Facts in the Fiction

Ever have a moment when you find out that something you read in a work of fiction was, in fact, true?  It can be a gut punch, well, ego punch maybe.  Either way, it is a moment of disbelief followed with a reckoning of “wait a minute”.  This first happened to me a couple of years ago.  I was sitting with my mother and sister on a warm summer day, just relaxing and conversing.  My sister brought up a documentary she had recently seen about with finders.  This immediately got my attention.  She then brings up the Witchfinder General, Mathew Hopkins.  I about choked on my beverage.  Whoa, whoa, whoa, that dude was real???

For context, if you have read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett then you know what I am talking about.  If you haven’t (other than you should if you enjoy a good bit of humor mixed in with some religion and satire, I recommend highly) the witch-finders are an important part of the novel (and television show).  There is a brief discussion of the history of witch-finding in England in the 1600’s.  I honestly thought this had all been made up by the authors.  So, it was not even that Mathew Hopkins was a living human being, but that witch-finding was also a real thing.

Weaving honest into the literary lies is a master craft it seems.  To flawless seem truth in with the lies makes the story even more real feeling.  While the story of Good Omens is one of fantasy, there is a lot of strange truth weaved in.  The same can be said of many works in historical literature, a genre I have a growing interesting in.  The vampire panic in the late nineteenth century is the center of Opium and Absinthe, and there are many tidbits of real and strange history woven into Things in Jars.

Overall, the truth grounds the lies authors are telling us as we read.  No matter how strange or bizarre the plot or characters, the story seems more plausible because let’s face it, humans are weird, and we do a lot of weird things.  And sometimes the truth, really is stranger than fiction.