but animal deaths? i don’t mind.

My original question was about scope; Nick Adams kills a lot of trout, for example, and has yet to be removed from the canon. And Breece Pancake killed the odd turtle, because where he came from that sort of thing was a necessary starvation avoidance tactic.

From MS’s email to me, which she must have thought was not relevant enough to put on the blog: An unscientific survey of mystery readers conducted by the DorothyL group found that over one third of regular mystery book buyers would stop reading if an animal was killed. Miss Snark said, “It is not a hard and fast rule. It is a preference. Mine.”

Because (my conclusion) ultimately she is a salesperson. Who would cut their commission by a third on purpose? That’s the true core of all of her advice. Be saleable.

i suppose i have loved some books with animals being killed — valiant and that kitten worked wellf or me. it was a sign of how screwed up that girl was, and there wasn’t any lingering on the death.

however, i read this other bookw here this mad scientist had some kind of rage drug and it he gave it to these too cute golden retrievers who had been littermates — follows a five page description of the two dogs *tearing each other apart*. literally. then the surviving dog, as it’s running around, intestines trailing. still ripping the pieces apart of the one it had killed, until it too expires.

and i think stuff like red pony and old yeller and stuff really *lingered* on the emotional trauma of the deaths. really wallowed in it. blah blah.

so maybe that’s the difference, for me. you throw a cat off a trainplatform and it disappears, it’s one thing, five pages of depiction of golden retrievers being torn to pieces, or a whole book devoted to makign a character love an animal and then taking it away, or even just a really moving scene of a little boy holding onto a piece of dead fish and crying “ratter” and I’m done for.

Kids or pets in danger I can deal with – that’s drama! (examples: the kid was on a quest to save the gemerald and fell off a cliff; the villain bests him in a swordfight; the kid and her pup are kidnapped by pirates in the hopes of a ransom and kept in a dank cell; there is a tornado and everyone in the village is killed including all the pets)

I have a problem with psychotic killings of anyone. that is to say, people chosen at random (or for reasons that they cannot help) by some madman and who are tortured or killed gruesomely.

It isn’t a ‘dealbreaker’ – I guess if it was a brilliantly written book about concentration camps or charles manson and I had already started it, i might not stop – but if i knew about the content before, i would have never picked it up.

(ritual killings, on the other hand, such as the sacrfice of an animal, is presumably for a reason, to placate gods or something, so that is ok by me.)

Now, I can see that for some Mansfield Park might have a bit of an “ick” factor because Fanny and Edmund have been brought up as siblings (though only from the ages of 10 and 16), but this clearly doesn’t apply to The Grand Sophy, where the two characters meet as adults. So it seems that this girl is affected more by the biological than the emotional issues.

I thought this was an interesting example of something that is clearly an absolute deal breaker for this particular reader.

Yes I know that sounds ridiculous, but the very thought of someone being that fast and loose with a character for the sake of fitting them to their big idea story rather than having actual motivations or internal integrity… it’s about the only thing I give up on anything for. Inconsistencies of character let’s call it.

I’m not a fan of animal violence because they don’t understand. You have more chance in a fight with a lion than a dog does, but we all know they’ll be the brave one and go in first… which is how they die in stories a lot of the time, unnecesarily trying to be a good dog, when if they’d just ran away when the human did they’d be fine. (If you don’t like animals having a bad day don’t read “WE3″ by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely but if you can handle it, wow, packs a punch.) I’m not keen on it in books and certainly not reality. (They’re not my food.) But I’ll take it in a story if it’s needed there.

I cringe and turn away at embarrassment comedies when I know it’s coming and they’re dragging it out.

The same goes for when people go snooping in other people’s houses to try to find some evidence of something, when there’s that whole set-up of them almost about to be found out. (No idea why that bothers me so much.)

Of course I watch that stuff because I’m never going to do any of that in real life so I have to experience it somewhere.

I therefore wouldn’t call those deal-breakers, so now I wonder why I mentioned them at all. Oh, so this is what embarrassment feels like.

I am *not* positing a direct causal connection, mind you. And I recognize that this connection is more tenuous than the fashion one. But I’m throwing it out there for consideration nonetheless.

As for eating dog, I hear it’s kind of like stringy beef. I managed to avoid kagogi when I was in Korea, but saw plenty of dogs penned up in back yards. When you stop to really examine the issue it’s not that different from how we treat cows, pigs, chickens, etc.

(Sorry, couldn’t resist! :’)

- Extremely ignorant statements about a topic I know pretty well. I’m very fond of Mary Gentle’s writing, for example, but only made it a chapter in to _Trouble_and_Her_Friends_. It was probably a good book too, if only the setup hadn’t been so completely implausible.

- Getting into the heads of psychopaths. Sorry, I just don’t want to hear about someone’s completely perverse sexual dysfunction that makes them want to torture people to death. Can’t read Patricia Cornwell because of this.

- Ludicrously unpronounceable names, while not actually a dealbreaker, really detract from my enjoyment of a book. Unless it’s Larry Niven writing – I can forgive him a lot.

- Politics. I read books to escape. I do _not_ need to know about the goings on at the council of werewolf elders, thank you very much. I can tolerate some politics, but if it’s the main thrust of the book, there’s virtually no chance that I’m going to be able to make myself finish.

- Relentless dystopia. I hated Brazil. Sorry. On the other hand, I really liked Beauty (Sheri Tepper), for reasons I can’t discuss without giving away the ending, which would be a shame, because if you haven’t read it, maybe you should.

I don’t really get the thing about animals. The best theory I heard was Amanda’s, that it’s a cheap plot device, and indicative of bad writing. But that doesn’t make it a deal-breaker, because it doesn’t always have to do with bad writing. Given the violence we do to animals every day, including husbandry techniques that amount to torture, it seems a bit hypocritical to object to similar violence in books. Hm, maybe that’s it – it’s a vast conspiracy on the part of the meat industry to help us to avoid developing compassion for our food.

