I’m back home from NorWesCon, and I wanted to get my fingers on a keyboard again. There is nothing more motivating that being around a bunch of excited authors and readers! At the same time, my brain is a complete mush because, for an introvert, there is nothing more exhausting than being around hundreds of excited people. So instead of trying to pick up the threads of the book I’m working on, I thought I’d return to a theme I wanted to write about since I finished reading Godshot by Chelsea Bieker and that came up fairly often at the con: the things we leave out.
This came up in the panel on short form, because in a short story, you have about six thousand words to create an entire world. How do you decide what stays or what goes? I think one of the most interesting points on the things we leave out was brought up when someone was discussing Thomas Ha’s Uncertain Sons — that he had left out character names, using titles instead. We don’t all know and have opinions of someone named Dan, but we do have opinions about the roles and relationships associated with Father or Son. This allows the reader to personalize the story to their own experiences of Father. That conversation revived my desire to dig deeper in this exploration. I don’t only want to focus on the afterglow of a book, which often involves plot and vibes. Instead, I want to look at how books interact with the social imagination.
So, here’s a bit more about Godshot. Consider it a take two.
The Story
I was in a writing class recently, and the instructor emphasized the importance of rereading books. As a writer with a full-time job and two children, I find time to read limited, let alone time to reread. But I was so floored by Godshot that I did take the time to go back and create a reverse outline. What shocked me was how easily the plot condensed into two thousand words. The book feels epic, but the story is simple — family caught in a cult that rose because of the desperation droughts can cause. The story relies on the tension of “will she escape?” as a fourteen-year-old girl is abandoned, raped, impregnated, and forced to bare a miracle child for the cult leader who feels his power is slipping away.
There are some complexities to the plot — the red house, the trip to Reno, the lawn-painting boyfriend. But even with these, the plot remains fairly simple and focused — which leaves a lot of room for character development. And we spend a lot of time understanding these characters. I remember reading the section about the holiday dinners Cherry once cooked. This scene comes after we’ve seen her full insanity on display — we suddenly get an image of how in-control and normal Cherry was before her husband’s suicide. Suddenly, our understanding of Cherry shifts. She was not always angry and cruel, but a good grandmother and — likely — a good mother. The sympathy we feel for Lacey’s mother growing up with a strict and insane mother melts away.
This is one example, but the reframing of characters happens constantly throughout the story. With each chapter, we see Lacey’s perception of Paster Vern shift. (But because we KNOW cult leaders are sleezy, this isn’t a shock). What is more shocking is how the descriptions of the mother, boyfriend, cousin and ladies at the red house change as Lacey develops more awareness of the world around her. In the end, the story is not about plot, but about the shifting of characters, and our understanding of the people around us.
The Technique
My favorite technique Bieker uses is one I try to use (with varied success) in my own writing: the ingrained flashback. In each chapter, a bit of Lacey’s history is revealed – and it is triggered by events that are happening in the here and now. I am a huge fan of current events triggering flashbacks because that is how I experience life. Talking with others, I realize my own experience of flashbacks might be more immersive than others – I am taken back to that moment and may live in it, rehashing it for hours before I’m able to move on. This likely has to do with my traumas and emotional processing and is, honestly, a little debilitating when it comes to staying present and experiencing the here and now. This is likely why I write flashbacks that take over the majority of a chapter. My life is constantly pinging between the present and the past.
I think Godshot was a great example of how to fold those flashbacks in with more grace and more akin to how most people experience present-triggered pasts. Images of the past were kept to a few sentences or, at most, two paragraphs. But they were peppered throughout the book. I felt held in a suspension between the past and present, learning not only what created Lacey, but what created the town of Peaches, in a highly realistic, relatable way. This was especially important because there were no outsiders (beyond the boyfriend) who could be used as explanation-characters. This made it feel like not a single bit of worldbuilding was info-dumped. Instead, every line was earned.
The Imagination
Getting to the things that Bieker left out. We can rely a lot on the social imagination to fill in details. When we don’t describe something, it may be more powerful, because we’re triggering the imagination to fill in. Most of the tension of the book relied on the social imagination of cults. Because we know cults are bad, and because we go into the book knowing it’s about a cult, we are immediately screaming at Lacey May to get out. Her slow discovery of Pastor Vern’s deception is almost painful because we have such a strong imagination of the horrors that await her. These are things the author does not have to lay out. Just one mention of cult on the back cover triggers that tension and makes the unreliable narration of a fourteen year old girl possible.
When we get to the secondary cult in the book – that of the turquoise cowboy – the explanations are actually rather sparse. We get a snapshot of the horror the mother lives in, and we are left to fill in the drug dependency, the desperation, and the utter despair she has sunk into. Honestly, if I had never seen Requiem for a Dream, that chapter might not have hit as hard. But to me, those women trapped by the cowboy were absolutely echoing the descent the characters in Requiem had fallen into, which made a single image of their life able to convey where they were coming from, why they had gotten there, and where they were going. That, to me, is the power of social imagination and the significance of work in conversation with other mediums.
The other role the social imagination plays in this book is a suspension of disbelief. In my past, I’ve come across many readers who have trouble believing that a character wouldn’t just walk away from an abusive situation, whether that person is a child, an adult in an intimate relationship, or a person in a cult. Then there are the people who completely believe these to be inescapable situations. I think the difference comes from either the person having experienced a similar situation OR having read/watched enough stories to realize these things happen every day. Because we associate cults with child abuse, sexual exploitation, and financial abuse, the author doesn’t have to write much detail to make these possibilities believable. It is this imagination that makes us go both “no!” and “of course” when Lacey is raped which creates a larger tension in the reader – the desperation for the world to be a better place where this imagination doesn’t need to exist.
I think a lot of horror writers have a tendency to overexplain our horror. Or maybe it’s just me. Because our pieces wallow in grief, fear, and dread, we think we need to dive into just how bad things can get. These graphic stories definitely have their place. But I think it’s also powerful to be able to tap into social imagination to create dread, belief, and inevitability in a subtler way. And perhaps the magic of a really powerful piece is when it ties into and draws from the worldview the reader has created, making the reader an active participant in the worldbuilding.
