literary litmus test - hard rain falling

Don Carpenter wrote a test. It’s not a long test, it only took me about nine hours. It’s not a lonely test, I listened to the thoughts of a fellow reader as I went along. It’s not an inaccessible test, the language is efficient and gives you everything you need to pass. But it is still a test. A challenge against the current market’s claims on what a worthy read is and an interrogation of why we choose to read in a deliciously saturated hobby space.

There’s this trend for “marketability” that is an unfortunate byproduct of books needing to make money. Likeable characters, a satisfying ending, clean(ish) language, contemporary if not in setting then in feeling. It’s important, our current paradigm says, that people don’t feel too uncomfortable when we read a book, when we recommend a book, when we buy a book. There are still heaps of uncomfy books published, of course, but usually in horror and marketed as such.

Unlikeable characters, complete despair, slurs from and to every which way, touching gay romance from prison culture in the 1950s. That is Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter. Nothing good happens. Nothing! We are conceived into tragedy and the book finds its demise in a tragedy. Every step between there and here is lacking joy. I love it and I’ll love it more as greater hordes read it.

There is a lot of pain in the world and we position ourselves at just the right angle to expose our skin to as much acid rain as we can soak up; it makes sense why we want more escapism in our hobbies. But I beg you, dear reader, to take the apathy that creates the craving for escapism and put it to bed every so often so that we can nourish the bear inside of us that has to keep our eyes open even when we think we have lulled it to sleep with a session of hard scrolling. A book like Hard Rain Falling will not make you feel better about our world, but it will make you more comfortable in it. It’s like shooting yourself with 9mm bullets everyday so you can tank the 5.56 at a protest.

Uncomfortable books push us beyond our limits so we are better prepared to interpret the world as it is fed to us. Don Carpenter gives us a story of despair as both an exploration of a human condition, but also as an inoculation for those of us who don’t necessarily live in the despair caught in those pages. The poke is better than the cough.

And in the same way that COVID taught me which people in my life couldn’t handle the poke to protect their communities (and themselves), reactions to Hard Rain Falling can teach me a lot about how someone reads. You don’t even have to like the book, there are heaps of reasons to dislike it. I personally don’t always like books with such utilitarian language, I find they get old after a while and always crave something a bit more playful with the arrangement of words. The book is absolutely dated and we should evaluate it both within the confines of its own time and ours; it will be found wanting when compared to the wisdom of our culture today. But the base traits, the constant despair, the abrupt ending, and the subject matter Carpenter chooses to explore, remain a timeless exercise in our abilities to parse literature and feel more comfortable with the jab so we may spread to our communities, not a cough, but a deeper empathy to a bitter world we live in.