Believer Awards
May 2nd, 2008 by Editors
No, this is nothing to do with religion. There is a magazine called the Believer, and it runs two awards. For the first award (the other is a reader poll) they say, “Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year.” And on this year’s short list is Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand. Possibly it was lucky for Hand that her short-listing for a Shirley Jackson Award (reported earlier today) came out around the same time that the Believer was deciding her book was undervalued, but hey, two award nominations in one day, can’t be bad.
(Cheryl, who loves the book, is delighted.)
Locus Online also notes that Zeroville by Steve Erickson is on the list,which suggests it is genre-related. We haven’t read it, but doubtless someone will put us right soon.
Re Zeroville: yes, it is genre-related. The High Literary types would probably call it magical realism, or something less downmarket than fantasy, but it is fantastical. And very good if you can stick his prose, which isn’t for everyone.
I stayed up until 1 a.m. last night finishing “Zeroville.” Two concepts which struck me the most were, one, that God hates children, and two, that the doorless church is to keep you in, not out.
Having grown up in a staunchly Mormon family, even serving a two year mission for my church – at my expense – I especially resonate with these concepts. In all of the religious studying I have done, it has never occurred me that it is always the children that suffer. Isaac at the hand of Abraham, Pharaoh in Egypt’s own son and the sons he sent his soldiers to murder, God sending his own son to suffer, and so on. In word, who can possibly believe in a god who demands a father murder his own child.
When someone is raised in a particular religion, told repeatedly that it is the only true church (as was my case in Mormonism) , it is almost impossible to get out. Not the organization per se, although that is challenging because they just don’t want to let you go, but the idea of God, Heaven and Hell, the years and years of brainwashing that has been drilled into your head since childhood. It takes a long time for the guilt to go away. Not the guilt that now you are doing things that we strictly forbidden by the organization, but the guilt of wondering if you were wrong to leave that organization, if it were right after all. If you have turned your back on god. It’s the notion and existence of god that is hard to get out of.