A (Non-Comic) Book You Should Be Reading

Hey, look, I finally got around to a book review!

I usually read about four books at a time. Partly it’s because I tend to lose track of them for an hour or so, leave them in the wrong bag, etc., and I can’t stand to be without reading material. Partly it’s because I always have a thing or two I’m trying to read for work and a thing or two I’m reading because I’m me. But mostly it’s because I can rarely settle down enough to read only one book on any given day. 

For the last month, Michael A. Stackpole’s In Hero Years … I’m Dead has been in my Now-Reading stack. Repeatedly. As in I finished reading it and then I went back to the beginning and started reading it again. For about a week in there, it occupied my attention almost exclusively. It’s just that much fun, and nothing else in the stack could compete with it. It’s the superhero novel I’ve been awaiting for 15 years. And it’s pretty much worth the wait.

In Hero Years … I’m Dead is, as far as I can tell, only Stackpole’s second published foray into the world of superhero fiction, and his first serious whack at the genre in a decade and a half. (Full disclosure: his 1995 superhero short story “Peer Review,” which you can buy here, got me into writing my own superhero stories, which eventually became Masks, so I’m hardly impartial.) But it’s worth the delay. Unlike the hipster superheroes who surface periodically and skewer the genre before melting back into the cooler-than-thou mainstream (I’m talking to you, Soon I Will Be Invincible!), In Hero Years takes superheroes at their word. Guys in capes exist; some of them are trying to help and some of them are not; but people are people whether or not they’re wearing spandex. The result is something Stackpole calls “superhero noir,” and it mostly works. 

The narrator of In Hero Years is a former superhero, a “Felix” (read: mere-mortal costumed hero with a bag of tricks instead of superpowers) who went by the name Coyote in his spandex days, though his real name is never revealed. After being held prisoner for twenty years by mysterious enemies, the narrator returns to his home in Capital City to find it dramatically changed. Where once heroes battled villains in the name of good, they now fight it out in a manner reminiscent of fantasy football or tabletop gaming. Villains leak their plans online and heroes bid for the chance to defeat them. More successful heroes and more colorful villains rise in the rankings and see more income from the sales of their memorabilia; television viewers at home get the ultimate in reality TV; and damage to the surrounding landscape and people is minimized. Best of all, citizens participate through fantasy “superfriends” leagues, winning small sums as their favorite heroes succeed. It’s an alien world to the narrator, not least because the media-centric nature of the rankings ensure that those great heroes of the past who didn’t get on TV much—including his aged mentor, Puma, now stricken with Alzheimer’s—are nearly penniless and all but forgotten. Puma’s poignant appearances in the story serve to underscore that something is rotten in Capital City. 

But the protagonist of In Hero Years may be too far out of the game to do much about it. Twenty years past his prime, trying to reconnect with his lost love and get to know the daughter he didn’t realize he had, he discovers how fragile his tenuous existence can be. In his hero days, he lived under a series of assumed names, keeping his real identity secret even from the reader for reasons that I won’t spoil here. Now that he has to build a solid life for himself, he discovers the ground beneath his feet is quicksand—and he’s sinking fast, as someone on the villainous side seems to still be out to get him. He has three goals, then—catch the bad guy, fix his life, and somehow set the world to rights again. The result is a winning combination of superheroic action, noirish mystery, and moving character-based drama. 

In Hero Years is not quite perfect, at least by my private standards for the genre. Stackpole is just a bit too fond of indulging in psychoanalysis of his characters, and the intriguing creation of “p-crud”, or post-costume rage disorder (a psychological syndrome common to former costumed heroes), doesn’t completely make up for the narrator occasionally sounding like he’s working through a twelve-step program instead of solving a mystery or rediscovering his family or returning justice to the world. Some of the social commentary may or may not age well, either, like the evil mastermind Dr. Sinisterion writing an O.J.-like hypothetical confession called If I Were A Supervillain, though it’s all fun for now. But even Stackpole’s wobbles have a history of surviving nicely (his Star Wars novel I, Jedi is still considered among the best of the series over a decade after its publication, despite a few dated references and a similar psychoanalytic indulgence), so it’s probably best to let him run and see where these characters take him. Besides, it’s far and away the closest I’ve seen to a truly brilliant original superhero novel. At its worst, it’s still great.

