By John Gilstrap

Language and violence are sensitive topics for fans and critics alike. My first book, Nathan’s Run, which I never considered to be a young adult book but nonetheless won the Alex Award from the American Library Association because of its relevance to teenage readers (the Nathan of the title is 12 years old), was banned by several school systems because of its language and violence. Apparently, there are 109 objectionable words in the book—an incensed mother actually counted. Maybe it was 409. Anyway, the book was banned from school libraries. (Memo to file: If you want to sell a lot of books, get it on a banned list somewhere.)

The whole book-banning thing is a soapbox of its own which likely will be the subject of a future rant, but for this blog entry, I want to focus on violence. As a society, we’re a little weird about it. There’s a whole subgenre of suspense fiction that celebrates vampires, the eroticization of oral exsanguinations, but if you kill a puppy or a kitty cat on the page, you’ll never sell a book in this town again. A few years ago, I was writing a very loose adaptation of Norman McLean’s Young Men and Fire for Warner Brothers, a never-produced flick about smoke jumpers—those wonderfully insane men and women who parachute into forest fires. The producers told me in no uncertain terms as I wrote the script that I should feel free to kill as many firefighters as I needed to serve the story, but that I could under no circumstances show a suffering, dying or dead animal. If I showed an animal in jeopardy, I had to later include a scene where we see that Yogi and Bambi made it out safely. Hey, the rules are the rules, and I signed the contract, so who am I to argue? But still.

In the world of the novels I create, no one tells me what I can and can’t do, and I have to say that the violence thing is something I struggle with. Not to keep flogging my fire service background, but I’ve seen violence up close. Torn, punctured flesh and broken bones are all ugly as hell. The screaming is unnerving, and injured people invariably smell awful. They make wee-wee and doo-doo on themselves, and if they’ve been dead for more than a couple of hours, they’re really unpleasant to be around.

As an author whose job it is to bring readers into the word of my characters, isn’t it my responsibility to make violence and its aftermath as squirmy as it is in real life? Shouldn’t violent actions have terrible consequences on the page as they do in the mean streets and combat zones? Clearly, I think the answer is yes, but truthfully, only to a point. A very fine line separates verisimilitude from a discomfiting violence-as-pornography. Like other forms of pornography, I suppose, it’s hard for me to define, but I know it when I see it.

A couple of weeks ago, John Ramsey Miller posted brilliantly on the importance of keeping scenes real in the reader’s mind. Along those lines, I become infuriated when I’m reading a story and a protagonist takes a bullet in the shoulder (or the thigh or the knee . . .) and keeps going. It’s not possible. The human body just doesn’t have a lot of free space in it. Every joint is a fragile structure. If you shatter a part of the scaffold that gives us structure, it doesn’t matter how tough you are; you’re going to fall down. You’re sure as hell not going to have one more fist fight with the bad guy just because you’re angry. Again, the anatomy and physiology of traumatic injury can be the subject of yet another future blog entry.

So here’s the tacit deal I make with my readers: Even when I take you to unpleasant places, trust me that I don’t do it for prurient reasons, and that I’ll never make you want to throw up because of what you’ve read.

Shake on it?