East of Eden

Geek Punditry #195: Paperback Blues

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If you can remember back a full seven days to my previous Geek Punditry column (#194: Can We Just Let Bad Guys Be Bad?), you may recall that the discussion was spurred by the announcement of a new Netflix miniseries adapting John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. The book lovers among you will not be surprised to learn, then, that as I spent some time pondering the changes being made between the book and the show, I got a hair up my nose to give the book another read. This was a little difficult, however, when it came to my attention that I suffered from a chronic condition shared by over 7 billion people on this green planet of ours: I don’t actually own a copy of East of Eden. 

And I feel like it’s judging me for that.

I own books, of course. I own a LOT of books. And the recent shenanigans by people like the bastards at Anthropic have made me more adamant than ever that owning as many books as possible is a good thing. That said, I DO have a limited amount of storage, and I’ve drifted more towards eBooks for most of my casual reading. I still love physical books, but unless it’s a keepsake (like a signed edition or something written by a friend of mine), something that’s unavailable in eBook format, or a book I need to complete a collection, I’m usually satisfied with the electronic version. So I decided to look into how much the eBook of East of Eden costs.

$12.99. And I looked at that $12.99 with the same sort of distrust that you look at the current prices at whatever gas pump is nearest to your house.

Look, I am a writer, and I believe wholeheartedly in paying writers what they’re worth. That said, I also believe that anyone charging more than ten bucks for an eBook is gouging you, because there are virtually none of the production, shipping, or storage costs involved with creating a print book. And when it’s a book that’s nearly 75 years old, the incredulity just rises.

That afternoon, I happened to be taking my son on our biweekly trip to the local library. While we were there, I thought, I should just check the book out. That’s what libraries are FOR, after all. They are a vital part of our community, and by NOT checking out books, I am doing them a disservice. It was such an obvious solution. So after convincing Edward that he actually had to follow ME through the stacks for a change, instead of me racing after him on a frantic search for the kitty pictures hidden around the children’s room as part of the library’s monthly scavenger hunt, I tracked the Steinbeck book down and looked at it.

I reeeeeally looked at it.

East of Eden is Steinbeck’s longest novel. And by “longest,” I mean it clocks in at about the same page count as Stephen King can turn out on a typical Sunday in October – it’s hefty. Let’s be clear about this: I do not mind a long book. I am by no means intimidated at the idea of reading a doorstopper. But I am also realistic, and I had serious doubts about my ability to finish the book and return it to the library in a timely manner. And even though the good people who work at the St. Charles Parish Public Library (Destrehan Branch) are uniformly kind, friendly, and helpful, I also reread Stephen King’s The Library Policeman a couple of months ago and I didn’t want to risk it.

Yeah, yeah, “it’s just a book” — SOME OF US CAN’T TAKE THAT CHANCE.

Anyway, I told myself, I’m an English teacher. I really should OWN a copy of such a seminal work in the canon of American literature. I should just get a paperback instead. So I looked it up: $20.

Then I went back outside to stare at the gas station again.

I remember a time – a time not all that long ago – when most paperback books fell in the $5.99 to $7.99 range. And sure, East of Eden is a huge book, clocking in at over 600 pages. But I started to look around at the NEW release paperbacks as well, many of which would take a full three or four whacks to kill a mouse, as opposed to the one thump that East of Eden would require, and I saw that $20 was about the average price these days. Part of that is because American publishing has all but abandoned the mass market paperback: the smaller sized and more affordable book that was ubiquitous for decades, small enough to fit into a largeish pocket, the glorious format upon which most people born before the turn of the century learned how to love books. Sadly, after making books accessible to the masses for nearly 100 years, this format has become almost nonexistent. If you ask publishers and distributors why that is, a lot of them will tell you that “the market” was no longer purchasing them, was no longer interested in them. As a member of “the market,” however, I can tell you that I was never surveyed about this decision. I never reached a point where I thought, “You know, I’m going to buy this larger version of the book that costs twice as much.” I just noticed that the smaller, less expensive versions were no longer being published for some reason. 

