Weekend Reading Assignment
By D.L. Winchester.
Recently I decided to dive into some Australian horror to prepare for our upcoming release of Deborah Sheldon’s Bodily Harm. Not knowing much about the Australian horror scene, I googled it, found a blog post, and picked a book they recommended.
That book was Rage, by Steve Gerlach.
And it was amazing.
So amazing, in fact, I’ve added a couple more Gerlach books to my TBR. But we aren’t here to talk about my ever-growing TBR pile, we’re here to talk about Rage.
Rage tells the story of a college student named Ben who feels like the world is against him. He blames everyone else for his problems, and sees the world through a lens that is as perverse as it is wrong. When something finally starts to go right, he can’t maintain it, and then the wheels really come off.
So what can we learn from Rage?
- Don’t half-ass your characters
Ben is an amazing character. He is an incel, someone so uncomfortable you want to put the book down and burn it, lest he creep into reality. Gerlach wrote Ben in a way that, as repulsive as he is, readers may see a little bit of themselves in him–adding to the horror. And if Gerlach had held back even a little bit, Ben as a character would have fallen flat.
- Empathy with a terrible character isn’t a bad thing.
By “terrible,” I mean as a person, not as a character. Ben does things, thinks things, and even says things that make me cringe. But, there are little moments throughout the book that make me feel empathy for what he’s going through, no matter how much of a piece of work he is. And that’s what kept me reading, kept me coming back to see what happens next. It wasn’t the story (though it was well developed), it was that slim connection with Ben and a desire to see what would happen to him.
- Predictable Endings can still be good endings.
Okay, this being a good thing is rare. But even though Gerlach telegraphed the outcome far in advance, Rage was still an entertaining read because the journey to the ending was off the wall and interesting. If you do it right, you can tell a story so well that even though the ending is obvious, the reader accepts it because it is the only way the story could have come out. If Gerlach had finished Rage any way other than how he did, it would have pissed me off to no end.
I’d have felt a lot of Rage…