Mostly, In Hero Years delivers the goods, and any stumbles are minor ones. The hero is a charming rogue, surrounded by colorful and engaging friends, lovers, allies, and enemies; the world is well-drawn and believable; the plot gamely balances superheroics, detective work, and family drama, leavened with delightful moments of humor (watch for the description of superhero poker night). Best of all, the twists of plot and character keep coming like a good roller coaster, right to the novel’s end, when the hero is revealed to be—well, I won’t spoil it. But I reread this book for a month just to see how Stackpole built up that dramatic reveal, and I dearly hope we’ll see more of his nameless hero.

Which brings me to the one big drawback to In Hero Years … I’m Dead. It’s a self-published, electronic-only novel, available for download in EPUB format here. I dropped the extra dollar for the deluxe edition, which included an afterword by Stackpole about how he came to write the book and how he developed various aspects of it, and it appears he tried for several years to get it published conventionally. Despite his status as a New York Times bestselling author, all deals fell through, and he finally decided to run the project up the online flagpole and see who saluted. Most of the wobbles in the book (including more typographic errors than I’m used to, though not enough to be really distracting) would probably be cleaned up by the attention of a professional editor, and so I join the author in hoping that a little online attention will help In Hero Years … I’m Dead finally see print in dead-tree format.

Especially because I don’t actually own an e-reader. Or a smartphone, or any other device optimized for the reading of electronic novels. I read the entire 700-page book on my laptop. I can’t say it’s my favorite way to experience books, but the free chapters Stackpole posted online were irresistible, and I’m a couple of years, a more steady job, and the conclusion of the format wars away from being able to purchase a dedicated electronic reader of my own. And so I made do with the EPUB and some e-book freeware, and it says something that this book held up so well under some fairly adverse conditions. 

One note on the two versions of the book available: the deluxe edition, which includes that afterword, is worth the extra buck for aspiring writers and anyone who really loves their DVD special features. If you’re the sort who just watches the movie and leaves the bonus disc in the box, you have my permission to go for the standard version with a clear conscience. Either way, you’re getting a ripping good yarn and the author’s getting several bucks per copy of his opus, as compared to the 50 cents or so he gets every time you buy one of his conventional paperbacks from Amazon. And he’s suggested before that books that sell more e-copies through his website will spawn sequels, so this is an excellent opportunity to vote with your dollars. 

I can’t wait to see what this Felix gets up to next …

The end, for now.

When I was nine years old, I entered a spelling bee and made an unpleasant discovery.

It was my second bee. At eight, I won first place in the local second-grade bee. It was my only extracurricular activity; being relatively friendless and spending all that time in libraries, I read so much that I couldn’t help knowing how words were spelled. The spelling-bee nerds were already at the bottom of the school’s social ladder, so they lost no face by being seen with me, which was a bit like having a social circle, especially with the coach encouraging me. And I found winning relatively easy, and liked it, so I accepted an invitation to enter the third-grade bee the following year.

The night before the bee, I went to bed feeling a little more tired than usual. I woke up the next morning with horrible stomach cramps, but there was no way I was going to miss the competition, and besides, the house rule was that if you were well enough to walk to the front door, you were well enough to do whatever you had to do on the other side of it. I could walk, albeit slowly, so I went to school.

I made it all the way through my first class of the day before I threw up on the floor of the school chapel. A teacher told me I was just nervous about the spelling bee that afternoon, and didn’t believe me when I told her that I wasn’t nervous at all. So I got into some parent’s car and was driven to the nearby site of the bee.

