Books are a fairly free medium. They can get away with things that films or shows can’t. In books dark themes can be explored that no one would dare to put on screen. Rape, incest and sexual fantasies can be described in a way that wouldn’t be possible in any other context.
It’s unlikely that George R.R. Martin ever considered showing certain scenes from his books in which naked teenage boys get drowned or underage strippers have sex in front of one of the main protagonists on TV when he wrote the script for Game of Thrones.
While this freedom books enjoy isn’t always used responsibly (rape as a plot device is an incredibly tired trope), these dark themes don’t only appear for entertainment purposes. Writing about them can be a way to process trauma both for the author and the reader.
But for a while now there seems to be an increasing effort to sweep everything uncomfortable under the carpet as if bad things stop happening if we just turn a blind eye and pretend they’re not a part of our reality.
Art dealing with any kind of dark theme is being pushed out of online spaces and it looks like books aren’t safe anymore either as a recent case from Canada indicates.
Last April, Quebec author Yvan Godbout and his publisher Nycolas Doucet were charged with producing and distributing child pornography. The charges against them stem from a single paragraph in one of Godbout’s novels, a dark retelling of Hansel and Gretel, in which a father sexually assaults his daughter.
Godbout and Doucet were arrested in March 2019, after a reader came upon the passage and called the authorities. The work was not marketed to children, contains no explicit visual images, a content warning was printed on the back, and the scene is meant to be horrifying, not erotic.