What did it was the dog.
I’m a wimp. I’ve established this. But I like to read outside my comfort zone, sometimes, and I decided it was time to try a horror author I’d been meaning to read. Everything seemed to be going great: creepy, but not unbearable; fraught and fascinating; looming sense of doom, check, check, check.
But then the dog got hurt. Terribly. Before long, it got worse. I couldn’t go on. And then I had to re-evaluate my entire relationship with the concept of the reading dealbreaker.
This is not, to be clear, the kind of dealbreaker where someone has very poor taste in books and thus a passionate reader declines to date them. This is the kind in which you simply do not want to read a specific book, or kind of book, anymore. A wall of sorts. An obstacle you cannot or will not force yourself over.
For a long time, I liked to think that I didn’t have dealbreakers. That there was no thing, no happening or plot point or character type or incident that might not be somehow used wisely, interestingly, powerfully. I read books in which terrible, horrible things happened. I watched aggravating movies that filled my head with images I would rather never have seen. And then I read more, and watched more, and read more criticism and commentary, and somewhere down the line, I changed my tune. People can write whatever they like, but some of it? Some of it I just can’t spend time with anymore.
No one has to read everything. To believe that is to believe that people should, for the sake of some kind of intellectual argument, subject themselves to writing that dehumanizes them. There are arguments about classics, and canons; there are arguments about books that some people believe are necessary reading regardless of how dated they are. I’m not here to make or refute those. What I’m interested in is how personal some dealbreakers are—how sometimes we read right up to (or over) the edge of things that are painful or difficult or insulting, and sometimes we want to read away.
In a different time, I might have kept on with the dog-harming book, but I texted a friend who’s already read it, and she told me that wasn’t the end. More dog agony to come. I set it down for good, setting it aside for another friend who might be made of sterner—or at least different—stuff than I.
But once upon a time, I adored Jo Clayton’s Diadem From the Stars, despite the fact that a really gruesomely terrible thing happens to a character’s beloved pet early in the story. I still love A Wizard of Earthsea, and I still get really upset about the otak. But the otak dies simply; it is not drawn-out, not ratcheted up for the sake of impact or pain. Things die. We mourn them. There are other kinds of animal death scenes, like in The Magicians where Reynard does something terrible to Marina’s cat. I understand why that scene is there, to a point. I still wish I hadn’t seen it. And yet I’m okay with how much I cried at a certain moment in The Knife of Never Letting Go. It was brutal and horrible and heartbreaking, but it made sense. It wasn’t just there to be cruel.
There is another line that’s specific to an individual: When a terrible thing is just life, reality, believable, important to the story, and when it becomes unnecessary. Joffrey shooting Ros with a crossbow in Game of Thrones was wildly unnecessary; we already knew that kid was a turd. The act didn’t tell us anything new about his character, and it just seemed like gratuitous grotesquery. I watched that whole show (the sunk cost fallacy in action!), but that kind of thing has become a dealbreaker for me now. I don’t need it.
Buy the Book
City of Bones
Is this just what happens with age and experience? You see so many terrible things—fictionally and factually speaking—that you lose your taste for them? Or is that, having seen or heard or read about too many horrors, you need them to be used all the more wisely, doled out in stories that earn them? How many stories have you read or seen that set up a female character to be assaulted? How many of them had a reason beyond wanting to traumatize that character, or to illustrate how very, very bad another character was?
I think these feelings come and go. What I would overlook or ignore ten years ago, I have no patience for now. Now, I need violence to earn its presence. I need a reason: Revolt, rebellion, changing the world, making it better. Cleaning up a mess, kicking out a tyrant. Yes to the violence of The Spear Cuts Through Water or Sorrowland or The Saint of Bright Doors, violence that means something, that is rooted in what the stories are trying to say. No to more cartoon violence with uncounted collateral damages. No to yet more cynical, dismal stories about how people are terrible to each other when everyone is trying to survive. No horrible things just for the sake of being horrible. There are a thousand ways to tell stories. I want to expand what I read, to read things that are different than what I’ve read before. And maybe that just means letting certain kinds of violence be a dealbreaker. At least for now.
And no more horribly injured animals. Not right now. After I quit on the book with the upsetting dog fate, I reached for something else spooky, something at least slightly October-appropriate, something I was assured had no animals in it. This was not entirely true; there was a giant space-cave-worm, and I felt kind of bad when it met its end. It was just living, in its own weird way. And yet in this case, I could live with its fate.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