By the time the first round was over, I had to raise my hand and ask to be excused to go to the bathroom. Soon I was fleeing the room after every round, vomiting or passing diarrhea, and the grown-ups running the bee started sending proctors into the bathroom with me to make sure I wasn’t hiding spelling lists in the stall.

You see, every time I staggered back into that room and was given a word to spell, I spelled it correctly. Sometimes I swayed in place or doubled over when I was done, but I always spelled the word right.

In my memory, the day is a blur. I don’t remember a single word I spelled, only the black-and-white tile pattern on the bathroom walls and my fierce determination that I was not going to wash out on a technicality, not on the one thing I was any good at. My mom seemed to understand; while she never pushed me to keep spelling, she supported my choice every time I made it. And so after every round, regardless of whether I’d passed blood or heaved air into the toilet because there was nothing left in my stomach, I hauled my nine-year-old self upright and shuffled painfully back to that room and kept on spelling.

Shortly after they handed me the first-place trophy, I finally let my mom rush me to the emergency room, where assorted medical professionals yelled at us both for letting me get so dehydrated and not coming in sooner. I showed up at school the next day to show that teacher the trophy and the note from an ER doctor saying that I had a stomach virus and a lethal case of stubbornness.

I still have that golden-bee trophy, plus its twin from the year before; I use them as bookends. I’m looking at them as I type this, and remembering the lessons I learned that day.

First, I learned that I was some kind of bloody-minded psychopath when it came to getting something that really mattered to me. That was always a short list of somethings, but it was good to know that I was that disturbingly stubborn about the contents of that list. It made me keep a close eye on the list, lest I waste that suicidal stubbornness on an unworthy goal.

Second, I learned that the fact that a task is difficult, or even painful, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I hadn’t exactly been a quitter before, but now I knew that sometimes, if you just worked hard enough and thought fast enough and endured enough pain, good things could happen. Sometimes it was just a question of whether the good things were worth it.

With lessons like that, you’ve pretty much figured out this blog entry is bad news, haven’t you?

For the billionth time, I can’t tell you everything that’s going on with Masks … except to say that, at least for now, the book is dead. Some very promising leads have dried up, and barring a miracle, it doesn’t look like Rae and Trevor are going to see print anytime soon.

First and foremost, I want to tell you guys how sorry I am about that.

No, really. I think I may have the most astonishingly loyal and selfless fanbase in the world. The fact that, between MySpace and Facebook, over 1,000 people have signed up to support a novel that doesn’t even have a publisher—that maybe a half-dozen of them have read, in any form, ever—just blows me away. It makes me feel like I’m fifteen again and getting my first fan letter—who the hell am I to be attracting all this attention? I’m just goofing around having fun over here, and I’m sharing the fun because people asked nicely and it seemed the polite thing to do. And so I feel absolutely horrible to come before you now and tell you that the long-promised book is not going to materialize.

I wish I could hand you guys the book right now to read, for free. In fact, until recently, I had planned to serialize Masks on the Web if I couldn’t find a publisher, just because I didn’t want to leave you guys hanging. It’s what I did with the original stories, all those years ago, and I was happy doing it then because I was telling stories I liked and giving people a little joy. That alone is reason enough for me to write.

But, er, remember the lessons of the spelling bee?

Here, briefly, is the reason Masks has died: it’s not quite good enough. After four or five major top-to-bottom rewrites, trying to incorporate every set of notes under the sun—get rid of this character, bring them back, have one protagonist, have two, use this villain or that one, bring in these themes and toss those out—I couldn’t quite get all the disjointed pieces to fit together. When I was growing up in the South Bay, near the old aerospace factories, I used to hear the saying, “Beat to shape, trim to fit, paint to match.” Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that approach works … but when you do it the hundredth time, you often destroy your aircraft’s structural integrity. The major criticism of Masks, ultimately, was that it wasn’t “organic”, that the pieces no longer worked together as they should. I have been told I am a very good writer, good enough that I almost made it work … which is apparently very impressive all by itself. But I didn’t make it work, not quite, and ultimately publishers are no longer in the business of taking almost-but-not-quite-perfect books and trying to make them perfect.

