For a long time I was a murder person. Cozy villages, locked rooms, a vicar with a secret. I had opinions about romantasy, and the opinions were that it was for other people, people with a different chair.
Then a friend, who’s forgiven me for things before, handed me a hardcover with a dragon on it and said, “Just read the first hundred pages.” I said I would read it at home. She said, “Read it on the train.” I said I’d think about it.
I read it on the train.
The train
Here is what I learned on the 7:52. Reading a romantasy in public in hardcover, with the cover out, is not an embarrassment. It is a signal. Three different women on that train looked at the cover, then at me, and gave a small nod, the nod you give to someone wearing the scarf of your football team in a foreign city. One of them, as she got off, said, “Wait till chapter twenty-six,” and was gone before I could ask.
I’d expected to feel exposed. I felt enlisted.
The first hundred pages
They were fine. A war college, a woman who’s too small for it, a man with a jaw who is also a problem. I made notes in the margin of my mind about the tropes, the way you do when you’re determined to be above a thing. The dragon turned up. I was above the dragon.
Chapter twenty-six
I was no longer on the train. I was at home, in the chair, and I had got there without remembering the walk. The cat had the blanket, I had the book, and chapter twenty-six did the thing the woman on the platform had warned me about, and I put the book face down on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.
I would like to say what the thing was. I won’t, because of the etiquette. I’ll say that I understood, finally, what the people with the nod had understood, which is that this genre isn’t about the man or the dragon. It’s about being wanted, violently, by a story that doesn’t let go of your sleeve.
The floor
I finished it at 2 a.m. on the floor, having migrated from the chair for reasons I can’t reconstruct. The cat had followed me and was sitting on the blanket, on the floor, watching me with the expression she uses for horror. I closed the book and lay there and thought: I have been wrong about an entire genre for a decade, and the correction took one weekend, and the woman on the platform knew.
What’s changed
I still read murder. The vicar is still my first love. But there’s a second shelf now, and it has dragons on it, and when I see a woman on a train with that cover out, I give her the nod. I’ve been enlisted. There’s a second book. There’s a third. I’m told to wait for the end of the fourth.
I’m not above it. I don’t think I was ever above anything. I was just sitting in a chair with the lamp pointed the wrong way.