Grimdark Magazine Issue #2

by Adrian Collins

  Langer shook his head, eyes gleaming under the shadow of the akubra. ‘Just wait until I find out about this. You’ve made a very big mistake.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be my first.’ George turned and walked away.

  * * *

  When they pulled the bag from his head the light blinded him. He coughed, barely able to breathe in the heat and thin red dust. His body ached from where they had beaten him with their force batons. After they had dragged him from his bunk, late at night, and set upon him.

  Behind him stood a half-dozen security personnel, black sentinels silhouetted against the maddening heat. A second figure stood directly next to George. As his eyes adjusted to the light he saw it was Burgess. One side of the corner man’s round face was swollen, his bottom lip split. He smiled weakly. ‘You might be right about that “liability” thing.’

  Less than a metre in front of them, the edge of the yawning chasm of the Great Yandi Pit: one kilometre deep, maybe five wide. The wind whipped at their clothes, pulling at them, beckoning them toward the abyss. A black Humvee rested nearby on the crushed red rock. The door slid open. Inside sat the vice president, in the flesh. He held the akubra in his hands. He seemed to be adjusting the brim.

  ‘I’m asking you twice: lose your next fight, George.’

  George’s voice came out in a croak. ‘Not going to happen.’

  Langer looked up, nodded at the guards. One stepped forward and brought his force rod down on the back of Burgess’ head.

  George turned. ‘No.’

  Burgess pitched forward. He was looking at George with bloodshot eyes when they struck him. He seemed surprised. His mouth was open, trying to speak.

  George looked after him as he disappeared into the depths of the pit. His chest heaved. It felt like he was choking. ‘Motherfucker.’

  ‘Why, yes. Yes I am,’ said Langer.

  George tried to speak, but let out a sob. He fell to his knees.

  The redhead watched him from the cool shadow of the vehicle. ‘Really, George? That’s all it takes? One dead drug-addict? Maybe you’re not the man I thought you were.’

  George coughed, cleared his throat. The ground was warm under his knees, the sun stinging the back of his neck. ‘You’re the one sitting behind ten men. Come over here, little man. Come over here and I’ll show you who I am.’

  Langer smiled. ‘That’s more like it. You’ll need to bring some of that to the ring for your next fight. But not too much.’ He turned and swung his legs over the side of the seat, so he was facing George, ‘We have a problem, Breaker. It’s the audience. The punters, the…’ he gestured with his left hand, ‘the people. They love you. And fear you. These are powerful things, powerful emotions. The problem as I see it is this: you didn’t earn these things by yourself—far from it. You’re a freeloader. You’ve manipulated our system. The one we invented, built, and paid for. An operation like this, like Hope Corporation, isn’t an accident. It’s a work of art. You see, what you’re doing, by using the system to your own advantage, is taking us for a ride. And there are no free rides here in Hope Corporation. The user pays.’

  The vice president ran one finger along the brim of the akubra. ‘This law is immutable. The user always pays.’

  George watched him in silence.

  ‘So you’ll throw this fight,’ he pointed at the pit with his hat. ‘Or you’ll follow your friend. And if we do have to put you in, well… everyone will think you’re just another jumper who couldn’t take the heat, the desert, and the time. Another brown stain baking at the bottom of the Yandi, soon forgotten. We win either way.’

  The redhead placed the akubra on his brow carefully. ‘So, what’s your answer?’

  George closed his eyes for a half a minute. When he opened them, he looked at the place where Burgess had been standing.

  He slowly got to his feet. ‘I’ll take the fight.’

  * * *

  He’d drunk hard after Yandi. Missed work, knowing they wouldn’t care. Wouldn’t dock his pay. Wouldn’t say a thing. And he played again. Yeah, he played. Six years of living clean, saving his pay, betting on himself on Fight Night. A small fortune.

  In three weeks it was all gone. The last of his liabilities sunk into the slots.

  So when he stood, finally, in front of the tumult, he felt light as air.