Although I have no statistics, quotes, or data, I firmly believe that the push away from mass market was spurred almost entirely by a publishing industry that wanted an excuse to increase its prices. And again, writers deserve to be paid. But I don’t believe for a second that, in the vast majority of cases, the inflated price tag on these books has equaled an increased cut for the person who actually created the book. Almost universally, the added revenue being collected is going into the coffers of the publisher, which of course provides the invaluable service of deciding which books they want you to spend money on.

I also believe – without statistics or data – that this format shift is also at least partially responsible for the decline in literacy in America. Look, there are a lot of reasons that people might not want to read books: social media, video games, other media drawing their attention, being afraid of being labelled a “nerd,” difficulty finding books that match their interests, their mother read Danielle Steele that one time she got hit by an ice cream truck and there’s no WAY they’re taking THAT risk, and so forth. But I think the fact that books are no longer cheap enough to be an impulse purchase makes every single one of those problems even worse than it already is. 

The funny thing is that while traditional publishing is doing everything it can to make it harder for people to become a part of their audience, comic book publishers are doing the OPPOSITE. I’ve written at length about DC Comics and their “Compact Comics” line, (In GP #119, GP #124, GP #164, and GP #178, but who’s counting?) so I’ll just do a quick recap here. DC now has a line of paperback editions of some of their most popular stories and graphic novels in a smaller format – ironically, about the same size as most of the paperback novels that have shoved mass market paperbacks into their grave. These Compact Comics collect the same stories that are published in traditionally-sized graphic novels, which usually have a price point ranging anywhere from $20 to $40, depending on the length. DC’s Compact Comics, however, have a uniform price tag of $9.99. And this format has proven to be a MASSIVE hit, selling out printing after printing not only in comic book stores, but in big box bookstores and other places that people buy books, like Walmart and Target. The line is so successful that nearly every other major comic book publisher has responded with their own line of smaller-sized bargain-priced paperbacks, and the result is an easily-accessible, affordable series of books that is appealing to both old and new readers alike.

Size-wise, these two books are everything you could want. Content-wise…well, one of them is.

Compact Comics also blow the argument for a $20 paperback out of the water. While a traditional book may have to pay a designer, a cover artist, and a few other people besides the author, a comic book has many, many more hands than that: multiple writers and artists, colorists, letterers, editors, and so forth. And while each of their pieces of the pie may be smaller than those of a single author who has written a single novel, the color pages and the paper that holds those images is also of a better stock than your usual paperback. The production cost for a Compact Comic is inarguably higher than that of a novel, and yet DC can afford to sell them for half the price.

To put it another way, if I have $20 in my pocket, I can buy Steinbeck’s East of Eden, or I can buy a copy of Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s exquisite graphic novel Kingdom Come AND have enough money left over for compact anthology of comics from Oni Press’s Rick and Morty series. And I’m sorry, but Steinbeck never ONCE included a plumbus in any of his novels, so this isn’t even really a contest.

If you look hard enough, though, you can probably find one in Shakespeare.

As a teacher, a writer, and a reader, I hear the phrase “literacy crisis” thrown around on a daily basis. Authors are desperately hustling to try to get readers. Readers are finding themselves in a cultural wasteland as it becomes more difficult to find people in your daily life that you can share your love of books with. Teachers are crawling behind students on hands and knees BEGGING them to read just a chapter or two of The Great Gatsby, because there’s a scene where a woman gets hit by a car, maybe because she’d read a Danielle Steele novel, I dare you to prove that she HADN’T. In fact, EVERYBODY seems to be doing anything they can to try to get people reading again.

Everybody, that is, except for the companies that have established themselves as the de facto gatekeepers of the entire world of literature: the publishers. Rather than making books available and attractive to as many people as possible, they seem to be on a quest to identify micro-cohorts of potential readers and squeeze every drop of cash out of THEM, rather than make reading appealing to the masses.

It’s an insane practice, but that’s the world we live in.

