300 pages became the opening for a second novel, A Clash of Kings. The series was no longer marketed as a trilogy. It had become A Song of Ice and Fire.

The armies of Martin’s Westeros must be fed and organized; they do not simply storm over hills at the proper cinematic moment. He also takes account of how slowly information travels in a world without wireless communications or printing presses—and how easily it can be distorted. His world is full of imposters, rumors, forged identities, and fatal misunderstandings. Battles end not merely in glory or defeat, but in burned crops, shattered villages, and starving peasants regardless of which side wins.

Tolkien spent little time worrying about battle logistics. Sauron’s armies never burn Gondor’s farms and starve the people behind siege walls. Aragorn’s rise to power is resisted by Denethor, but he faces neither poisoned cups nor succession crises. We are told Aragorn’s rule as King Elessar is just, but we never learn how he rebuilt a land wracked by long decades of war. For Tolkien’s imitators, logistics were little more than plot devices used to place the hero in temporary danger—devices easily discarded whenever they threatened the momentum of victory.

Tolkien survived the horrors of trench warfare in the Great War; Martin was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam era. Yet Martin’s detailed research gave Westeros a gritty immediacy that Middle-earth often lacked. The rolling hills of the Shire smell of fresh air, pipeweed, and baking bread; the streets of King’s Landing reek of mud, dirt, sweat, and horse shit.

But what we consider more “realistic” only seems so because we know urban decay far better than agrarian peace. To modern readers, Tolkien’s pastoralism feels idealized and fantastical. Yet Tolkien knew that green world intimately—and knew how quickly it was disappearing beneath industrial modernity. We recognize Martin’s crowded cities and filthy streets because we have become accustomed to them. His world feels realistic because it resembles our own.

Middle-earth is a world that once was, a place captured in its last wistful twilight. It is saudade given form. Westeros is our world plus dragons and minus modern technology. It is a moral sinkhole given form. But how well does Martin’s vision map against either past or present?

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Aragorn represents the ideal king; when Sauron is defeated and he is crowned, the land is healed. This seems unrealistic to modern minds, but it is precisely how most subjects viewed their king. They thought that a good and wise king would bring blessings to the realm and peace to his people, while an evil, weak ruler would bring curses and despair. This may oversimplify monarchic politics, but there are many grains of truth within it.

Aragorn is an honest man. His word is his bond, and both friends and adversaries know they can trust him. He is also a powerful man and a mighty warrior who has stood outside Mordor’s gates. It is in the best interests of his adversaries to seek an honorable peace. They know, as Aragorn’s subjects know, that he has rid the world of a great evil. Their lives are better for his victory. The reign of King Elessar will not be Utopian—Tolkien was never at risk of falling for that old lie. But it will be a good and a just one.

Ned Stark is the closest thing Martin gives us to an ideal king. He is honorable, compassionate, and beloved by his people. Yet he dies at Joffrey’s command just as Joffrey’s grandfather died at the hands of the Mad King Aerys. Martin rejects the old belief that a good ruler can heal the land—but he repeatedly shows us how thoroughly evil rulers can poison it.

Martin seeks to de-romanticize fantasy and puncture heroic narratives. That approach sweeps away many tired old cliches. But it can also replace them with new ones. The Marquis de Sade interrogated morality, chastity, and idealism. To that end, he produced a great deal of pornography that was occasionally philosophical but more often simply tedious. Martin sometimes veers perilously close to that edge. Sexual assault is a horrifying reality in war-torn societies. But there’s a reason his saga earned him the nickname “George Rape Rape Martin.”

In troubled times, we frequently see religious revivals. There are hints of this within ASoIaF. Melisandre and Thoros believe sincerely in the Lord of Light. Thoros, a lukewarm priest at best, has a conversion experience when he prays over his deceased friend and unexpectedly raises him from the dead. Yet the Faith of the Seven is often portrayed less as a deeply rooted cosmology than as a thinly veiled version of modern Christian fundamentalism projected backward into a medieval setting.