  ‘BREAKER… BREAKER… BREAKER…’

  The crowd was as big, as loud as it had ever been.

  A fighter with a heavy jaw looked at him through slitted eyes. He moved forward slowly across the canvas, watching George from behind two large fists.

  George stood, arms by his sides, watching the man. He smiled a small smile.

  The man paused, lowered his fists slightly. ‘What? What are you grinning at?’

  ‘This is going to hurt.’ [GdM]

  T. R. Napper is a 2014 Writers of the Future winner. He's had stories published in Interzone #254, AMOK: an Anthology of Asia Pacific Speculative Fiction and others. He has an upcoming story appearing in Interzone #256. Over the past five years he's had dozens of non-fiction articles published at The Guardian, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Drum, New Matilda, and others.

  T R Napper is an aid worker, stay-at-home father and writer. He's spent the last decade living and working throughout South East Asia. He currently lives in Hanoi, Vietnam.

  Twitter: @DarklingEarth

  Website: www.nappertime.com

  Grimdark: Onscreen

  LAYLA CUMMINS & KYLE MASSA

  Across film and TV, drama and traditional high fantasy have often gone hand-in-hand, drawing viewers in with familiar character tropes, romantic subplots and good versus evil concepts. But the recent trend towards grimdark fantasy, with its gritty storylines, complex anti-heroes and flashes of gallows humour, sees audiences welcoming the subgenre into both traditional and non-fantasy films and TV series.

  Early cinema was often black and white, not only because Technicolor was still improving but also because in Hollywood morally grey characters were almost non-existent. In The Wizard of Oz (1939), one of the most popular movies of its decade, heroine Dorothy and her friends were the embodiment of good while the film’s evil characters, especially the Wicked Witch of the West, were their polar opposites.

  Yet other films of that early era explored the darker side of the human psyche. In Germany for example, F. W. Murnau’s silent film Faust (1926) took a well-known European legend and played around with the complexities of character immorality. Here the titular Faust strikes a deal with demon Mephisto and embarks on a self-serving path of sex and murder that culminates in his own grisly demise.

  Fast forward thirty years and characters and narratives became a little more complex. Although not fantasy, The Godfather (1972) changed the way the world watched gangster movies by giving its violent criminals internal moral compasses. Nowadays, blurring the lines between right and wrong is common, but it can still be found in some unexpected places. The Batman universe took a distinctly darker turn when Christopher Nolan stepped up to direct Batman Begins (2005), the first instalment of the Dark Knight trilogy. While Batman obviously doesn’t have a medieval fantasy setting, Nolan’s take on the franchise is surprisingly grimdark. Ambiguous morals? Check. A war-torn locale? Gotham is attacked by master criminals in three separate films, so check. Intense violence? The hand-to-hand ninja stuff is fairly tame, but when the Joker stabs a pencil through a goon’s eyeball in The Dark Knight (2008), well, what could be grittier than that?

  Art-house fantasy epic Valhalla Rising (2009) has many of the tropes found in grimdark, including an almost unhinged attitude towards graphic violence. The protagonist, a mute warrior named One-Eye, bites open a throat, bashes someone’s head in with a rock and tears out a man’s entrails with his bare hands. One-eye, though, is not your typical protagonist who fights for honour and the good of men. Beyond the violence One-eye is an archetypal morally grey character. In the beginning, he fights for revenge. But when he comes to the new world
things get a little blurry. Why does he follow the crusaders? What does he hope to achieve? We are never really given a satisfactory answer to these questions, except maybe that he needs to die in the way that he sees in his visions.

  In plague-ridden medieval England, the setting for Black Death (2010), perhaps the most interestingly grimdark element is not where the characters start but where they end up. Osmund the monk begins as the star-crossed lover, a man conflicted between love and duty. But the film ends with a much more grimdark Osmund, scouring the earth for Langiva, the witch who killed the woman he loved. And leaving your protagonist worse off at the end than he was at the beginning is most definitely grimdark.

