Competing to shock - loss of the moral compass

I was appalled to read on Twitter last week that a bestselling thriller writer was boasting that his next book would be his most violent ever. I have only read one of this author's books, and the amount of graphic and unnecessary violence in it ensured I'd never read any more.  I have met women, some of them in their sixties with grandchildren they dote on, who've said that the more violence there is in a book, the more they like it.  This bothers me.

It seems that many crime writers, and some SF ones too, are competing for the award of Most  Shocking Narrative of The Year.  Yes, literature must  reflect the zeitgeist of its age.  Yes, it should comment on and challenge the tenets of the prevailing culture and societal values.  

But at this point the writer's moral compass comes into play.  Both metaphysics and quantum physics tell us that, at a fundamental level, everything is pure energy.  And they also tell us that we affect that energy with the thoughts and words we put into it.  That gives us a moral duty to think very carefully about the amount of death and violence we put into our work, and about how graphically we describe those things.

There is a very successful fantasy series of books, and now its associated TV series, that have gained notoriety for the number of people killed in its stories.  But to me, there's something obscene about boasting that the body count for series five will be even higher than series four.  This is a series of books I've refused to read.

Sometimes I feel like King Canute, trying to hold back the relentless tide.  But then I remember that everything is energy.  And if I can send my energy out into the universe untainted by such violence then that is one clear voice slicing its way through the darkness, showing a different way,  By refusing to add to the sum of graphic violence, by refusing to read about it and watch it, I am making a difference.  I'm throwing a small pebble into the pond from which great ripples arise, ripples of awareness that spread out and help others to say no, and to change things.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com