For the record, these are modern authors. So no talking about Lewis Carol and his even-for-the-time creepy relationship with a young girl or H. P. Lovecraft’s outward racism, sexism, homophobia (to name a few) that even racist people called ‘troubling’. These authors are alive and what they wrote was actually good.
Can you separate the art from the these artists?
3. Anne Perry
I’ve wrote about her before in my ‘5 Authors Who Were Also Murderers‘ article, but I’ll pretend who haven’t read and I’ll pretend who aren’t reading this sentence.
Author of the Thomas Pitt detective series and the William Monk detective series (no relation to the strange Monk series staring Tony Shalhoub), Anne Perry is an English author whose been
In a wonderful turn of events, Anne Perry has a movie based on her life! Who can say they have a movie based on their life? Not many people, considering most movies based on people’s lives come out when they’re dead!
The movie is Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Released in 1994, the film follows the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case about two teenage friends, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, who eventually murdered Parker’s mother.
That took a dark turn, didn’t it?
Parker was sixteen at the time, Hulme was fifteen, so too young young for the death penalty, the girls each received five years in prison, according to The True Crime Library.
Here’s the thing: At the time of the film’s release it was not known that upon her release from prison, Juliet Hulme had changed her name…
Image Via The woman I am Today.com
…to Anne Perry!
After the film was release and Perry’s identity discovered, the New Zealand Herald claims that, “…Perry has told the London Times Saturday Magazine that although they were never lesbians the relationship was obsessive”.
Well, that clears up everything! On a serious note, this murderer/author cleared up on her website that, “I began the ‘Monk’ series in order to explore a different , darker character, and to raise questions about responsibility, particularly that of a person for acts he cannot remember. How much of a person’s identity is bound up in memory?”
She also has an interview where she says:
2. Frank Miller
This man has cemented himself as one of the greatest comic book writers…of the 80s and 90s.
He reinvented Batman with Batman: Year One (adapted into Batman Begins) and Dark Knight Returns, reinvented Daredevil (his work on Daredevil was one of the many key inspiration for the Netflix adaptation), 300, and Sin City.
Maybe we should have gotten the hints, given that Alan Moore has said:
I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny; 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. There has been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time.
But we liked those comics! Frank Miller was insane, but we liked his insanity. It was…what? Well thought out, I guess.
Come 2001-2002 we got the three issue series Dark Knight Strikes Again. We don’t talk about it.
Then between 2005 and 2008 we got the unfinished ongoing series All Star Batman and Robin. The series, meant to reinterpret how Batman and Robin first met, remains unfinished because, well…
-Batman tells young Dick Grayson, newly orphaned, to eat rats
-when Alfred gives Dick Grayson a burger, Batman punches him
-when Alfred tells Batman he’s not his slave, Batman grumbles away (did he think Alfred was his slave?)
The only good thing about this series is Jim Lee’s art and the fact Batman says:
Come 2011 and everything goes down hill. Holy Terror, a comic about a masked vigilante punching Al-Qaeda terrorists in the face. In July at comic-con he explained:
“I was raised Catholic and I could tell you a lot about the Spanish Inquisition but the mysteries of the Catholic Church elude me. And I could tell you a lot about Al-Qeada, but the mysteries of Islam elude me too.”
Come November, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, he said that:
“Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.
His reputation wasn’t helped by the fact Holy Terror is terrible, Islamophobic, paranoid…
….and just ugly to look at.
Since his Occupy Wall Street comments, Frank Miller has explained, “I wasn’t thinking clearly when I said those things”.
At least he apologized, unlike the next guy….
1. Orson Scott Card
Image Via Hack River
You knew he’d be on the list. Maybe you hoped that I’d come up with someone you never heard of, but Card is such a garbage person that this list was literally made for him. Not really, of course, I don’t sit around and wallow in my hatred for the Card, but he needed to be on this list and, dangit, he must just be the worst person on this list.
Ender’s Game is a great book. The 1985 winner of the Nebula Award and the 1986 winner of the Hugo Award, the book is about a child who is told to play a game to train him to kill aliens, and he kills them all. Plot twist! He actually killed the aliens, except one. he talks to this alien and…Plot Twist! Turns out the aliens all have one collective mind and assumed humanity were the same. Thus, when they needed a planet to occupy, they did our equivalent of nudging us to the side on the bus. When they realized their mistake, it was too late.
Flash forward and Card is now antithetical to everything that book stands for.
Did we read the same book? Well, at least he has some good opinions on other topics such as gay marriage…
The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
Closing thoughts
Do you agree with this list? If you do, can you separate art from the artist? If you can but you don’t want to give them money, here’s something you can do:
Buy the books second hand. That way you:
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Support your local bookstore
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Don’t give them any money
Featured Image Via VIDEO BLOCK