The Literary

Mercenary
Home ▼

Home ▼

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Does Your Masquerade

Pass Muster? (Thoughts
For Modern Fantasy
Stories)
How many times have you read a modern
fantasy story where an entire
supernatural world is kept completely in
the shadows? Whether it's vampires in
their ivory towers making secret deals
with politicians, cabals of wizards waging
war on werewolves, or eldritch beings
whose stirrings send ripples through
space and time, the general population
doesn't know about these things. And
most folks, if you tried to tell them, would
look at you as if you were a crazy person.

Cynthia, James isn't a vampire. If he tried to bite

your neck without consent, file a sexual
harassment complaint with HR.

This approach does you two, major favors

as a writer. The first is that it means you
don't have to re-write any major world
events or locations in important,
noticeable ways. This means all you're
doing is adding the underground stuff,
and putting in secret, hidden places that
only the denizens of the Night World
know about. The second is that it gives
your story an extra added thrill, because if
this secret world is only known by a few
people, then it could potentially be real.

That's a powerful shot, and it's one

reason this kind of story is so popular.
However, there is one thing that can
make or break your story on pure
suspension of disbelief... the strength of
your masquerade.

How Does No One Know?

This is not a rhetorical question. If you are

asking your readers to believe that an
entire secret society of dark wonders
walks among us, then you have to explain
how no one has noticed them. And as the
world marches ever onward into the age
of satellite surveillance, smartphones, and
instant video, this becomes more and
more important.

There are a few things you can do to

make your masquerade feel more
believable, though, and to get your
audience focused on your story rather
than on the premise you're asking them to
swallow to get to your story.

Right, right, no one knows it's the plague because

of his mask. Anyway, back to the duke and his
party...

#1: The Veil

The first (and in my experience most

common) way to have a masquerade is to
have a metaphorical or literal curtain of
invisibility around the secret world,
typically thought of as the Veil. For
example, in the Vampire: The
Masquerade setting the vampire
community has a huge, proactive network
meant to keep their existence secret.
They own the cops, they own the judges,
they own the newspapers, and if there is
information they don't want released then
it simply will not circulate. Not only that,
but it is extremely difficult to collect
evidence of a vampire, and what
evidence there is looks more akin to
shaky Bigfoot-capture footage than proof
of nosferatu. So between the money, the
power, and the community rules against
breaking the secret, they hide themselves
in the shadows. There are literally
hundreds of these bloodsucking undead
monsters all around the world, but their
existence is covered up by lackeys, and
the efforts of those looking to hide
information, camouflage evidence as
false, and to make vampires into a
popular fiction that couldn't possibly exist.

Some setups go even further, though. In

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, for example,
being a part of the secret world means
that regular people simply stop registering
your presence. You can maybe get their
attention long enough to ask a question,
but as soon as they look away they'll
forget they ever even saw you. You exist
as a member of the secret world, now,
and by virtue of that membership are
apart from the world of the mundane in a
real, complete sense.

For those wondering, the second option is

harder to do in a unique way, but is
strangely easier to swallow since you can
just say, "Because magic, that's why."

#2: Isolation

The second thing you can do (particularly

if you want to avoid the above approach),
is to make the supernatural elements of
your secret world rare, and far away from
prying eyes. I call this the horror movie
approach, since it seems like immortal
hockey-masked murderers, ghostly child
predators, angry spirits, and demonic
possessions would get a lot of attention...
but because they're isolated, rare, or
unusual, they just don't. Even in horror
movies where there are secret societies,
church divisions, or multiple generations
of victims, it seems like no one in the
general population ever lends credence to
these stories.

Because it's easier to hide something

when it's rare.

If you think about it, this is the key to a lot

of cryptid beliefs. Even if you comb every
inch of Loch Ness, or beat every push in
the pine barrens, it's a lot more believable
that one (or maybe a handful) of
creatures could evade being discovered
in such a big area. Hell, we're still finding
isolated tribes of people in the rainforest,
and we've been exploring that area for
centuries!

One of the best examples of this in my

opinion was the Clive Barker novella
Cabal. In it a man is driven to hunt down
the legends of a city of monsters beneath
a necropolis in the middle of nowhere in
Canada. A place called Midian. Beneath
that necropolis we find the tribes of the
moon, who are the monsters from all of
our folklore. Hunted nearly to extinction,
Midian is one of their last refuges. And we
believe it, because their sheer isolation,
combined with their relatively small
numbers, means that they very well could
have escaped notice for decades... or
centuries.

