👏🏻CANCEL👏🏻CULTURE👏🏻SOMETHING👏🏻SOMETHING👏🏻 (Monthly update #1)

Also: My Best Friend's Exorcism; Star Wars

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(Welcome to my inaugural Monthly Update! If you’re wondering what this is, here’s an explanation!)

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Having thus far failed to sell my latest novel as, y’know, a novel, my agency has (partially) pivoted to trying to sell it as the basis for a movie or TV series, and apparently, when you’re pitching a TV series, one of the key questions you’re supposed to answer is the “Why now?” question—that is, “Why does this story matter now?”

When the film and TV rights agent asked for my help with that particular question, I told her that, as always, I’m pretty clueless about the zeitgeist, but it does feel like so-called “cancel culture” is finally starting to burn itself out, and this novel was always, in part, my rejection of “cancel culture” and my affirmation that everyone is worth saving—but that she should absolutely, under no circumstances actually use the phrase “cancel culture” in her pitch, because it was clichéd at best and rightwing-coded at worst, and therefore the exact opposite of a phrase you should use to pitch a TV show.

She went ahead and wrote up a pitch that led with, “As cancel culture rages on…”

I eventually talked her out of that phrasing, but I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts on this one. My sense is that “cancel culture” points to a real thing (it’s not hard to find examples of online mobs hounding people out of their jobs and lives for almost no reason at all), but the phrase has become so tainted I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Let me know if I’m the crazy one, though. 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

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Two years ago: I just read My Best Friend’s Exorcism and I have questions

This site is allegedly the blog of a horror author, so every once in a while I try to write about fiction and/or horror, but those always end up as my least-read posts. I guess I should just give up and do all-culture-war-stuff-all-the-time? (Please don’t make me do that.)

Two years ago, I read the novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix, and I found it equal parts engrossing and annoying. I’ve since read another one of his (How to Sell a Haunted House), and found it about the same—hard to put down, but about an inch deep thematically. Maybe that’s all just sour grapes, though; after all, the guy writes the same sort of thing I do (horror-comedies with religious overtones), and he’s about a million times more successful than I am (he’s had several bestsellers, and MBFE was adapted into a movie after I published this piece).

But anyway! I tried to funnel some of those complicated feelings into this article, in which I tried to argue that it’s incoherent to crib so freely from The Exorcist while simultaneously replacing its spiritual depths with pop-culture-canon vacuity. (But then, who needs coherence when your book has a great title, right?)

There’s just something vacuous about congratulating yourself for existing simultaneously with pop culture that (surprise!) you enjoyed. Like, congrats on being entertained by entertainment, I guess, but your only contribution to it was consuming it. If that’s where you get your sense of identity … welcome to late-stage capitalism?

Whatever the reason, though, that cynicism was gnawing at me the whole time I was reading Grady Hendrix’s 2016 horror-comedy novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism— a book so awash in nostalgia that every chapter is named after a hit pop song from the eighties. It was a book I enjoyed more than not, and I don’t regret reading it, but it was also a house of cards built on pop culture nostalgia, so, unfortunately, I’m going to have to tear it apart, anyway… (Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

For anyone looking to tell the kind of stories that change the world, there are about about a million lessons to be gleaned from Star Wars—and, unfortunately, George Lucas has done his best to conceal all of them.

I don’t want to beat up on Lucas too much, since the Star Wars fandom has already done plenty of that, but if you read his interviews over the years, you’ll see him slowly become the king of “I meant to do that”—eventually insisting that the six original films were exactly what he envisioned from the beginning, that he always knew the story, that he always knew it would take exactly six movies, that he always knew the perfect place to start would be the middle.

All of that, though, is provably untrue.

The early drafts and treatments of Star Wars movies are all freely available online, and they make it clear that Lucas was making the whole thing up as he went: Early treatments for the first film describe Han Solo as a humanoid reptilian; Darth Vader doesn’t become Luke Skywalker’s father until the second draft of The Empire Strikes Back; no one could sit through the first film until Lucas’s then-wife Marcia took a heavy editing hand to it. These days, there isn’t a single corner of global culture Star Wars hasn’t touched—but that outcome was far from assured.

Chris Taylor’s 2014 book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe does as thorough a job as you could ask for tracking the development of the franchise—from its roots in H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Boroughs, to Lucas’s early attempts at building a brand-new galaxy, to the series’s apotheosis into the pop culture canon—and it takes a relentlessly clear-eyed view of how much of the whole thing was both dumb luck and tireless iteration. Personally, I’m less someone who achieved Star Wars fandom and more someone who had it thrust upon him (check the first name), but I had a great time with this book. It’s breezy, funny, and—above all—highly instructive for aspiring creators. 🕹🌙🧸

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Favorite comment of the month

I thought part of the issue with Christian movies is that the particular genre of soft-focus, non-denominational-but-protestant Jesus flicks don't really have a market outside North America (Passion of the Christ did well precisely because it was *not that*).

In a globalized entertainment industry, people in China or Dubai won't be buying "Touched by an Angel".

Therefore I think you're probably on the right track with the woke parallel too, in that there isn't a global market for the identity politics hysterics that only really works in the US. —Katrina Gulliver 🕹🌙🧸

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Hey, thanks for reading! If you’re new to this newsletter, here’s how it works: everyone who signs up to receive it in their email inbox gets free e-book copies of both my published books, plus you get entered in a monthly drawing for a free signed paperback copy of each! Why? Because I like you.

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