Most people outside the publishing industry who have read Masks, including some Hollywood producers who got the manuscript by accident (long story, and it really was an accident), think it’s phenomenal. But I don’t want to write a screenplay, at least not yet. I want to write a novel. And I want to make it the best novel I can possibly make it, the kind of novel you guys deserve after waiting so long and so patiently for me to tell you this story. I want to write the kind of book that will curl up in your heart and keep it warm for years to come, the kind that never leaves you. I want to write something worthy of your support. And I want it as badly as I wanted that spelling-bee trophy in third grade, and for the same reason—this is the only thing I’m really good at, and there is just no point in using your one gift to do things half-assed.

So I am going to do the hardest thing I can imagine. Harder than passing blood, or spelling words when the only thing my mouth wants to do is vomit. Harder, even, than giving up on the book that has broken my heart, harder than digging a hole and burying it and moving on to more promising projects.

I am going to wait.

Right now, I have another project on the front burner, and it’s attracted a fair amount of interest. It’s a science-fiction story, both the darkest and the most joyous thing I’ve ever written, and intimately personal to me. It’s also—and I say this as someone who hates speaking ill of any project she’s worked on for more than a decade—quite a lot better than Masks. I have been advised to pursue this project, which is considered more saleable, for now. I love writing it, and I think it has great potential. You’ll hear more about it in the coming weeks.

And eventually—maybe after this book, maybe after the next, maybe a few years from now when I’ve learned enough to properly execute an idea as ambitious as Masks—I will come back to the world of Rae Masterson and Trevor Gray, and I will get it right. I will start again from the beginning, and I will use the lessons I’m learning now to write that book that will move into your heart and take up residence. And when it’s right, you’ll get to read it. I’m working on developing the maturity and the perspective to recognize right when it finally comes along, and while I’ll understand if you’re not willing to wait around indefinitely for a story you’ve never seen, I will do my best to make that story worthy of those who stay. And I promise that you’ll get to see it when the time does come, regardless of whether a mainstream publisher wants to take a chance on it.

I’ve tried a few times to quit writing Masks stories, but in 13 years I haven’t been able to do it. Perhaps I never will. Every story I write has a little fragment of my soul in it, but Masks has great heaping chunks. I go off to write other things and pursue other interests, and I never give it less than my full effort, but somehow Rae and Trevor never really leave me.

I don’t quit. I take occasional sabbaticals, but I do not quit. If it matters enough, I go back in that room and I keep on spelling. And this matters to me more than anything else I’ve ever written, not least because it matters so much to you guys.

So this blog will keep going. Some of the entries and videos will disappear, because they won’t be accurate anymore to whatever Masks will eventually become. The stories will go away, too, to be replaced by something better. I will wait for the wounds to scar over before I pick myself up and get back into the fight. And once the scarring’s done, from time to time, you will see little bits of what the world of Masks is turning into. Maybe there will be artwork, maybe a scene or a short story, maybe just a little fragment of something. I may ask for your opinions sometimes, and when I do that I’m asking for your real opinions, not your support (unless you believe the matter in question deserves that support).

You won’t see those fragments anytime soon. The current book, and the next book, and the others, will have to take priority for now. But difficult is not impossible. Painful is not insurmountable. I am a better writer now than I was when I started Masks, and if I keep practicing my craft and honing my skills, I have no reason to think I won’t improve still more. And I make you this promise now—when you do get to read Rae’s and Trevor’s story, whatever form it eventually takes, it will be worth the wait. It’ll be a thousand times better than almost-but-not-quite-perfect. I’ll do my best to earn your continued support with assorted interesting bloggery, and when the time comes, I will justify your faith with a book that’s worthy of all the time you’ve spent on it.

