Writing in the Dark: Dealing with Problematic Authors

I wrote the following mini-essay for the latest edition of my newsletter. I try to avoid repeating content between my blog, newsletter, and YouTube channel, but since a number of my newsletter readers contacted me to say how much they appreciated the essay and that it should have a wider audience, I thought I’d share it here as well.

A year or so ago, author Tom Monteleone posted a screed on Facebook complaining about how the Bram Stoker Awards were no longer awarded for merit but rather to serve a social engineering agenda. He claimed nominees were chosen primarily because they were BIPOC or LQBTQ+, not because of the quality of their writing. In this post, he also insulted specific writers he felt were unworthy of the award. The post received the sort of reaction from the Horror community that you’d expect, and Tom reached out to a number of writers via email to explain that he wasn’t racist, that the hard-edged and sometimes-controversial persona he effects got the better of him. (If he was sincere, he would’ve posted this on Facebook too, but he didn’t.) Then the next night, he went on a podcast hosted by a couple alt-right dudes, was obviously drunk, and doubled then tripled down on his racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic comments. He succeeded in immolating his career and tanking his small-press publishing company Borderlands Press.

Tom recently decided to start a newsletter on Substack, and the first issue went out to all his email contacts, not just those who chose to subscribe to his newsletter. I received that email, and it was Tom’s Screed Part II. He reiterated the same points he’d made a year ago, and he attacked some additional writers he felt weren’t worthy of the Stokers’ Lifetime Achievement Award. I was saddened to see Tom hadn’t learned anything in the intervening year, but I wasn’t surprised. I wrote a blog entry about older white male cishet writers with, shall we say, limited perspectives. You can read it here: https://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/2023/01/an-open-letter-to-my-fellow-old-white.html

I considered Tom a friend and a mentor, so the situation with him was a difficult one for me to deal with emotionally. I broke off contact with him, and unless he makes sincere, public amends to the Horror community – and especially to the authors he denigrated – I don’t intend to have any contact with him ever again.

Sometimes people like Tom and the Grand High Terf J.K. Rowling out themselves as toxic. Other times – as with the recent sexual abuse allegations against Neil Gaiman – others come forward and out them. But how should we react when a writer we admire, or who we have a personal relationship with, turns out to be a not-so-good person? The short answer, of course, is you can react any damn way you wish. There’s no right way. But I can share with you how I attempt to navigate these rough waters.

· Can you separate the art from the artist? Should you? I have an MA in English Literature with a Creative Writing Concentration. Our professors were up front about authors’ often problematic backgrounds. Poet Ezra Pound was a fascist. Edgar Allan Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, and he wrote vicious literary criticism of writers he disliked. Lovecraft was racist. Dickens was rumored to have had an affair with his sister-in-law. Our professors taught us that these writers weren’t literary gods to be worshipped, but humans like us, with all the good and bad that comes with being human. We could read their work and ask how their racism, fascism, sexism, homophobia, etc. influenced their writing. We could also read their work knowing that it represented the best part of themselves, while not ignoring the negative aspects of their personalities. Or we could say “Fuck that guy,” and never read anything by them again. But all these responses had us engaging with the complex and uncomfortable reality of art vs artist vs society.

· Problematic writers are good models of what not to be. If you’re introspective (and if you’re a writer, you should be), once a problematic writer shows their whole ass in public, you’ll examine yourself to see if you have any of their issues inside you. When I first started writing at the age of eighteen, self-publishing was considered something only failed writers did. It took me a while to see indie publishing as a viable option for writers. I had a prejudice to overcome, and seeing people rail against self-publishing over the years and listening to counterarguments helped me overcome it. So while problematic writers cause damage to the community and to individuals (in the case of Rowling, damage on a worldwide scale), they can also have a positive effect in some ways. After Tom’s first attack on HWA’s recent LAA honorees, I gathered all the physical books of his that I have and put them on one of the bookshelves in my living room where I see them all the time. They’re a constant reminder to me keep my mind and heart open and to continue trying to be a better person today than I was yesterday.

