Too Dark
Rejections from publishers arrived fast and furious. Too dark, they said. American readers want books with lighter themes during these difficult times.
My agent asked if I could somehow alter the premise—keep the same characters and plot points, but with a different theme. She made the request half-heartedly, however, understanding that to follow her suggestion would be to eviscerate the book, and myself along with it.
In 1948, the New Yorker published The Lottery, a now iconic short story by Shirley Jackson. Spoiler alert in this paragraph. On a perfect June day, all the townspeople gather in the main square to carry out an ancient annual ritual: They will draw lots, and the person who takes a slip with a black dot will get stoned—perhaps to death—by all the neighbors.
The story caused an outcry. People were horrified by its cruelty, outrageousness, and the ambiguity of the ending. The deluge of mail showed that many people thought that, somehow, a final explanatory paragraph had been omitted. “What does it mean?” they demanded, and “What’s the point?”
Some readers were so upset, they canceled their subscriptions.
The people in the village square were ordinary folk, living their tranquil lives. Upstanding citizens and kind, helpful sorts, pillars of the community, our friends and neighbors. No one stood up and said, “This isn’t right.” No one volunteered to break the deadly thread and not cast the first stone.
Would that story be published today, I wonder, at a time that readers of all stripes have no appetite for literary perturbation, stories that ruffle the feathers or cause discomfort?
What to do then, as an author whose writerly offerings unsettle her readers?
The logline of my rejected novel, A Reluctant Spy, is as follows. On the day of her husband’s funeral, a young widow, a computer scientist, is approached by an FBI agent and asked to go undercover in the Computer Science Department of her university, to find out who is providing encryption software to purveyors of child pornography on the dark web.
The pornography is the sub-theme that snakes through the novel, always off the page, threatening the reader with horror that is never made explicit. The power of the story lies in the depth of the reader’s imagination. It exposes a truth about our world, which can be dark. Evil lurks among people, often in the shadows, threatening to break through, even in the village square.
That’s what the book is about. The perturbation of readers is the point.