Those guys are sneaky!

:’)

I like a good fight in a story IF the person can fight back.

oh, man. i was deeply traumatized by where the red fern grows, the movie version, when i was just wee. and then for my next several birthdays, people kept trying to give me copies of the book. noooooooo!

(It might also explain why I had such amazingly strong reactions to The Golden Compass and am Dragging my feet about Subtle Knife. Daemons are practically animals)

All I know is that when a writer starts torturing and killing animals, the trust is gone and the relationship is over. This of course, variers depending on how much trust I had been putting in the writer before.

though things often die in books I read, I don’t read horror novels, I don’t read books where one lingers and luxuriates in the gore. so I’m a lightweight when it comes to violence anyway.

The big moment in the book was when the adopted kid gets her first spanking. It means now she’s one of the family.

I’m so done with this book you can’t imagine. I’m doing the author a favor by not reviewing it, believe me. It was insulting on so many levels, I just hated it.

Spanking means you belong to us. Can you imagine?

Child abuse never fun to read, but what makes me nuts is when abuse is presented justified. I used to be a social worker; it’s not a position I accept (Then again, Keri Hulme’s BONE PEOPLE was magnificent, so there’s obviously some wiggle room).

*In part, I hated the movie because it made me feel humourless. I was sitting amidst an audience convulsed with laughter thinking ‘what? This is supposed to be funny? You’ve got to be kidding!’

Little Willow: I’m so sorry about your cat. You take care of yourself now.

Holly: Hmmm, I’m a very bad human being. I’ve read all your books and I didn’t even notice.

Dan: That sounds like a crap book indeed. Would you have been able to have read it, though, if the writing were better and more subtle?

Niki: Stop projecting.

Lili: But even then I’ll sometimes keep reading if I need to know what happens or I think the plot is particularly ingenious or if it’s so bad I can’t quite believe it. Stuff like that.

Harriet: I hate, hate, hate comedy of embarrassment, but it affects me more in movies than books. For example I can’t watch Peter Sellers movies. Hate them.

Lisa: I went through a phase of reading lots of true crime books. And not just the well written stuff like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. For me it’s about trying to figure out why stuff like that happens and how evil works. But yeah. Nightmares.

Ben: Oh, yes, cruelty to the spear carriers. One of the things I loved about Clerks (Was it Clerks?) was the long rant about what happened to the workers building the Death Star in Star Wars. Brilliantly funny because it was so true.

G. Jules: Erk! Like I said reading descriptions of sexual violence is one of my least favourite things. I’m trying to think if I’ve read a book you describe or not.

Hannah: Now that’s an interesting point. Also people just get killed a whole lot more fictionally than animals do. Hence the shock value like Whedon’s killing off [spoiler].

Jonathan: I’ve heard that from a lot of parents now. Apparently by the time they’re all grown up you’ll be fine.

Amanda: I agree with you, but for me the problem there is cheap, lazy writing, which is something that frequently (though not always) gets in the way of my finishing a book.

Andrew: That’s really interesting. I’ve spent a lot of time in NYC, living in Manhattan mostly and those movies don’t worry me in the least. Their NYCs never seem like the real NYC. Too shiny. So it’s clearly an alternative NYC that’s being blown up, not the real one.

May: Tee hee! Yes I have stolen your capital letters from you.

Marrije: Kissing? You mad thing!

Sir Tessa: Yeah, but those reports are of real-life things that really and truly happened. They must be horrible to deal with.

And yeah on male bullies.

Don: Really? Many people read for comfort and not to be confronted (obviously there are many people who do both). I don’t think that’s a moral failing. Everytime I’m sick I read Georgette Heyer because I want to be soothed. Reading something that made me uncomfortable while I’m sick or miz would wind up being thrown across the room.

Diana: But why do you have this reaction? Some of the books you’re refusing to read are really good!

when i saw ‘independence day’ in the theater (which by the way, post-9/11 i cannot watch anymore) and all those people were blowing up, the audience cheered like the dickens when that labrador jumped out of harm’s way at the last second.

no dead puppies for me. it’s a dealbreaker. cats are probably okay, as long as I wasn’t attached to them first.

i actually refused to read most of “those” books growing up — old yeller, red pony, the yearling, black beauty, stuff like that. animal farm assigned in school was pure torture.

after killing/torturing animals, there’s killing/torturing children, then the elderly. but if done well, i’ll go with the other two. animals always seem like a cheap shot.

my hatred for steinbeck is virulent.

but no, there aren’t actually any subjects i find too upsetting to read about. as you say, justine, if it’s a necessary part of the plot and it doesn’t suck, i’ll read it.

on the other hand, i can also imagine where miss snark is coming from. she probably reads lots of dreck, and one of the tropes of dreckery may well be a particularly nasty attitude to animals. and amanda’s right, too, about the cheap way of establishing something. for ms snark, this rule may serve as an effective way of weeding submissions down to a manageable pile.

i must admit i’d be much more likely to read a book with dead animals (or kids in concentration camps) by someone i know and trust, say, philip roth, who is probably not a nice man, but i trust him as a writer. if it’s a book by joe nobody (or god forbid someone from some sludgepile), i’d probably pass.

Everything else, I will read.

That said, when it comes to doing reports at work, I have a hard time with cruelty to animals, as said, they can’t see it coming, and won’t ever understand why, and don’t have the same capacity to defend themselves.

I’m also having an increasingly hard time (and this is something that is beginning to creep into my reading of fiction) with male bullies who do honestly believe that they have the right to hit/rape any woman, as it is the natural order of things.

Not.