Just about any fat nerd (skinny nerds have notoriously bad memories) who lived through the 1980s is going to remember Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeons, an infamous anti-D&D tract that was equal parts hilarious and depressing. Chick’s ministry was doing Infowars before Alex Jones was even born. His tracts attacked Halloween, evolution, homosexuals, and the majority . . . of other . . . Christians. The goal is for gullible dupes to have terror-induced epiphanies after discovering a tract in a public restroom (with bonus points if a glory hole is involved), so basically it’s an illustrated Breitbart News. People still break anti-littering ordinances with them today.
Under Chick’s umbrella, so-called occult experts, like William Schnoebelen (an ex-Satanist, Illuminati vampire), warned mankind about the dangers of the Necronomicon and dread Cthulhu, stating, “There is now a whole line of materials based on the hellish H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, a form of magic that we practiced in the darkest days of our satanic career – a system of magic prominently featured in THE SATANIC RITUALS by Anton LaVey! Contrary to the ramblings of D&D defenders like Michael Stackpole, the Necronomicon and the Cthulhu mythos are quite real.” That’s right. Cthulhu is real. Schnoebelen knows it, because he personally saw the actual Necronomicon . . . while flying the Kessel Run in the Millenium Falcon on his way to visit Mickey Mouse. To reiterate, this “Christian” publishing company warns us that a massive pantheon of monsters really and truly exist, even though this mythos would completely undermine the validity of every world religion . . . ever. You can’t prove Christianity with Cthulhu! Bombastic scare tactics are a better gauge of character than veracity.
I had wanted to include an illustration in tribute to Dark Dungeons in anupcoming RPG book. It was meant to show the world’s second worst gaming group. Oops! I noticed my mistake and ran it past a couple friends. They both agreed that now is not the best time for an illustration of a social outcast murdering his peers, no matter how poorly drawn. My intent was more along the lines of Greg Costikyan‘s Violence RPG (free to download from the author’s site).
My book’s central theme is comparable: Role playing is better when you don’t murder everything in sight. My character’s unhealthy fantasy life bleeds over into the real world, much like Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters, another classic gem of anti-D&D propaganda. There was a lot of baseless hysteria like that, way back in the good ol’ days, about D&D derailing youth and turning them into sexually-active, drug-addled occult assassins (if only). It was funny back then, because the accounts were exaggerated or fabricated. Now, there is an overhanging threat of real violence made worse by people attributing mass shootings to sex, drugs, and rock & roll, instead of seeking a solution. The radicalized sides of the argument each want to shoot their way into heaven.
We need a contemporary Ars Moriendi, a shift from our culture’s detachment from and fear of death to an acceptance that gives life perspective. Perhaps we are transitioning right now from a culture that glorifies violence in every medium to one that reconciles death as part of the human condition. Probably not. To die well and with dignity after a long and meaningful life, isn’t that the counterargument to these incessant battles of Pyrrhic attrition? Worth. Dignity. Life is meaningful and death is significant, which is a hard point to make when the “good guys” discuss morality like a fan service debate over whether Han Solo shot first. It is healthy to laugh at death, so long as death is not an abstraction. Good humor speaks to truth, a salutation of memento mori, which translates as “remember that you have to die.” Birth and death, joy and mourning, this is what unites us as human beings.
— Derek Kagemann
Gary would have smiled had he been alive. Instead, his face was an unchanging white expanse punctuated only by two black eye holes through which Melantha sometimes thought she could catch a glimpse of his human eyes. At least once, a nose had protruded through one of them, which Gary had explained was a ghost glitch, like when his ectoplasmic exterior fell off and he looked like his old naked self. Ghosts were much more confusing than other supernatural beings.
“You can’t have passed on or you wouldn’t have been able to come back and be a ghost. Trust me, Gary. I know a lot about the supernatural. Sometimes ghosts think that they still have human attributes, which is why you sometimes manifest as a naked man in my bed or generate ectoplasmic discharges into my used underwear, but that is all tied into the trauma of your passing. We really need to get around to resolving the unfinished business that is binding you to this plane of existence.”