I broke down and got the Kindle version of the Steinbeck book, by the way. At $12.99, it would take me almost three years of late fines at the library to offset the cost, but by then I should be almost finished reading it.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Geek Punditry #194: Can We Just Let Bad Guys Be Bad?

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Item #295 on the list of “what are people on the internet in an uproar about THIS week?” is East of Eden, the new Netflix miniseries adapting the classic John Steinbeck novel, which is coming under fire for following along with a rather sizable trend in modern fiction: making the villain less…y’know…villain-y. 

Because nothing says “controversy” like an adaptation of a 74-year-old book that’s only read by English majors.

Now I am not a Steinbeck scholar, I should concede. I don’t have strict reverence for the novel or the original film version, adapted in 1955 by director Elia Kazan. I do, however, recognize trends, and some of the buzz around this miniseries concerns me. The series was produced by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of the aforementioned Elia, and some of the things that are being done with the new version actually sound pretty good. East of Eden, the novel, is a complex generational saga tracking the history of two intertwined families in the decades between the American Civil War and World War I. Elia, in making his movie, trimmed out all but a single generation and made a film focusing on only about a third of the novel’s content. Expanding it into a miniseries to make it more faithful to the book is a logical idea, one that makes much more sense than a lot of remakes that seem to be fueled by the promise of “Well, we own the IP, so let’s do it again.”

The problem, though, comes in the character of Cathy Ames. In Zoe Kazan’s version of the film, Ames is played by Florence Pugh, which is an inspired choice. Pugh is a phenomenal actress, and I’ve got no doubt that she can nail the bitter rage of the character, who is very much the villain of the novel. The issue is that I’m not entirely certain Pugh IS going to be playing Steinbeck’s villain, at least not from the way Kazan keeps describing her. In a recent interview on Good Morning Washington, Kazan said, “What if we think about her not as the embodiment of evil, but as a person who does really bad things?…I think we can learn more about ourselves if we don’t think about evil people as being that different from us.”

This is a statement about Cathy Ames. This is a character who, as written by Steinbeck, is unabashedly violent, selfish, sadistic, and cruel. A character he referred to as representing “Satan himself.” A woman who – over the course of the novel — abandons her infant sons, burns her own parents to death in a fire, frames innocent boys for sexual assault, drives a man to suicide, and manipulates a woman (whom she then murders) into leaving her a brothel in her will, then turns the brothel into a den of sadism and torture.

Ms. Kazan, respectfully, I very much WANT to think about people like Cathy Ames as being different from us.

I obviously have not seen the Netflix series yet (it doesn’t drop until Oct. 1), and I have enjoyed a lot of Kazan’s work in the past, both as a writer and actor, in movies like Ruby Sparks and The Big Sick. I’m just a bit concerned that this may push East of Eden into the trending area of “Villain Justification.”

To be fair to Kazan, in an interview with Time magazine she said, of Ames, “I don’t think anything in her background excuses her behavior,” but then she comes right back around and says “there’s something really compelling about her insistence on her autonomy and selfishness, especially as a woman.” I can accept an evil person as being compelling. But that doesn’t mean I think a character like Cathy Ames should necessarily be RELATABLE. 

I’m not against a morally complicated villain. The BEST villains are morally complicated. But at the same time, sometimes evil is just evil. You can understand a villain without thinking that they’re “like us.” To go to comic books (because they’ve got the most dramatic examples of villains out there), let’s look at characters like Dr. Doom or Lex Luthor.

These aren’t guys you would ask to help you get something off the top shelf at Walmart, is what I’m saying.

These two villains – arguably the two greatest villains in comics – are similar in many ways. Their true danger comes from just how brilliant they are. Both of them have the intelligence to change the world and make it a better place, were they to choose to use their gifts in that way. But they don’t, and for very petty, very human reasons. In the case of Doom, he believes that his genius makes him the most suitable to rule the world and is willing to crush anybody who stands in his way. Luthor (modern Luthor, anyway) isn’t concerned with ruling the world per se, but he cannot overcome the unbearably obstinate jealousy he feels because the people of Earth love an alien more than they love him, so rather than channel his intelligence in a positive way he is intent on destroying Superman and “proving” he’s “better” than the Kryptonian. Both of these villains are fascinating, intriguing, and wonderfully complex…but that doesn’t mean I see myself in either of them, nor do I want to.