Not until The Silmarillion did Tolkien fans learn about the Valar and Erū Ilúvatar. There are no overt religious rituals in The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. Yet we clearly see many Catholic and Christian ideals given form—grace, providence, sacrifice, and mercy are all presented as living virtues. We even see the mortal sinner struggling for grace and resisting temptation in the person of Sméagol/Gollum. Tolkien’s lived faith shines through his work as Martin’s secular modernity shines through his.

Tolkien was a world-renowned philologist deeply familiar with Old English, Old Norse, Gothic, and Germanic languages and myths. This shaped not only his invented languages but also his entire worldview. His characters behave like figures out of an early European myth because they were inspired by those myths. This gives them a sense of timelessness that simultaneously draws us to them and sets them apart.

By contrast, Martin’s characters behave like modern people placed in a feudal world. They share our angst, our appetites, our sexual liberation, and our spiritual disinterest. Villains like Gregor Clegane and Ramsay Bolton feel less like medieval black knights than monsters from post-Code comic books—unremittingly evil and theatrically perverse. Tyrion Lannister is a noir antihero; Jon Snow is a noir hero.

Some will tell you that Martin “demythologizes” high fantasy. But 8,000 pages of a truly demythologized story would be unreadable. Mythic structures provide the framework through which audiences make emotional, logical, and moral sense of events. Martin does not abandon myth; rather, he incorporates modern mythology into his medieval world.

Modern readers were raised in an age of cynicism, institutional distrust, and moral fragmentation. We were taught that skepticism and irony are virtues, that nihilism is realism, and that sacred truths are meant to be deconstructed. The violence, corruption, and betrayal that permeate A Song of Ice and Fire feel believable to us because they align with our assumptions about human nature.

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On November 14, 1904, Mabel Tolkien died after slipping into a diabetic coma. She was 34; her sons John and Hillary were 12 and 10. Their father had died in 1896. Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan became their legal guardian.

In 1916, Tolkien was deployed to the Western Front. He returned home after contracting trench fever. Most of his closest friends did not. That sense of melancholy, loss, and longing for a vanishing world would become the emotional spine of his writing.

George R.R. Martin was born in 1947, at the height of the Baby Boom. He came of age during the Vietnam war; not long after he sold his first story, America learned of a burglary at the Democratic headquarters inside Washington’s Watergate complex. His career unfolded amid stagflation, institutional distrust, and cultural malaise. That skepticism became the bedrock upon which he would build Westeros.

The heroic narratives offered by Tolkien and his imitators increasingly felt naïve and emotionally dishonest. Martin gave readers a world that offered real consequences. Even his heroes—nay, especially his heroes—could meet a bad end. Good was rarely rewarded and evil was even more infrequently punished. Westeros felt emotionally true to audiences raised amid institutional decline and moral fragmentation.

But just as romanticism can degenerate into sentimentalist tropes, anti-romanticism can quickly become a pastiche of ugly, brutal cliches. Cynicism provides an endless effluvium of corruption, institutional failure, betrayal, and violence. Martin’s tale gives us many examples of power corrupting goodness. It has less to say about goodness surviving tragedy and disillusionment.

Tolkien understands that even under terrible circumstances people still seek meaning, grace, and redemption. Martin more often portrays corruption as the final political reality beneath human aspiration. His characters, with few exceptions, struggle not for redemption but for survival, power, or fleeting moments of human connection.

Modernity tried to reduce myth to lies, fairy stories, and old wives’ tales. It preferred the clear, verifiable world of science and reason. Martin got his writing start in science fiction, at a time when optimistic space opera was giving way to collapse narratives and dystopian futures. Movies like Soylent Green and novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz served as requiems for the gleaming technological future Martin had consumed so avidly in his youth.

Martin is neither “the American Tolkien” nor is he “the anti-Tolkien.” Tolkien saw a rapidly changing world and asked what we had lost. Martin came of age in a declining world and wondered what we had become. Both reveal truths about humanity. But both high fantasy and grimdark cynicism ultimately collapse into cliché and exhaustion. Sam carries Frodo toward Mount Doom; Jon Snow stands alone on the Wall. Both refuse to become as broken as the world they have been cast into. The myths change. The human hunger beneath them does not.

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[1] Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay.” Atlantic Monthly, December 1944.