“No, it hasn’t!” Salvador shouted from the couch, where he sat wrapped in Melantha’s most recent (and wackiest) quilt creation. “Even without eyes, I can smell it! That’s a fucking gillman wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache like some kind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle reject. He only came here to crush your skull and hide the remains in his lagoon. Why did you let him inside?”
“It’s amazing. I’ve met three different types of supernatural creatures today,” Melantha said sensually to the delivery guy. Her life had changed so much in such a short time ever since she had found a magical lamp and wished to be true to herself, an individual, and for supernatural creatures to exist postdated to 1673. Then again, this change of events could be attributed to her pushing Stephenie Meyer into the Large Hadron Collider (now, the Meyer Collider) during her visit to Switzerland last year.
They practically fell through the door — not literally, as in, they did not physically pass through the material of the door, but as it opened, they stumbled through in a semi-sexual position expurgated from the Kama Sutra for its absurdness and impracticality, what was once known as “Stork Plucks a Weird Lily With Pants Around Its Ankles.” It was gross and weird. Mrs. Halls definitely felt disgust even if she could only emote moist bemusement.
Derek Kagemann 
“And books — she swallows like dumplings.”
— Sholem Aleichem
Read whatever you want, but considering those numbers, is it really possible for the casual reader to connect with those authors best suited to them? Even the most devoted bibliophile must, out of pure necessity, breeze past dozens of bookstore titles without a second glance, never knowing which of them could have been life-changers. There are only so many books that one person can read in a lifetime, so many that will fit on a shelf. Few people can accommodate all of the recommendations from friends, family, colleagues, and well-meaning strangers into their busy schedules. Too many classics and “must-reads” serve more as cultural anchors, engendering a shared water cooler experience, rather than speaking to the intellectual and emotional needs of the individual.
Readers waste too much precious time sifting the wheat from the chaff, particularly when so much of the chaff is backed by savvy marketing campaigns. The fiction market really isn’t all that different from any other in that regard. Performers, like Justin Beiber or Kanye West, are just front men for their respective teams of producers, songwriters, lyricists, sound engineers, stage managers, etc. who are responsible for crafting the product and building the brand. The end product damn well better be palatable, because a huge amount of money goes into polishing the turd.
In an episode of The Book Group, a BBC television series, an aspiring author has just completed his first novel. At a meeting with a prospective publisher, he asks the editor what he thinks. “I think it’s not very good,” the editor replies after several significant pauses. “It’s bad. It’s really quite bad.” Following a thorough denunciation of the book, he goes on to say, “I think there’s a market for it. People who read a lot are by-and-large very stupid people. I mean, have you seen what’s on the bestseller’s list in this country?” He agrees to publish the book as yet another “affront to contemporary literature.”
It’s not about what’s “good,” but rather what sells. The strong surge in Young Adult fiction sales coincides with statistical evidence from the Literacy Project Foundation indicating that half of our country’s adult population would struggle to read a book written at a higher level. People want to read. The desire is evident, but we are a culture of readers rarely pushed to achieve past ninth-grade comprehension. Nearly half of American households neither read nor buy a single book in a year, not even weird sex tales about dinosaurs. We are #1 in war and #12 globally in reading how to wage it.
A person who “don’t like to read” is generally part of that passive audience who had a few not-so-great novels forced into their unwilling hands and then judged the whole of literature according to that standard. The same is true about all of us in terms of one thing or another. Whether it is a matter of time or inclination, few people are open-minded about everything. Socrates was famously quoted as saying, “I don’t like Mexican food,” to which Plato replied, “Well, then you have never tried Don Gilipollas!” It’s like that with books. Even when someone breaks down and accepts the recommendation, there is the chance that tastes will clash and the reluctant reader’s aversion becomes further entrenched.
Of course, as an unsuccessful author (or emerging writer, depending on perspective), I have a vested interest in people trying new things and discovering new stories. I’d rather not be one of those writers who struggles his whole lifetime with depression and amazingly fun drinking binges only to publish a solitary book that may or may not be recognized as having literary merit a century after I’ve died in the gutter — oh, I just got it now, it’s penniless, not penis-less in the gutter. At least, that’s a relief!