Category: Fiction

Over on my Facebook page, a reader has left an interesting comment. Admittedly, I don’t interact with my Facebook page as much as I should because I’ve had a heck of a time figuring out the interface. Every time I try to see reader comments, it kicks me to a different part of the site … it makes me want to strangle Zuckerberg in Minecraft.

Anyway, regarding Jake and the Dynamo, a reader writes:

I’ve been rereading the book, and you have got some horror fantasy gold here. Your stuff is like Stephen King’s—American culture is built out of trash, and while his trash is b-movies and comic books, yours is anime and kid videos. That’s a good thing. We’ve had a lot of pop culture lately with comic books being elevated into the status of the a new Western or Cowboy genre, but your stuff, and King’s, recognizes that superpowers and fantasy adventure would be less like a Saturday morning cereal fest and more like a living nightmare.

Of course, magical girls are a Japanese riff on a specific type of all-American fantasy to begin with—the magical wife, whether she is a witch, or a genie, or what have you. Now, there are writers, like Fritz Leiber, who dialed in on the fearsome possibilities of how supernatural powers could distort a relationship, in his Conjure Wife. But you’ve opened the magical girl genre up to horror in many, many ways. It’s a real treat. Take body horror—adolescence is disturbing enough for a normal child, but what if the steel hard hide and augmented strength your contract gave you has the effect of not only protecting you from harm, but also making it possible to hurt people you love, or keep love and friendship, ironically, forever at bay, shielded by terrible powers?

The magical girls close up are terrifying. Are they children wearing costumes that give them powers? You get the impression that they are actually costumes that wear children—a demonic concept indeed! The competent arrogance of Pretty Dynamo becomes grotesque because it is inhuman. The brash neediness of Sukeban becomes a behavioral loop that traps a youngster in a state of arrested development. Rifle Maiden is compelled to become a cartoonish mass murderer, which may have begun as a fantasy of unconquerable strength. Not to mention the nightmarish depiction of Kaiju destruction your narration supplies—in some way, the magical girls are implicated in the mayhem, because they and not armies, are participants in the carnage. (Incidentally, the best descriptions of the trauma inflicted by falling buildings that I’ve read is in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, which I recommend.)

The horror of nightmare is especially strong in your writing, with the reality of the fact that the magical girls are all witches who have sold their souls to demonic powers, and who face a reckoning of some sort, whether it is from the Kronos-like spaghetti monster en route to make the universe a tomb, or God, who is forgotten in the crush of trying to survive in a universe bent on humankind’s demise. The irony of this spiritual ignorance is deeply rewarding to the reader. In a world of cheap heroics, what will true heroism be? I’ve never read anything like this before.

My comments:

I am humbled and flattered. I also admit to being perplexed: This is the second reader who has informed me that Jake and the Dynamo and its sequel are horror novels. I was honestly unaware of that, and it makes me think I need to redirect my marketing plan. I have always thought of these books as action-comedy.

Part of my confusion may simply stem from the way I see the magical-girl genre. This reader flatters me by attributing to me things that I thought I was merely borrowing. The idea that the magical girls are “costumes that wear the children,” for example, is not unique to me. That magical-girl transformation entails a loss of self is already hinted in Sailor Moon, which first introduced the concept of the reluctant magical girl, and it is further developed in titles like Princess Tutu and Shugo Chara, the latter of which was Jake and the Dynamo’s immediate inspiration. When I depict the girls as uncertain about their true identities and as having distinct personalities when in their magical forms, I am (to my own mind) merely following the formula. I am also doing that for my own convenience: In my head, Dana acts differently when in and out of costume, so I wrote her that way.

The hint of demonic contract and Faustian bargain does, I admit, deviate from the norm, in which the bargain between a girl and her talking animal is benign. Phantom Thief Jeanne first proposed the idea that magical-girl contracts were dangerous and potentially diabolical, but it was of course Puella Magi Madoka Magica that finally developed it. To me, it seems obvious in part because the magical girl’s animal mascot resembles the familiar of the classic witch. That’s why I use the word familiar in Jake and the Dynamo.

My most original contribution to the genre may be the antagonist of the series, whose true nature has not yet been revealed. Though one may find him lurking behind the arch-nemeses of some anime titles such as Neon Genesis Evangelion or Gurren Lagan, the resemblance is coincidental: Those anime deal with some Stapledonian concepts that I already had churning in my mind for a long time, long before I became interested in anime. In fact, “Lord Shadow” is a version of a villain (if he can really be called a villain, or a he for that matter) that I invented for another work, and whom I will undoubtedly use again in a different guise.

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