  Absent the huge ad campaigns of Hollywood blockbusters, however, these fantasy films are little known outside of core fan groups. Production companies are reluctant to finance anything that isn’t an adaptation of an already popular series because it’s considered too risky. Hollywood also likes spinning money from film franchises by splitting the final chapters of already lengthy series like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Twilight into two parts. With action, horror and sci-fi movies drawing big bucks at the box office, there just doesn’t seem to be room for an all-fantasy grimdark film right now, with a few exceptions like The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014) which makes the cut for its depiction of dark magic, moral complexity and awesome bloody fights. But while Hollywood churns out the same old drivel on the big screen, it’s over on the small screen where grimdark is carving out a niche for itself.

  Over the last couple of decades we’ve seen several ground-breaking drama series hit our television screens, many of them in the fantasy genre. Popular shows like The 10th Kingdom (2000) and Once Upon A Time (2011) drew viewers in with recognisable fairy-tale characters and themes. It hasn’t all been good though – Legend of the Seeker (2008), a show based on the The Sword of Truth series by novelist Terry Goodkind, received mixed reviews and was axed after only two seasons. Trailers for Netflix’s original drama series Hemlock Grove (2013) promised great things, pairing dark horror fantasy with teenage angst in small town America. But it failed to live up to expectations with some viewers calling it “The O.C. with werewolves.”

  Nevertheless, grimdark has proven to be a genre that thrives in the medium of television because of the complex conflicts and compelling character arcs that can be revealed over multiple episodes. HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011) ensnared millions of fans who would never touch a fantasy novel yet are crying out for the next season. Its commercial success also paved the way for other shows created in the grimdark style. Canadian-Irish historical drama series Vikings (2013) is set in one of history’s most violent eras and is packed with bloody battles and strong male and female characters. Over the course of the first and second seasons [spoiler alert] Lagertha, a skilled shield-maiden and authority figure, defends herself against would-be rapists and maintains order amongst the townspeople when her husband, Ragnar, sails for England. When Lagertha has a miscarriage, a devastated Ragnar conceives a child with Aslaug hoping for the sons he was promised by the Gods. Personal and emotional conflicts like these are some of the reasons behind grimdark’s rise in popularity on television, as they parallel our own experiences and challenge our views on the world around us.

  However, while using the word ‘grimdark’ often conjures up images of medieval battles and the odd mythical creature, characteristics of the genre have been appearing in other, very different series. Zombie soap-opera The Walking Dead (2010) is set in a world parallel to our own and asks, what would an ordinary person do if all laws and morals that once held humanity in check were stripped away? It’s not fantasy in the traditional sense. There’s no magic, dragons or epic battles fought on horseback—although Michonne does have a badass sword and knows how to use it—but each character has done something morally ambiguous because of the world they’ve been thrown into.

  One of the best genres right now for morally complex characters and conflicts, gritty storylines, and loveable anti-heroes is crime drama. In The Sopranos (1999) Tony Soprano took his uncle’s place as head of the Family. He’s a violent criminal, but the audience learns to sympathize with him because of his panic attacks and internal struggle to balance protecting his own family alongside his duties as a crime boss. In Breaking Bad (2008) Walter White is the perfect anti-hero because we see him turn from everyday good guy to gut-busting drug dealer over the course of five seasons. It’s also increasingly violent with darkly comic turns. In the contemporary crime drama Hannibal (2013) ex-teacher turned FBI profiler Will Graham descends into madness due to his own psychological issues and Dr. Lecter’s clever mental engineering. Even ultra-gritty Scandinavian series The Killing (2007), Wallander (2005) and The Bridge (2011) have proven so popular they’ve been given their own subgenre: Nordic Noir.

  With the ongoing success of fantasy franchises like The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, could a blockbuster grimdark movie or another hit TV series be forthcoming? It may only be a matter of time. Fans are demanding film and TV adaptations of The First Law and the Gentlemen Bastard series. Even Joe Abercrombie has been hinting about how he’d like to see his books on the big screen, but claims that “no one seems to be listening.”