I hope you’ll stick with me until then.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm having to run silent for a while longer, but I hope to be back soon. Until then, a mutant plush toy sends you his regards ...

The extra lesson

Ms. Stumpf, my host in Arizona.
Also Raven, her horse—er, dinosaur—er ...

Once, I didn’t have any teachers.

Not for writing, anyway. My first dedicated lessons in the art of writing came from my grandmother, a writer herself, when I was a teenager and had already been writing Rae Masterson’s adventures for about three years. Before that, I was largely self-taught, and in many ways I still am. I read widely and voraciously, and constantly challenge myself to write the best stories I can. I am my first test audience, and I’m quite a nasty one. (Remember, I used to tell my English teachers in school, “Don’t tell me whether my writing’s good work for a twelve-year-old, tell me whether it’s good!”) Most of my techniques are hard-won lessons I taught myself, the fruit of trial and error.

You know that old saw about how conflict is essential to good writing? I actually tried writing a few stories without conflict. (They were incredibly boring, and you will not get to see them.) That’s how I did most of my early learning about writing—through experimentation. I experimented with different kinds of characters and plots, and hammered away at my writing until I figured out how to introduce themes. It was tedious, grueling work, and it’s a good thing I loved it so much, or I might never have persevered.

In Arizona, I got to cheat that process. I got to stand up in front of about 600 kids, all told, and say, “This is how it works. This is what I know.” I broke down the basics of plot—using my own system, the one I developed when I found that “beginning, middle, and end” was the most frustrating way imaginable to describe a story I then had to write—and then helped the kids apply them to their favorite books and movies. I shared the best of the many tricks I’ve learned for characterization—secrets of motivation and worldview that lead you outward to words and actions. I showed them how to build fictional worlds, from gravity up. And I showed them how to find themes in what they read and what they watch, which I believe is the key to putting your own themes into your own work. (For one thing, I’ve found I tend to write them into my own stories without knowing they’re there, and find them only later.) If someone had told me these things when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I could have shaved years off my development as a writer. I am proud to have shared these ideas with those students.

Even so, I hope they didn’t listen too closely.

Because while all those elements are crucial to writing good stories, there is one I can’t teach. The best writers don’t just swallow what their teachers say (even when the teacher is me). They go after the rules with a hammer and bash them until only the stuff that works is left over. They try things, even if they’re told those things can’t possibly work. And they write. They sit down, day after day, with a pen or a pencil or a keyboard or a stick in the dirt, and they write. They find out what works for them. Everything I said in those lectures is what works for me, and for a majority of my students—but I’ve never met a writer who didn’t violate at least one important rule in at least one way. No two brains are exactly alike; no two souls are identical. Every writer has to discover for himself or herself what works for him or her. And the only way to discover that is to try everything in the hope of finding something.

Right now I’m writing a novel that came to life when I heard someone say I couldn’t do something. Specifically, they said that no one could write an adventure story (at least, one in the style of the West) whose hero was committed to nonviolence and making a serious go of it. If the good guy can’t fight the bad guys, I was told, the story doesn’t work, at least for Western audiences.

I’m writing that story now. I’m about halfway done with the first draft, and I’ve passed the first major fight sequence where the hero’s principles are put to the test. The chapter is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever written, and consistently exciting (at least to me). There’s action, there’s suspense, there’s a funny bit with a dog and a moment to make you cry a little inside. You could say I cheated a bit, since there are plenty of other characters in the story who have no problem whatsoever with using violence—but the nonviolent hero is the most consistently interesting part, the most difficult to write, and the most satisfying when I finally figure him out. So it turns out it’s not impossible. It’s just hard. And that’s the thing about writers—they’re not afraid of hard. They’re not afraid of time-consuming. They’re not afraid of impossible, because they’re used to making the impossible happen.

