Book Event

I attended a panel event hosted by Loyalty Bookstore with the authors KJ Charles, T. Kingfisher, Malka Older, and Martha Wells that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The theme of this panel centered around comfort reads and how they are important at trying times, like how they are now with everything going on in our world.

Mostly everyone agreed that how to gain comfort in a book is by earning it so that the comfort is grounded.

Martha Wells described comfort in knowing that life can be put back together. She said that there is no comfort without discomfort. She loves when there is bad going on outside for a character but comfort going on within. For her, happy endings are harder to do than bad ones because putting things back together after tearing them apart is the hard part. She loves mystery because she expects solutions at the end of the story and for everything to be set right. The Rivers of London Series is her favorite comfort read because it brings order to chaos compassionately and reasonably, which is what she looks for.

Malka Older said that when you encounter a comfort read, it is nice knowing that a good thing will happen at the end because it puts the reader in a good place. She believes that there needs to be potential for justice and that the reader needs to be with someone competent so that way the main character doesn’t stress the reader out.

It was interesting because then everyone built off the topic of competence. Apparently, there is even a thing called competence porn, which is when many characters are component and accomplishing difficult tasks with great aptitude.

T. Kingfisher is one of the ones who added to that conversation in saying that it is comforting to know that terrible things are happening, but as a reader, you know you are with a character that can deal with it. One of the things they love in books is knowing that they can relate to what bad things are going on. She writes mainly horror and prefers horror with happy endings otherwise she feels like she went through everything for no reason. For them, when they write horror, they always write it in the first person to bring the horror closer to the reader, and for dark fantasy, they write in the third person.

One of the very interesting things that T. Kingfisher pointed out was that the horror section at Barnes N Noble changes to reflect what is going on in society. It grows when more bad things happen because people are looking to relate to the moment and looking for comfort in seeing people getting out of the bad. There was a time when the horror section was even smaller than the western section because not much was going on in the world, but now, it has grown a lot bigger.

KJ Charles agrees that horror is sought to comfort and find happy resolutions. Lately, she has been reading Deep Sea Horror after the recent submarine incident. But that comfort can be taken away if the story is labeled wrong. She described it by opening a book expecting it to be a rom-com, but then encountering it being serious, and one’s taste buds are all wrong for it. It is also interesting that to her horror is romance’s evil twin because they do the same thing by emotionally messing with someone. T. Kingfisher added that horror and romance are the only two genres defined by how they make you feel.

This panel held a fascinating conversation, which I enjoyed and was happy to listen to. Thank you, Loyalty Bookstores.