The Dark Fantastic: Race And The Imagination From Harry Potter To The Hunger Games, by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

This book is at its best when the author lays down the identity ax that she has to grind about the place of black people in literature and television and film adaptations and writes about her own love of fantasy literature and movies and television shows, which she shares with many people (myself included–it is a frequent subject of my reading and writing). At least a couple of the series here that the author writes about–namely The Hunger Games and Harry Potter–are series that I have written about, read, and viewed on the big screen, and so the author and I are both members of the same fandoms, albeit with considerably different areas of focus. Unfortunately, such moments are few and far between in this book. Far more common, in fact, is seeing the author’s genuine love of fantasy literature and her understandable desire to see people like herself be treated as compelling heroes with agency and happy endings (what the author views as the final stage of a fantasy cycle that she tends not to find in literature, is seeing the author’s constant complaining.

This particular book is mercifully short at less than 200 pages. Its materials are divided into an introduction and five chapters. The introduction discusses the author’s thesis about the “dark fantastic,” namely the place of black people in fantasy literature, which the author uses as a means of entering into a debate about race and the imagination gap of black people and about black characters. The first chapter seeks to work towards a (not very worthwhile) theory about the dark fantastic where the author posits a five-stage general approach towards black characters where only the first four seem to be found–the author positing an imaginary emancipation that she uses to critique literature as it is (1). The author then discusses Rue and the problem of racial innocence in the Hunger Games (2). This is followed y a discussion of the racial and gender and sexual politics of Gwen in BBC’s Merlin series (3). This is followed by a complaining chapter about Bonnie Bennett and her place as a whiny killjoy (not dissimilar from the author) in CW’s The Vampire Diaries adaptation (4). The fifth and final chapter discusses ideas of a black Hermonie and contains an attempt by the author to justify her own writing and her own place in controversies over plagiarism and who belongs in fan communities (5). The book then ends with acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, index, and information about the author.

What is the proper attitude and response to a book like this? Few people will ever read this book. Those who do, whether they like it or dislike it, will come into this book with their minds made up about the subjects it deals with. I, for one, find the author’s thesis overrated and her approach tedious and tiresome. Strident, self-righteous approaches in general do not win me over. The author’s common confusion between justice and literary vandalism demonstrates her misguided belief systems regarding literature. Indeed, there is a deep paradox in this and in the critical literary analysis of which this book is a textbook example. While people like the author claim that writings belong to the readers of them, and that readers have a right (or even obligation) to shape them according to their own perspectives and identities, such authors do not consider the readers (especially hostile readers) as having the same freedom with regards to the writings of critical analysis. Critical theorists rage against criticism directed against them even as they criticize everyone else. But in the end, everyone is paid in their own coin. If we desire people to be charitable to our own creations, we have at least some obligation to be fair-minded with that of others. This book would have been easier to be charitable towards if the author had shown more charitable to those who struggle to create popular media in the field of fantasy in the face of our deeply divided Western culture.