I could see a few faces in the audience in Arizona that were thinking hard about what I was saying. I could almost hear wheels turning inside heads—“Can I really do that? Can I make that work? What if …?” Go with those instincts, guys. Try it. Mess around. Find your own voice, your own method. Figure out how you too can do the impossible.

And send me a link afterward, will you? I do so like to see how it’s done …

Off the map

(Written January 18, 2011)

Last summer, I had to make a last-minute trip to the East Coast. I don’t particularly like flying—I’m not phobic or anything, but it will never rank high on my list of favorite activities—and I remember staring intently down at the scenery to distract myself from the noise of the engine and the activities of my fellow passengers.

As we left California and flew over the western United States, I found myself studying the landscape. I was fascinated by the places where human civilization just seemed to stop—the solar farms and suburbs that suddenly gave way to mountains and desert, which just as suddenly gave way again to something manmade. It was as if the landscape below me had been constructed according to incomplete map—in this place everything should be as built-up as possible, but this patch is missing from the map and so we’ll leave it as it is. I stared at those off-the-map spaces, trying to burn them into my brain because I knew they wouldn’t be as common once we crossed the Mississippi and entered the land of trees. I could see the coyote coming from those places, and some of the wilder and more unpredictable elements of my stories. It’s always good for a writer to go off the map from time to time.

Well, I’m off the map now.

I’m in Arizona. I just finished leading the first day of workshops as I type this on Tuesday afternoon (no telling when it’ll upload). The kids were enthusiastic, and the teachers seemed doubly so. Several students came up to the edge of the stage when I finished my presentation to ask me questions about writing and getting published. One cautiously pulled out handwritten pages and told me about a series of novels that sounded quite promising. So far, so familiar, and it’s the reason I’m here.

But I only have to step outside the auditorium to remember I’m out of my territory. Sliding through the desert on a train crossing the California border, I got a close-up look at country I’d previously flown over. I didn’t recognize any of the plants. The earth was a different color. The jagged mountains looked different from the rumpled foothills and worn coastal ranges of my native terrain. It seemed alien, maybe a bit hostile. I could see the beauty in the harshness of the environment, but I couldn’t escape the nagging sense, every once in a while, that I’d landed on the moon.

But it’s good to go off the map. I can’t wait to see what I’ll find here …

Some fairly awesome news

I’m going on a school visit!

Sharp-eyed readers (and Mr. Olson’s minions, of course) will recall that I made a visit to a junior-high English class in Texas via Skype back in October. Well, this time it’s not Skype. I am getting on a train and chugging my way out to Bullhead City, Arizona, where I will be speaking at Mohave High School (go, Thunderbirds!).

I will do my best to take photos even as I do my best to warp young minds without burning down the building. I will try to post said photos, although I’m bunking at a friend’s house and internet access will be iffy. So the page may be sparsely updated next week.

BUT … the REASON I am trekking to Bullhead City is to lead a writing workshop based on my new short story, which you fine folks will get to see when Free Comic Book Day rolls around on May 7. I’m also working to develop curriculum for it at the high-school level, which I will make available for free on my website whenever I get around to making one. (Don’t hold your breath … I have to read Web Design For Dummies first.) Any teachers in California, Texas, or New York who’d be interested in helping me tailor the curriculum to your respective state education guidelines, hit me up and you’ll get to read the story a few months early, albeit without the illustrations. Plus a Skype visit, unless you’re in southern California, in which case you might get an in-person visit.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you saying, get to the part that matters to ME! Well, all this means that 1) a new short story is in the pipeline, which is ALWAYS good news; 2) Masks is getting a toehold in our lovely educational system, which is good news for both overworked teachers (translation: all teachers) and bored students; and 3) my completely awesome friends and fans have found yet another way to prove the viability of this book from a publishing standpoint.

Bullhead City, here I come!

