The Case of Cozy Versus Grimdark

I have a confession to make, and I hope I’m not ejected from the GdM family for it: I like cozy SFF and I indulge in a good novel now and then. I know, I know, but honestly, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons) was like a Band-Aid on my heart and soul, and I eagerly await the release of the audiobook for the third and final novel in the Miss Percy series. Lighter novels make up about a third of my reading.

So, let it not be said that I’ve maligned our cozy brethren. Rather, I admire them and their ability to find a shining beacon of gentleness in the current climate. I appreciate the skill it takes to hold fast to the goodness that they find in their communities, and offer it back to us in literary form so that we can feel the glow of their affection through their pages.

And yet, my most recent review for GdM was for the recently launched novel Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen (thank you Poisoned Pen Press for the ARC) and it encapsulated everything I love the most in Grimdark. Without reiterating my review, Blood on Her Tongue was very much a book that celebrates women’s wrongs. As the world spins ever deeper into what feels like an IRL grimdark plotline, I find myself more stubbornly committed to seeking out stories like Blood on Her Tongue. Stories that have sharp, brittle edges. Stories of survival at any cost, stories that have split knuckles and bruised ribs because they’ve been fighting for their very existence against overwhelming odds. Stories that suffer that existence in a hostile environment, stories that spit in the face of the status quo.

Cozy offers an escape, and I do need the escape now and then. Reading cozy SFF is kind of like taking a vacation. The reader is invited to step out of their lives and into an indulgent bubble for a little while. The real masters of cozy, like Quenby Olson, are able to infuse that bubble with earnest emotion, nail-biting stakes, and well-earned happy endings. I appreciate the opportunity to sidestep my anxieties about reality.

Grimdark, on the other hand, is the ultimate comfort media. Grimdark is the genre of my heart and soul, because only in Grimdark can I find such broken, imperfect heroes as I found in Blood on Her Tongue. Grimdark makes space for my reality, wherein simply the act of existing feels like a rebellion against the suffocating system that tries to smother all resistance. Real life forces us into making impossible choices as we struggle to make ends meet, and Grimdark crouches down in that gutter with us to offer us a hand. Here, in this genre, we can find the clearest reflections of ourselves. We get to see the echo of our own impossible choices playing out in fiction, and we get the catharsis of hard-won victories on a personal scale.

On Grimdark pages, said victories are not guaranteed. Sometimes the price paid for them is devastating. Sometimes the heroes are so shattered by their journey that they are unrecognizable from the character we met on the first pages. Call me crazy, but that shattering is where I find comfort. After all, I am not the same person I was back on my first few pages. Life has pressed down on me from so many sides that there are fault lines in my assembly, sure to leave me quaking when they knock together too hard. But Grimdark tells me that I can still be the hero of my story, even though I am so imperfect, even though the options available to me may in fact leave only the possibility for a Pyrrhic victory.

So, I offer this from the pages of GdM: thank you to the cozy novels that let me take a vacation in your gentle worlds. Your genre gives me the rest and recuperation I need. But I can’t vacation from myself forever. Eventually, I have to come home to the detritus I’ve accumulated on my path through life.

And that home is built on a Grimdark foundation. I surround myself with Grimdark fables that acknowledge the inevitability of chaos, but celebrate the stubborn core of humanity and survival even in the whirlwind of entropy.

We do not go quietly, or softly, into the status quo. Thank you, fellow Grimdark fans, for being such good company.

This article was first published in Grimdark Magazine Issue #42

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