· Don’t put writers (or anyone else) on a pedestal. Tom’s books also remind me of this. As I mentioned earlier, it’s important to remember the writers whose works we admire are human. But we also dehumanize people when we put them on a pedestal. Whether you denigrate a person or lionize a person, you aren’t giving them the respect of treating them as fully human. People aren’t demons and they aren’t gods. They may do horrible things or wonderful things, but those things are part of the range of human behavior, for better or worse.

· Don’t immediately engage in a social media pile-on. This is my policy, and you may feel differently – and if so, you do you – but let me explain my position. Once a scandal in the writing community breaks, I try to give myself 48 hours before responding to it online. I read other people’s posts about it and consider them, but I wait to see if it’s a real situation, a real situation that’s being exaggerated, or not a real situation. I don’t want to contribute to the early noise and confusion that accompanies a scandal, and I certainly don’t want to potentially do any harm to someone or to their career. It also takes me a while sometimes to sort out my thoughts and feelings about a situation. An immediate post from me would be something inarticulate like “This am bad.” Some people undoubtedly post quick reactions because they have a strong moral stance regarding the situation. Others respond fast because they’re acting emotionally and have to post their feelings now. Some people rush to post because they want to show immediate solidarity with the community, and I suspect that some might post out of fear that they’ll be viewed as silently approving of an offender’s behavior, which could end up getting them canceled. Waiting to post about a problematic writer scandal works best for me, but your mileage may vary.

· It’s okay to have mixed feelings about the situation – maybe very mixed. I never got into Harry Potter, but my wife and daughters did, as did a number of my friends and colleagues. So when J.K. Rowling outed herself as the Queen of Transphobia it didn’t have any emotional impact on me. But if you grew up reading her books, if they were important to your development as a person, it can be difficult as hell to reconcile your feelings about the work with your feelings about Rowling’s current pathologically shitty behavior. I’m here to tell you that however you feel is okay. Never want to read Harry Potter books again? Fine. Want to still read them, but with full awareness of how awful Rowling is to trans folks? Fine. Want to honor your past experiences of her work while recognizing what a terrible human being she’s become? That’s healthy. Want to publicly boycott her work? Go for it. Find yourself doing any or all of these things at different times as you try to deal with your emotions? Perfectly normal. The only response I advise against is putting on blinders and pretending that a problematic writer isn’t problematic. That’s not healthy.

· Don’t let the reveal of a problematic writer stop you from writing. Maybe you viewed Rowling or Gaiman (or in my case, Monteleone) as a role model. You learned to write by studying their work, listened to their advice on writing and publishing, and learned how to comport yourself as a professional by observing their career. None of those experiences are invalidated by the revelation that your role model is a horrible human being in one or more areas of their life. The knowledge you gained is yours, and you could’ve learned the same lessons from a zillion other writers. You just happened to learn them from someone who, while a good (maybe even great) writer, is a shitty human. Use that knowledge to create and bring positive things into the world. Balance the scales, at least a little, by using your light to counter their darkness.

· Acknowledge that these situations suck and will continue to suck. Some people will always be sad about Rowling’s transphobia. I’ll always be sad about Tom. It’s okay to be sad, and while you’ll likely adjust to your sorrow over time, it’ll never be fully gone. You need to find a way to make peace with that somehow and just keep going.

I like this resource from the American Library Association: “Addressing Challenges to Books by Problematic Authors Q&A” – https://tinyurl.com/y5tt2ca8 It presents a thorough analysis of the issues involved in dealing with authors who are deemed problematic. It’s written for librarians, of course, not individual readers, but I think it still presents a lot of good points for readers to consider.

Feel free to leave a comment below, but because many people have strong emotions regarding this topic, please keep your comments civil and constructive. I’ll remove any comments that attack others or spew vitriol for its own sake.

DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Book of Madness, Book 2 in the Custodians of the Cosmos series is Out Now

When Maintenance Surveyors Neal and Gina investigate a house saturated with Corruption, they expect the job to be fairly routine. What they don’t expect is for Gina to become psychically bound to a monstrously mutated woman called the Witch Lady. Nor do they expect the Witch Lady’s son Randall to come into possession of a dark tome of unimaginable power called the Insanitarium, which he uses to wreak havoc throughout Ash Creek. And there’s no way they could anticipate the arrival of Neal’s childhood friend Donnie – who thanks to the malign influence of the sinister Mortuum Blade is now the serial killer known as the Ghostmaker, and determined to add Neal and Gina to his long list of victims.

Add to this. . .

– A visit from Gina’s sister Juliana, who might be a double agent serving the Black Trust.

– A member of the Multitude known as Bad Jack, who changed the course of both Neal and Donnie’s lives when they were young, and who now seeks to obtain the Insanitarium for his own nefarious ends.

– An extradimensional trip to the deadly realm called Low Town.

– And the birth of a very special little girl.

It all adds up to one very bad day for Neal and Gina, but in order to get the job done, they’ll have to risk more than their lives. They’ll have to risk their immortal souls.

No pressure.

Paperback: https://tinyurl.com/5n8z78fx

Kindle: https://tinyurl.com/bddetj5u

Audiobook: https://tinyurl.com/2s3fu6vt

Praise for Book One: The Atrocity Engine

"Waggoner offers a fresh variation on the trope of a covert agency combating evil in his blood-drenched Custodians of the Cosmos series opener."- Publishers Weekly

"The Atrocity Engine is a wild ride full of entertaining scenarios and scary monsters!" - Booklist

"THE ATROCITY ENGINE is a kick-ass cross-genre thrill ride of a novel! Holy moly! Tim Waggoner is easily one of today's best horror writers."- Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of CAVE 13 and NECROTEK

"This is edge-of-your-seat Horror Fantasy. It's as if Stephen King wrote MEN IN BLACK!" —Scott Sigler, #1 NYT Bestselling author of EARTHCORE

"Fast-paced, cleverly thought-through, and deeply unnerving in all the right places—urban horror fantasy with a decidedly creepy difference. Don't read it in the dark!" - Diane Duane, New York Times bestselling author of TALES OF THE FIVE: THE LIBRARIAN

"The story is a thumping, genre-bending tale—one part horror, one part fantasy, and two parts thriller. The pace is frenetic, and the writing delivers. There is an abundance of action and gore, which, delightfully, is not always blood (big green snot tentacles or giant serpents made of corpses, anyone?). For readers who like their tension and thrills to emerge from another Universe, THE ATROCITY ENGINE is one heckuva ride." - G.A. Rivers, The Big Thrill Recommends

Terrifier 2: The Official Novelization is Up for Preorder

Titan Books will be bringing out this novel on Oct. 8^th – just in time for the theatrical release of Terrifier 3! I had an absolute blast writing this book, and I hope Terrifier fans will love it! Brad Miska of Blood Disgusting said this about the novel:

“Terrifier 2 is seriously one of the coolest and most entertaining novelizations I’ve ever read. @timwaggoner absolutely crushed it!”

How’s that for an early review? Here’s the synopsis:

The nightmarish Art the Clown returns from the dead to continue his murderous and mad spree, in this gruesome novelization of the hit horror film.

It has been one year since the sleepy town of Miles County survived the murderous spree of demented killer Art the Clown, but little do they know the nightmare is about to begin anew.

Resurrected by a sinister entity, Art is back with an appetite for murder and mayhem—setting his sights on the recently bereaved teenager Sienna and her younger brother Jonathan. The streets are about to run with blood, and Sienna must somehow survive this gruesome Halloween night and discover how to defeat a brutal and unforgiving killing machine from beyond her nightmares.

There's no stopping Art once his sights are set on you…

Order links: https://titanbooks.com/72530-terrifier-2/

SCHEDULED APPEARANCES

IGW Genre Con. August 17^th to August 18^th. Huntington, West Virginia.

World Fantasy Convention. October 17^th to October 20^th. Niagara Falls, New York.

Authorcon V. March 28^th to March 30^th. Williamsburg, Virginia.

StokerCon. June 12^th to June 15^th. Stamford, Connecticut.

WHERE TO FIND ME ONLINE