Conjuring the Monsters in Ourselves

Synopsis (500-800 words): “Fantasy is the lie that speaks truth,” writes Brian Attebery in his 2022 Fantasy: How it Works, reflecting on how fantasy operates as a genre, and how it is understood. This paper looks at how fantasy as a genre can do more than “speak truth” in the abstract sense, and how it can make visible often-obscured, or deliberately avoided, historical truths. Literature has long been a medium that allows society to take a distanced look at itself, with contemporary fantasy containing within it a unique ability to reveal real-world truths through the construction of the imaginary. This paper uses three young adult contemporary fantasy novels, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron, Legendborn by Tracy Deonn, and Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen, to examine how fantasy can make visible human-caused atrocities and violences in more stringent ways. In each of these novels, the evil depicted is not supernatural, but drawn from human violence historical and present. These novels deploy of depictions of misogynist and patriarchal violence and chattel slavery at the point of kidnappings as well as on US plantations. By incorporating banal cruelty of both under-discussed or deliberately obscured history, and that which is often ignored in the present, these authors each in their own way use the progressive potentials of the fantastic acknowledged by critics such as Daniel Baker, and Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill to force the readers’ gaze not to linger moments of wonder but rather to acknowledge and see fully the trespasses of the past and their long-reaching aftereffects. Such works become anchors for dialogue between past and present, not correctives, but witnesses through the imaginary to that which should have been, by all rights, unimaginable. As such Deonn’s Legendborn, Bayron’s Cinderella is Dead, and Bowen’s Skin of the Sea all reposition how fantasy can intervene in how the story of history makes meaning in its retelling. They examine how these horrors are systemic as well as individual, and leave lasting impacts on the social fabric for generations. They also show the power of reimagining these stories in ways that unlock new potentials for new types and ways of heroism. As counternarratives, they each ultimately show that banal evil might be faced and defeated – patriarchal systems can be remade, lost histories can be uncovered and become roads into new imaginary spaces, the monsters of the past and present can be acknowledged. As such, fantasy becomes the vehicle for writing back; where nonfiction won’t accept the truth, the fantastic demands it be witnessed, unobscured and undisguised by the trappings of magic or an imaginary world. Abstract (125-150 words): “Fantasy is the lie that speaks truth,” writes Brian Attebery in his reflection on fantasy as a genre. This paper looks at how fantasy as a genre can do more than “speak truth” in the abstract sense, and how it can make visible often obscured historical truths. Literature has long been a medium that allows society to take a distanced look at itself, with contemporary fantasy containing within it a unique ability to reveal real-world truths through the construction of the imaginary. This paper uses Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron, Legendborn by Tracy Deonn, and Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen, to examine how fantasy can make visible human-caused atrocities in more stringent ways. As such, fantasy becomes the vehicle for writing back; where nonfiction won’t accept the truth, the fantastic demands it be witnessed, unobscured and undisguised by the trappings of magic or an imaginary world.