A little more than a month ago, Annie Lamott, whose column I follow with delight on this platform, wrote the following:

I tell my writing students to write what they would like to come upon, so I have jotted down what I would like to come upon today…I would like to come upon someone to address the question of evil, by which I mean cruelty, stupidity, and brutality. Ms. Lamott wrote in the context of the ICE shootings in Minneapolis, but of course the question of evil is always relevant. Unnecessary wars. Indiscriminate bombings. Heedless destruction and the murder of the innocent.

So her prompt struck a chord. I’ve wrestled all my writing life with the problem of evil and the concomitant question of how an allegedly benevolent God can allow wrong doing to flourish. I’ve written realistic novels in which characters grapple with those questions, and a few years ago I began a darkly fantastical series which I hoped would allow me to speak of such matters more explicitly, all within the safely playful context of magic and shape-shifting and the heroes and villains who engage in such things.

I came up with the idea of creatures of immemorial appetite, the Saturni, so hungry they would eat the world, and I was fortunate to secure a publisher and see the series into print. For sensible enough reasons, my publisher advised me not to overstate the political aspects of my argument, and since I bow to the gods of marketing as much as anyone else, I’ve so far kept my opinions to myself.

But this seems like the perfect place for me to take the gloves off, so here goes.

I began the Saturni series because I was mad.  I was mad about the Great Recession and climate change and the ways people in power were always lying to the powerless and telling them they were on their side.  And I was even madder at the fact that even these powerful people, who had literally everything, weren’t even trying to preserve that everything, so they could keep on enjoying it.  

No, they wanted to consume everything they could:  animals, people, land, wealth, resources, planets and ideas, and even hope.  And in return they produced nothing but waste.  That’s what first gave me the idea of creatures so greedy they would eat the last endangered species and drink the last drop of unpolluted water on earth, and not even care when it was gone.

As I developed the books, I came up with other beings.  The Skin Eaters, the Saturni’s slaves, who in return for great power are compelled to hunger incessantly for human flesh.  And at the same time I came up with their antagonists, the great old spirits, the vodou gods, who, while driven from power and forced to go underground, were still waiting to come back and save the embattled earth.

All this mythmaking was of course great fun. Writing fantasy is the most freeing activity in the world, because you literally get to make up all the rules. At the same time, you have to play by those rules once you’ve invented them, and you have to think long and hard about what you really want to say. I borrowed cosmology from the Gnostics and theology from everyone from Teilhard de Chardin to C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers, and gave nods to Rowling and Meyer and Rice along the way.

But my main inspiration was the gradual unfolding of the goddamn unholy mess that has become our current political climate. No amount of grisly imagining could ever have predicted DOGE and the gutting of USAID. No fiction writer would have dared to invent a president who systematically loots and at the same time murders his own country. No cynic could have imagined the cold-blooded rebranding of fascism which has become commonplace today, with heavily armed masked men “disappearing” people in the streets.

I find myself wanting a place now where I can talk about the themes of the Saturni openly, even at the risk of being accused of idealism (guilty) and naivete (probably), Trump Derangement Syndrome, and a lack of post-modernist irony. I hope I can keep the tone light enough to avoid screeching, or wailing, or too much gnashing of teeth.

But as a certain well-known commentator once put it, there really are times when pitchforks and torches are called for, and this may help me to breathe a little more easily. Please bear with me. See you on the flip side.

Love and XXX,

Adrienne V. Parks