More like J.K. Trolling, amiright? J.K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series and now pens the Cormoran Strike detective novels under the pen name Robert Galbraith, has incorporated a new element into her latest installment that anyone familiar with her recent work will recognize: internet backlash.
Rowling has been one of the most vocal and visible, let’s say, critics, lending her money and her celebrity to groups that make the world less safe for trans people, and in the process receiving death and rape threats herself. A lose-lose situation for all. And many have pointed out that her fiction isn’t far removed from her own politics; in one Galbraith novel, the killer is a cis man who dresses like a woman when he commits his crimes.
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But that’s not what’s gotten people talking this time. No, this is a little pettier. In The Black Ink Heart, Rowling’s latest, one murder victim is a YouTube-based animator named Edie whose work is accused of being problematic by the web horde. Mob mentality takes over. She receives threats and is eventually stabbed to death in a cemetery. Oh, and the book is long.
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Depending on your source, it’s in the realm of 1,200 pages…some of which are just tweets.
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The dunking is all good fun, and murder-for-a-crazy-reason is sort of part and parcel with the detective novel genre, but we should remember that transphobia and toxicity—online and IRL—are actual threats to trans people.
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J.K. Rowling defended herself against accusations of self-insertion (when a novel’s character is a thinly veiled version of the author) in an interview with Graham Norton, claiming that it’s a case of life imitating art: She wrote the book and then it came true. “I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that],” Rowling said, per Variety. “I had written the book before certain things happened to me online. I said to my husband, ‘I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,’ but it genuinely wasn’t. The first draft of the book was finished at the point certain things happened.”
We’d read the book and decide for ourselves, but who has the time?
