I have had a "full, rich day" and as I begin to wind down for the evening, cold beer in hand, I want to discuss an oft-neglected aspect of storytelling, one which I feel is extremely important despite that neglect, and indeed, if properly addressed, would right much of what is wrong with books, TV series and movies which have supernatural and magical elements or themes.

If you read this blog -- and it's been years since Goodreads allowed us, the authors of G-reads blogs, to see a "view" count, so I have no idea how many do so anymore -- you know that one of my favorite TV shows is FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES, which ran from 1987 - 1990 and had enormous, if usually unacknowledged, influence on many shows which followed it. I've discussed the show at least twice before so I won't do so again, except to say it's about a trio tasked with hunting down antiques whcih were cursed by the devil and each have unique powers which give something to the user...but expect (and demand) something in return. Well, today I watched a first season episode from that show called "Bedazzled." The cursed item in question is a brass lamp whose light can locate treasure buried at sea, but which demands in turn that the user shine the light on an unsuspecting victim, who is promptly, if painfully, incinerated. I enjoyed the episode, but I had to laugh at the numerous plot holes. They did not relate to the object, but to the bloodthirsty bad guys trying to retrieve it from our heroes. By the end of the story five people have been killed, including a power company lineman and a police officer: indeed, our heroes shop, Curious Goods, is a veritable battlefield, with corpses sprawled in and around it, not to mention the now derelict vehicles of the police and power company. Yet the next morning everything is presented status quo ante, as if nothing of import happened. No army of cops and crime scene investigators is present documenting the massacre. No newsmen are crowding outside the shop looking for a scoop. It's as if the horror-movie storm of the previous night simply washed away all the evidence.

To quote Thomas Magnum: I know what you're thinking. It's a show about antiques cursed by the devil which possess evil powers. The audience knows that going in. So why bother making the heroes worry about police interrogations, or pesky journalists, or even neighbors exasperated by the constant mayhem going on in Curious Goods? If the central premise is fantastical, it doesn't have to be realistic in other ways.

If you think that, you're wrong. The prosaic details that govern everyday life matter on a supernatural show as much -- no, even more -- than in one based in ordinary reality. I'll say this again: The more magic and so forth you have in a world, the greater the urgency to get the nonmagical things right. This is the bedrock of making the unbelievable, believable.

Years and decades ago, probably around 1985, I read an article in a film magazine ridiculing INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM not for its supernatural flummery, but for the fact things like the laws of gravity and physics are simply ignored throughout the film whenever convenient for the writers. Specifically, the writer referenced the "jumping out of the airplane in a rubber raft" scene, and the scene where a coal car, packed with our heroes, jumps its track at high speed, flies in the air, and then lands perfectly on a completely different set of rails and continues on its way. Both sequences are preposterous, but why should they matter in a movie whose central premise revolves around magical objects?

Well, the gist of his article was that we can accept the existence of magical happenings in movies, but not resistance to ordinary physical laws in nonmagical moments. A man can jump off a 20 story building and land soft as a feather if he has a magic amulent: we accept this sort of thing in fiction. Indeed, half the reason to read fiction (or to see it on screen) is because things can happen in it that cannot happen in the real world. But we also understand that if our man lacks this amulet, he cannot survive the fall, which is what creates dramatic tension in stories where there are powers which supercede the natural laws by which we normally operate. A man without the amulet is just a man; he is subject to gravity, physics, entropy, and all the rest of it. Shylock's famous rhetorical rant -- "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?" -- applies doubly to ordinary characters in a world in which magic or the supernatural exists. By balancing the "rules" of magic (its scope and limitations) with the rules which govern the real world, we help establish not merely boundaries, but that crucial sense of limitation, which fuels a sense of realism.

I wish I knew who wrote the article or what magazine it was featured in -- probably "Cinemafantastique" -- but I will say that I've kept this principle as a sort-of amulet of my own, to the point where I operate, in my own writing, from its principles, often without consciously thinking about it. Take my own novella, “Wolf Weather” as an example. This is a story about werewolves, or more specifically, about men fighting werewolves. There are supernatural creatures like Arabeth and Wolfgod in the story, and the very premise of werewolves is rooted in the supernatural, but the protagonist, Crowning, is anything but supernatural. He is subject to all the rules which govern the human being and the human body. In other words, he lives in a real world intruded upon by magic, but still has to cope with the woes and limitations of the real world. He must eat, he must sleep, he must relieve his bladder and worry about slipping on the ice and breaking his arm. The fact he is besieged by monsters does not mean he doesn't have to worry about drinking his posca every day to prevent scurvy. By keeping Crowning grounded in the physical world, one where cuts bleed and hurt and lack of sleep makes you stupid, the werewolves seem all the more abominable and horrifying. They are outside, like the Agents in THE MATRIX, operating by a different set of rules; you, the ordinary human however, do not have that luxury. Only intervention of magic can allow you to cheat the laws that govern existence. Where there is no supernatural, there is no super. You fall from too great a high and splat you go, whether magic exists somewhere else in the world or not.

The inversion, however, also obtains: I'm convinced one of the reasons BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER was so damned good is because although Buffy herself is supernatural, or rather in possession of supernatural powers, she resides in the real world and is constantly vexed and bedeviled by real-world problems. Her super-powers avail her nothing in the realm of dating, or schoolwork, or popularity, or her ability to make or keep friends or maintain a healthy relationship with her own mother. By tying her to the prosaic, petty, frustrating, and the tedious -- in short, by making her human despite being extra-human in ability -- Buffy's war against "vampires, demons and the forces of darkness" becomes relatable, and thanks to that genuinely magical power, "the suspension of disbelief," believable. It has a hard foundation, a clearly-painted backdrop. Buffy can save the world on Thursday night, but on Friday she's still got a pop quiz she didn't have time to study for and no date to the dance and a mother who wants to ground her anyway because her grades are no good.

All this is my way of saying that storytelling -- the sort of storytelling with magical or supernatural elements, or even storytelling which is drenched in all things fantastical, such as the works of Tolkien -- still has to operate by a two-tiered system of laws. The first governs the fantastic. It establishes that, say, vampires exist, but it also sets up boundaries for the vampires: sunlight, crosses, holy water, stakes through the heart. The second governs the real world, where we have to pay taxes, get our hair cut, sleep at least six hours a night, obey the laws of thermodynamics, and explain dead police officers on the floor of our antique shop. So long as the storyteller keeps this system in mind, he cannot go far wrong: his audience will happily and enthusiastically suspend disbelief. It's when he is slovenly with the rules he sets up for magic, or allows characters to break the laws which administer everyday existence without magical intervention that eyes begin to roll.