This isn't limited to middle-of-nowhere

settings like the Slaughter family's house
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You
can have isolation in urban environments
as a subject of blight, or even as a result
of money. Monsters could live behind the
walls of the old, venerable mansion just
as easily as in the concrete gutters of
half-abandoned slums. The key is that no
one goes there, so how would they know?

#3: The Cthulhu Effect

Those who know the truth are deemed to

be mad, and it is only by calling clarity
insanity that the world can keep its eyes
closed to the threat of the Old Ones.

Or, put another way, convincing someone

of the impossible takes a lot of doing.
Especially because people do not like to
be proven wrong. Even if you can show
them facts that proves their beliefs about
the world are incorrect, humans have the
unique ability to look you dead in the face
and say that those are lies, what I know is
true.

There is evidence of this all around you.

How many people believe the world is
flat, even though you have photos from
outer space proving the contrary? How
many people refuse to consider that the
world is billions of years old, insisting that
a holy book written in the bronze age is
more accurate than carbon dating? How
many people totally believe that if you cut
taxes on the rich that the money will
trickle down to the poor, despite decades
of research that state that simply is not
what happens?

Now imagine telling a populace who is

more than ready to disbelieve easily-
proven facts like this that vampires are
real. Or that fairies live in the woods. Or
that no, really, you can totally do magic?
Even if you have video of yourself casting
a ritual and summoning a hellhound, the
first 50 comments on the video are going
to be FAKE! with a helping of, "what editor
did you use for this? It's really smooth."

People are stupid, pigheaded, and don't

typically react with open-minded clarity
when events transpire that could make
them re-think their whole worldview. And
you can use that to explain how an entire
werewolf pack goes undetected when
they masquerade as homeless people, or
how the popularity of stage magic was
engineered to specifically cover up occult
practices in a phenomenal act of sleight-
of-hand. People don't want to believe that
these things are real, and while some of
them might, those who see the truth are
more likely to be thought of as delusional,
dangerous, or both, rather than as
witnesses to the world's radical truths.

You Still Have To Explain All This, Though

While you can use all sorts of

combinations of the above explanations,
the important thing is for you to illustrate
how your masquerade functions. If your
protagonist gets definitive proof of a
werewolf attack, show how the camera
doesn't want to be recorded what it's
being pointed at. The video is choppy,
problematic, and seems to malfunction.
Even though it's clear to one character,
you should show how others regard it as
faked, or how they think this belief in
werewolves is a manifestation of the
trauma the believer experienced.

And so on, and so forth.

It helps if you have a Professor Van

Helsing character to help explain things to
the newly exposed, but it's also important
to remember that Van Helsing was sort of
thought of as a quack with odd, old-world
ideas until he managed to convince
several thoroughly modern men that the
woman they'd been courting had, indeed,
become a vampire. And to do that he had
to prove to them she was attacking
children, and chase her back into her
crypt.

Despite their belief, and their slaying of

multiple vampires, in the world of Dracula
the living dead didn't suddenly get
unmasked to the public. They were
known to our protagonists who
remembered themselves in their
ignorance. Who knew that they never
would have believed it either, and who
understood that it takes extreme
circumstances to make someone step
over the threshold to the other side of the
Masquerade.

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing

entry. Hopefully you found it engaging,
and it got some ideas going for you! If
you'd like to see more of my work, check
out my Vocal archive. To get updates on
all my releases, follow me on Facebook,
Tumblr, and Twitter. Lastly, if you'd like to
help support me, you could Buy Me A Ko-
Fi, or head to The Literary Mercenary's
Patreon page to become a regular patron.
Either way, there's some free books in it
for you as a thank you!

Neal Litherland at 11:37 AM

Share

2 comments:

Unknown September 15, 2018 at

10:26 AM
Just ask Harry Dresden.
Reply

Replies

Nightstone September 15, 2018

at 7:40 PM
Harry has 2 factors 1 groups
actively making sure things stay
hidden and the Buffy effect where
ppl unwilling to accept the reality
edit their own memories

Reply

Enter your comment...

Comment as:
Google Account

Publish Preview

‹ Home ›
View web version

About Me
Neal Litherland
Valparaiso, Indiana, United States
Neal F. Litherland is an author from
Northwest Indiana. He holds a bachelors degree
in criminal justice from Indiana University, sword
fights in his spare time, and acts as a guide to the
realms fantastical.
View my complete profile

Powered by Blogger.