On Grit

So the first thing one encounters, truly, when you enter the story of These Restless Hills is, at the beginning, middle, and end.  I wanted the reader to smell the coal, taste the coal dust and the smell of the hot steel, the horseshit in the streets, the constant steam, the unrelenting rain of May 1889.  Johnstown’s geography lends itself to this, with vertiginous hillsides, deep valleys, and miles of buildings (many of which are still standing) that housed the mighty industry that was once in the area.

But there’s more to grit than just some description and a general awareness of the history of the region.  Indeed, I set the reader up in media res, as they say, and from the very opening of the novel, you’re riding along inside the head of Thomas Houghton, Inspector, Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police.

The reader also quickly learns that this is decidedly not a nice place to be.  Houghton is a menacing figure, promising violence and delivering it with what can only be described as “tempo.”  He’s a sociopathic, deeply damaged, violent man, shaped by an isolated childhood growing up in the hills of Fulton County, and thence proceeding to fight in most of the major engagements for his unit during the Civil War.  From there, after Appomattox, Houghton fell in with the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police, a public constabulary used as the mercenary forces for the private, business interests of Pennsylvania industrialists of the time.  Houghton never saw a gunfight, knifefight, or fistfight where he didn’t want to engage.  His language is plain and he’s really without most any redeeming quality.  Even as he questions his own loyalty to his employer, he goes along with it because, in the end, he prefers the violence.

This is also a setting.  Yes, it is a character, the main POV character in the book and he has some touches of dark humor that makes it possible for him to possibly evade complete psychosis as a diagnosis.  But it’s still a setting, and the reader is going along for a ride on this level of difficult and dangerous topography as well.  Because Houghton is a stranger to the city, the reader gets to see things for the first time (I’ve been told from readers familiar with Johnstown that they are able to re-see things anew.)  At the same time, Houghton is NOT a stranger to the times in which he lives; in fact, he tends to amplify it.  He is, therefore, a part of the theme and the setting, in addition to being the character.

The fact that the reader is riding along inside the head of a borderline, if not outright, psychopath is something that adds that gritty texture to the work.  When you think of Houghton, I wanted the reader to feel like what it’s like to be inside the mind of the Terminator, with the distinguishing factor being that the Terminator was a machine created to be violent and ruthless, but with Houghton, such a project was learned and executed over the course of a lifetime.  This is, after all, a man who not only uses violence without remorse, he has the imprimatur of the state itself giving him the right to do so.  For him, there is no consequence.  He is an analogue to the ultra-wealthy lurking in the background of the book, but really has no awareness that the impunity with which they move in his world equates to the impunity with which he moves through Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889?

Feeling that grit?  That’s the reader’s own discomfort with the POV.  Grit is friction; grit comes through plot points, it comes through voice, and it comes through character. (I would actually give serious reflection and worry to anyone who actually likes Houghton.  I was told by a person who read an early draft of the work that Houghton was an amazing and “compelling” character.  Of course, that’s excellent praise, but the ultimate factor about Houghton is that he is made into what he was by human action.  The most inhuman actions of all have, in fact, been made by actions taken by humans.)

I also wanted to give the reader, as I point out in the Afterword for that book, a clear and visceral picture of life in the Gilded Age, particularly for that vast majority who were ungilded.  The sicknesses, the fear, the brutal work conditions, the unrepentant and unpunished violence, especially violence visited by the powerful upon the powerless.  Anyone that thinks 1889 was a year amidst a “golden age” would need, I think, a bit more of a cautious and holistic perspective on the era.  It was a terrible time to be alive.

Grit – stemming from the setting, bristling out in the prose, just enough for the reader to feel a bit of the sandpaper.  It’s texture and feeling; the “thing” I was going for throughout that work was to give the reader a sense of grim, a sense of grime, along with a mix of both claustrophobia and disorientation, especially being inside the head of a man who is obviously challenged in terms of morals, dragging the reader along as a somewhat-unwilling witness to his guidance.  It’s a rough world.