Fist, meet face! Or, the beautiful nose-breaking

For Christmas, I received a copy of a comic book that got me thinking about one of the central tenets of superhero adventure: guys in tights whumping on each other.

The collection was Moon Knight: God and Country, written by Mike Benson and Charlie Huston. I loved Moon Knight as a kid—the shadowy world inhabited by a flawed hero in a silver-white costume (and the moody artwork that resulted); the fact that he had not one but three secret identities, and it made him kind of schizo; the serial encounters with his lycanthropic nemesis, Werewolf By Night, with their bizarre fusion of superheroics and horror. Moon Knight at his best was weird, and mysterious, and beautiful, and indefinably cool in a way that never really caught on (lucky for me—it meant I found a lot of good stories in the 25-cent bin).

Huston’s revamp of the character has been charitably described as hyperviolent. This version of Moon Knight is tormented by the Egyptian god who resurrected him in his origin story—except instead of demanding justice like he used to, Khonshu now wants blood and flying body parts, and usually appears wearing the form of a psychopathic mercenary Moon Knight killed (accidentally? During a psychotic episode? I’ve never been sure) in an earlier adventure. Moon Knight is now a government-sanctioned vigilante, and rapidly losing his grip on reality as he takes to carving his crescent-moon symbol into the foreheads of his bloodied and broken foes. I read Huston’s comics for a while, then finally quit in disgust because the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere interesting and pretty much everything I had liked about the character was now gone.

Reading God and Country, which picks up around the time I quit, reinforced my conviction that the comic had gone in an uninteresting direction. But it got me thinking about why I missed the old Moon Knight, and what it said that a take on the character that was (arguably) supported by the stories I loved was yet so repellent to me.

The answer struck me as I was typing those words up above—weird, mysterious, beautiful. There aren’t a lot of superheroes I consider beautiful, but as dark as Moon Knight’s adventures always were, I took a certain primal satisfaction in the fact that the character was trying to balance so many conflicting sides of his life, and more often than not managing to be a glimmer of light in his own darkness. That made the character beautiful. Huston lost that beautiful light in the spray of blood, and I lost interest in Moon Knight.

But let’s face it—guys in tights whumping on each other has always been a central feature of superhero comics. The first modern superhero comic featured on its cover a picture of Superman smashing a car full of gangsters into a boulder. Violence is part of the genre, and I don’t really have a problem with violence in my fiction. Heck, I do exhaustive research to get the violence in Masks right—to make sure Trevor’s fights, in particular, make sense in the context of the laws of physics, anatomy, and human behavior. I have described my book as “a love story and a coming-of-age narrative and a meditation on modern mythology—in which a lot of stuff blows up.”

And yet superhero violence, in my view, works best when it plays by rules, or at least when rules exist. In Masks, there’s an indelible line between masks who do their jobs with minimal violence—who never cripple or kill when they have a choice, who train to win fights without doing permanent harm—and those who believe in using the bad guys’ methods against them, who usually leave a trail of bodies in their wake. Rae and Trevor are in the first category; Cobalt is in the second, although he pretends otherwise. It’s what makes them enemies, really. The rest is window dressing.

Part of that conflict is rooted in the question of superhero morality—to have good guys and bad guys, you have to have at least a working definition of good and bad, right and wrong, and varying definitions lead to varying approaches. Most people who make the distinction at all agree, for example, that at least some forms of violence are bad—like murder. However, there are three major schools of thought on how to deal with the fact that violence exists whether we want it to or not. These ideas get dumbed down a lot for superhero fiction, but I’ll try to maintain at least a little of the necessary complexity.