This has been a trend in fiction for many years now, the de-villainizing of villains. Gregory Maguire didn’t invent the concept when he wrote Wicked, retelling The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West, but I think the smash hit Broadway musical is directly responsible for how pervasive that trend has become. Maleficent and Cruella are both movies built around showing how some of Disney’s most colorful villains ain’t all that bad. The ABC series Once Upon a Time made Snow White’s Evil Queen (eventually) one of the heroes, and did major rehabilitation work on characters like Rumplestiltskin and Captain Hook as well. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker movie takes the sadistic, serial-killing clown of our dreams and shows us how he’s beaten down by society. Like many patterns, once you’re aware of it, it’s hard NOT to see it.

This novel launched a thousand ships, by which I mean fanfiction.

None of this should be construed as a CRITICISM of these movies, books, or TV shows. I’m not saying that they’re poorly-written, poorly-acted, or in any way invalid projects. I’m just saying that as a TREND, the sheer number of stories that seem to try to excuse evil behavior as opposed to explaining it kind of bothers me.

Another part of the issue, as many people have noticed online, is a severe lack of critical thinking from modern audiences. People seem to think that liking a fictional character is somehow an endorsement of their behavior, and that makes people try very, very hard to avoid making characters who are purely evil. The whole thing is preposterous. If I say Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street is my favorite 80s slasher, I’m not saying that I approve of murdering teenagers in their sleep, I’m saying that Robert Englund is entertaining to watch. Somehow people have started to view what fiction a person consumes as an entire component of their personality, and I think that’s dangerous. It comes back to something I wrote about a few weeks ago (in Geek Punditry #191), about how some people allow their fandoms to completely consume who they are. This is a side-effect of that – my fandom consumes who I am, and therefore I assume that yours does the same, and when you tell me you like Friday the 13th I’m worried you’re going to put on a hockey mask and terrorize a camp. Q.E.D.

Poppycock. 

And finally, there are the moral relativists out there, the ones who have the opinion that there IS no good or evil, which is a mindset I fully reject. Some things are simply evil, like murdering innocent people or using Chat GPT to answer a math problem when you’ve got a calculator app on the same damned phone. And it’s possible to explore that darkness in fiction without trying to rationalize it. I’ll use the Joker as an example again, specifically Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke.

This is one guy who doesn’t need an LLM to hallucinate.

In this story, the Joker takes the position of that moral relativism – everybody out there is really just “one bad day” away from becoming a sadistic sociopath just like him. He sets out to prove this by hurting Batman and the people closest to him – specifically by shooting Barbara Gordon in the spine and torturing her father. His hypothesis is that even good men like James Gordon can be pushed over the edge. But the story rejects this notion; even after everything that has been done, Gordon insists that Batman takes in the Joker by the book, and that he not cross the line the Joker wants him to cross by killing him. Admittedly, the ending of the book is deliberately vague as to whether Batman chooses to cross that line or not (and if you accept it as an out-of-canon story as Moore intended, it remains vague), but the message here is that evil, ultimately, is a choice. 

I’m not saying that I don’t want villains to be fully-developed characters or have rich, intriguing backstories. I’m not even saying that I don’t want them to be sympathetic, because it can be pretty powerful to understand why somebody is doing something bad, even if you still condemn the action. But I’m kind of over seeing sympathy being confused with empathy – you can feel bad for somebody without feeling like you’re the SAME as them.

We’ve lost clarity in the name of complexity, and it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. Yes, I want interesting, intriguing villains. But that doesn’t always mean that they’ve got to be one step removed from the guy who lives next door. Good and evil are real things, and we’ve lost something by losing fiction that recognizes that fact. Sometimes good is just good. Sometimes bad is just bad. And if we can’t even concede that point in our fiction, how is that going to twist the way we think in life?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.