I Wrote A Novel Because People Are The Worst

I wrote a novel because people are the worst.

There are a lot of stories out there with happy endings, even in this sad modern age. Stories where normal, everyday people are placed in awful situations and discover within themselves heretofore unknown depths of courage and strength. Stories where good people triumph over evil despite horrifying losses and real terror.

Fairy tales, each one — because I know people. I have met people. I am people. And people are the worst.

People follow trends without question, repeat rumor as fact, and lash out with terrifying anger and banal hatred at perfect strangers just because they posted on an Internet forum. People talk during movies in theaters and urinate all over the toilet seat in public restrooms and hack into your bank account and purchase $5,000 worth of ugly, overpriced designer shoes. People use periods inappropriately for emphasis. People. Are. The. Worst.

Thrown into some sort of apocalyptic scenario where the world is being threatened by powerful forces beyond normal human ken, most people, including certainly myself, would flee and hide. We would also doubtless gladly give up the locations of everyone else huddled in a crawlspace nearby if such betrayals would buy us a few more minutes. Or, possibly, eat them ourselves in order to survive. Writing a story where otherwise normal, non-powerful folks stand up for what’s right and sacrifice themselves is simply unbelievable. It destroys my suspension of disbelief, and I spend the final 300 pages of every book with a smirk on my face that is the universal symbol for “People are The Worst.”

So, I wrote a novel to counter this trend, this awful trend of trying to convince me that people are anything but the worst, that my friends and neighbors would do anything besides betray me immediately if I were, say, hiding in terror from Ant Aliens who have come to harvest humans for food, or trying to flee from evil warlocks who had come to enslave me for their dark magical purposes. I thought, if I wanted to convince someone like me that people – who are the worst – would actually stand up against evil and fight the good fight, how would I do that?

You’d have to come up with a reason why people would sacrifice and struggle to save the world, because of the aforementioned worsedom of humanity.

The main character in my novel We Are Not Good People is a magician – he can cast spells. But in this universe, magic has a cost – you have to shed blood to fuel your tricks. It can be your own blood or someone else’s, but the power of your spell is proportional to the amount of blood you shed, so most magicians – also being people, and therefore also being the worst – choose to shed other people’s blood rather than their own.

This leads to all sorts of evil shenanigans, up to, and including, attempts, to murder the entire population of the world in exchange for untold power.

My heroes want nothing to do with being heroes. They’re self-interested grifters and small-time con men. They try their best to run away from danger and wriggle out of the dangerous situations they find themselves in. But they’re also people who have no one else. They have each other, their best and only friends. And, ultimately, it’s that friendship that drives the narrator, Lem, to heroic lengths. He doesn’t want to save the world, really. He’s afraid and would be delighted to pass that job onto anyone else. But if he doesn’t stand up and do the heroic thing, he’ll lose his friend. His only friend. It’s that simple.

It’s selfish. And that’s why it made sense to me.

I think you have to give people – and thus, the characters in the novels you write – reasons. They have to be making choices based on something more than the indomitable human spirit, which in my experience is not indomitable at all, something more than a vague sense of moral rectitude, which, again, in my experience, is almost utterly lacking in just about everybody. In short, you have to make your stakes very personal. The personal is where people’s goodness comes out.

The other side of this coin – if Lem and his powerlessness are one side – are the powerful. And they are also the worst, naturally, but they have the ability to inflict that worsening on all of us. And I ask you to take a moment and look around you. Consider the people around you right now. And ask yourself: If they suddenly knew for a fact that if they stabbed you in the neck with something handy – a fork, perhaps, or a pen, or maybe a ceremonial knife they carry with them because in addition to being the worst they are also absolute psychopaths – and let you bleed while they muttered some ominous-sounding magical language that could grant them incredible powers, would they do it? Would they hesitate? Would they wrestle with their conscience for five minutes, five hours, five days, and then creep up on you and do it?

Probably. Because these are the same people who are parking in handicapped parking spaces, the same people who are stiffing waiters on the tip right now as I write this (and now again as you’re reading it), who refuse to give up their seats on public transportation to the elderly and infirm, and who will likely refuse to purchase my novel when it comes out because they are the worst.

That’s what we’re up against. You know those books that assume people are fundamentally good and would use power to protect others? The books that made you wish magic was real, that made magic seem like the portal to wonder and beauty and adventure?

I didn’t write that book. Because people are the worst.

Jeff Somers sold his first novel at age 16. His story “Ringing the Changes” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2006, and his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight. He’s written prolifically since then, and his next book is We Are Not Good People, due out October 2014.