The first school, which has become increasingly popular in the last 20 years, views violence (even in fiction) as a matter of proportionate response. If the bad guys are level-5 bad, then the good guys are allowed to be level-5 bad to beat them. If the bad guys are level-12 bad, you may need to keep a puke bag handy in order to root for the good guys. This is the same argument often advanced by people who advocate a “whatever it takes” approach to dealing with real-life violence—if the opposing force uses chemical weapons or suicide bombers, then we should be allowed to respond in kind. Anything less, this thought argues, ties the good guys’ hands. That’s where God and Country is coming from, and where Cobalt comes in.

The second school of thought is at the opposite end of the spectrum—if violence is bad, then the good guys shouldn’t use it, period. In the real world, this usually takes the form of pacifism—for example, Quakers who register as conscientious objectors in wartime because their religion prohibits war. You don’t see this portrayed much in Western entertainment anymore, partly because it really limits your fight-scene options. But you will occasionally see a pacifist superhero trying to make headway in a violent fictional world. Usually he doesn’t succeed; the best-known example of an attempt at a nonviolent hero in American culture is Shane, a novel and movie about a former gunfighter trying to give up the gun. It’s a deeply moving story, full of big ideas, but you can’t help noticing that Shane keeps beating people up in bar fights. Shane’s attempt at pacifism, noble as it may be, is a real problem for somebody writing a Western. There aren’t any heroes in Masks who take this view, although I’m experimenting with a pacifist hero in another novel just for the heck of it and it is as difficult as it is rewarding.

The third school of thought occupies the middle ground—the idea that violence is a necessary evil, but evil nonetheless, and should be limited as much as possible. In the real world, this basically boils down to the rules-of-war approach—things like the Geneva Conventions. This approach says that violence is sometimes the only solution to a bad situation (the Nazis are a classic example of a bad thing that needed stopping), and that violence should therefore be used only when absolutely necessary, and then only according to strictly defined rules, which are written out in advance so nobody is tempted to cheat. Soldiers wear uniforms; they don’t deliberately harm civilians; captured enemies are treated humanely and with respect. Most superheroes used to take this approach, although it’s less popular now as writers and editors have made villains ever more extreme—by the time the fifth school bus is blown to bits, it’s hard to understand why Batman hasn’t just strangled the Joker already.

Writers, of course, see problems and opportunities in all three approaches. It’s easy to give a pacifist hero the moral high ground, but stories need conflict, and it’s harder to create action and tension when your heroes avoid it. Competing with an already violent culture makes the proportionate approach tempting—when you’re trying to make your bones as a storyteller, nothing gets readers’ attention like the snap of bones breaking—but having to constantly make up new tortures is exhausting. And the middle path seems to be the best of both worlds, but it requires constant examination to balance the need for action in a superhero story with the need to avoid unnecessary violence.

Different writers have different attitudes toward this question. Part of it’s a question of temperament, naturally, and of how much you can get away with in a given story. But I’ve always found the most beauty in the balance—in the good guys who stay good guys, as much as they can, while the world goes to hell around them. They fight monsters without becoming them, or at least they try. Sometimes they’re outnumbered or outgunned as a result, but that just makes it more dramatic when they win. The balance itself is a good source of conflict. My favorite heroes abhor violence to one extent or another, but they won’t stand peacefully by while someone, for example, abuses a child. But neither will they beat the abuser into the ground just for the hell of it. The balance is difficult. It’s complicated. And when it’s done right, it’s beautiful.

(By the way, this is all completely separate from the question of whether violent art should be censored or restricted to certain audiences—although I do support things like clear and informative labeling so we don’t have six-year-olds bringing home God and Country by mistake. So if you want to know whether movies like Hostel should be in general release, you’ve come to the wrong window.)

At the climax of Masks, Rae and Trevor are forced to fight each other, with the fate of the world at stake. It’s arguably my favorite scene in the book because of the way their beliefs and their feelings for each other play out in their exchange of professional blows and personal words. It couldn’t happen if either one of them refused to fight at all, or simply pulled out a gun and blew the other away. What happens next is unexpected, and thrilling, and heartbreaking. And, to my mind, beautiful.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.