My grandmother is Catholic. Very Catholic. She attends church daily, wears a koa cross around her neck, and believes in both angels and demons. (She says believing in one requires belief in the other.) She, also, would never travel with pork over the Pali lest she anger the Hawaiian goddess Pele.
In Hawaiʻi, the blending of religion and ancient traditions are so natural as to be a given. Of course you don’t disrespect the gods. Of course you lie down naked in the presence of night marchers. Of course, of course, of course. It is in this intersection of belief, where everything is allowed, that I am most interested.
“Indigenous people, BIPOC people, women, are forced to forgive even in fiction”
In that dark crevasse is horror. And from its dark depths, I’ve pulled out my upcoming novel. A Hawaiian gothic, House of Salt.
The turn of genres is surprising, even for me. Five years ago, I didn’t consider myself a horror fan. The scares never landed for me because the decisions the characters on my screen made were incredibly stupid. Only fools went out in search of ghosts, gods, and monsters; the legends I was raised on were all about how to keep such frights away.
But in recent years, the genre has become an expansive menagerie of what terror truly means. It’s one which doesn’t simply stop at the end of a bloodied knife. As BIPOC folks have known for generations: there are far worse things to fear than death.
Modern horror fans have been well fed. From the brilliant vampiric twist in Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, to the haunting of Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, we’ve been given a glut of delicious, bloody morsels to consume. And as I’ve read book (Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill) after book (Never Whistle at Night edited by Shane Hawk) after book (Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zheng by Kylie Lee Baker), I began to see a pattern written in blood.
Violence against the violent.
It’s cathartic. It’s riveting. And dare I say: it’s a long time coming.
Revenge gets a bad name in other genres. In stories, the common revenge trope is that it is never satisfying to the person who takes it. They typically die or become something worse than the person they’re seeking to destroy. A revenger is never given a happy ending—and that sucks.
Because in subtle, unconscious ways, it reinforces the idea of a ‘noble savage.’ Indigenous people, BIPOC people, women, are forced to forgive even in fiction. We’re given syrupy themes to swallow: Love conquers all. Living a good life is the only true revenge we can take. Letting go of the pain is the best path forward.
Well, I call bullshit. Some acts, some deeds, some histories, are unforgivable. Sometimes, violence is the answer.
We’re supposed to forgive because if we don’t, the implications of what that means to colonizer, oppressors, and abusers are terrifying. But maybe, that’s the whole point. Maybe, they should be scared.
We’ve been scared long enough, have grown used to the taste of iron blood in our mouths. And god, are we starving. Modern horror has finally given us back our teeth and sent out only one command.
Feast.