  Yet the tide is turning. Grimdark is appearing across all film and TV genres forms is making a big and bloody splash. The team at Grimdark Magazine are all crossing our fingers in the hopes that en epic grimdark movie adaptation is on the cards. Because let’s be honest, folks – it’s long overdue. [GdM]

  An Interview With Kameron Hurley

  ADRIAN COLLINS & CHERESSE BURKE

  [GdM]: Thank you for speaking with us, Kameron. With Bel Dame Apocrypha providing such an awesome start, bringing in a slew of awards and nominations – such as the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel – we’re all eagerly waiting to see where you’ll take the Mirror Empire.

  [GdM]: What does “Grimdark” mean to you?

  [KH]: I’ve always seen grimdark as a reaction to traditional fantasy Tolkien knock-offs, where no one took a shit, the good folks always won, and the bad folks tended to be monstrous stand-ins for our fears instead of actual people. There were always folks writing gritty and complex fantasy, of course, but they weren’t the sort of thing flying off the shelves the way the Dragonlance and Shannara books were. Looking at it now, I also wonder if grimdark wasn’t an offshoot of our expectations around video games, which have taken the same darker, bloodier tone as the folks who generally imbibe this sort of media grow up instead of growing out of it. As a nation, the U.S. has also been at war for over a decade, and suffering a major Depression for nearly that long. We can’t help but bring our current environment and concerns to our art. Grimdark, more than other types of fantasy, explores the grey line between “good” and “bad,” hero and conqueror. It complicates a genre that has, traditionally, been seen as a far more clearly heroic white hats vs. black hats genre.

  I know a lot of authors don’t want to touch a definition of grimdark with a ten foot pole, but I think a lot about marketing as part of my day job, and I understand why the category exists. I’ve thought a lot about it, and how my own work fits in the broader pattern. I’d say I write grimweird as opposed to grimdark, as my interest in the darker aspects of the genre takes a decidedly weirder turn than most of the other authors lumped into this category.

  [GdM]: What interests and excites you the most about the genre?

  [KH]: I’m very interested in exploring complex, grey heroes: ordinary people who do things both monstrous and heroic. I also think it allows discussions of war, and the realities of combat – from mass death by disease to shell shock to the reality that many wars are won on logistics – in a way that more traditional forms gloss over. “And then he raised an army and saved the day” isn’t something you’d traditionally write in a grimdark fantasy.

  My academic background is the in the history of resistance movements and mass atroc
ities, so I’ve seen some of the best and worst that people will do in the name of a cause, a belief, or simple greed. I can tell you now that nothing we can imagine on the page comes close to the things people have done to each other in real life. The real things I’ve read about people doing to each other are, to be blunt, too gruesome even for me, and I’ve avoided putting down some of those real events in even my darkest stuff.

  [GdM]: On your website you provide 150 pages of short stories called Brutal Women: The Short Stuff, for free or donation (2.99c on Kindle; readers can donate through your website for other formats to say thanks for putting them up). What can readers expect to see in there?

  [KH]: Brutal Women: The Short Stuff contains published work from my early days, before my first novel God’s War, came out. I don’t write a great deal of short fiction, and prior to a few years ago, of the little that I did write, it wasn’t particularly publishable, so this really isn’t a terribly large crop of fiction when you consider it was written over about 15 years. It’s also of interest to newer writers, I think, who are interested in how a writer builds the themes and tone of what will become their unique voice. I spent a lot of time trying to mimic the Sword and Sorceress stories I read as a teenager, and those just never gelled for me. It wasn’t until I started pushing the boundaries of those predictably safe stories that I started to sell reliably. Nobody wants “just another sword and sorcery” story unless they’re really hard pressed to fill a blank space in their magazine. What they want from me now is a “Kameron Hurley” story. But figuring out what that was, what that is, took me two decades.