Orson Scott Card, "Hamlet's Ghost"

I was suckered into reading "Hamlet's Ghost" by the controversy surrounding it, which started when Rain Taxi Review got its hands on a special edition of the story, published by Subterranean Press, and panned it completely for being a homophobic mess. Other writers spoke out and eventually the whole thing made it into the papers.

I love trainwrecks and was curious to see how bad "Hamlet's Ghost" would be, and it turns out that the original story is available in a Kindle collection (don't worry about buying it, Tanith Lee's in there, too). For those who don't know (spoilers ahead): The big twist in "Hamlet's Ghost" is that Hamlet's uncle didn't kill Hamlet's father, it was really Horatio, who was fed up with King Hamlet raping him and decided to off the old man. Hamlet realizes his mistake, but it's too late and Hamlet dies and goes to rape hell. The end.

It's difficult to adapt Shakespeare, and Card isn't up to the task--the original Rain Taxi review links to an adaptation Card did of "Taming of the Shrew" which is even more ridiculous in some ways than "Hamlet's Ghost" (let's modernize the text but leave the iambic pentameter in! Genius!) At least the "Shrew" adaptation keeps some of the text, though. "Hamlet's Ghost" is pure prose, and it all goes down like a lead weight through Jello.

In this version of Hamlet, Hamlet is so self-absorbed that he never notices that his dad is raping all of his friends. This despite his friends constantly hanging out one-on-one with his dad, after which they return in floods of tears. Card's Hamlet makes Shakespeare's Hamlet look like a model of consideration for others--at one point Card's Hamlet flies into a snit because he's told that his before his father died the old man liked to garden, which meant that his father was edging or grafting roses instead of hanging out with him. Hamlet is able to slip out of his own thick head long enough to notice that King Hamlet is not a particularly good ruler, but he still spends the entire book wailing over his daddy not paying enough attention to him. This is supposed to make the ending ironic, because OMG HIS DAD WAS A PEDO and so on.

Every character in this novella is a self-absorbed idiot, with the possible exception of Ophelia, whose decision to kill herself seems perfectly sane in this context. Hamlet's mother is willing to threaten King Hamlet with a knife when she sees him feeling up his offspring (ugh), but she doesn't notice that her husband is using her son's training as an excuse to gather up a bunch of "beautiful" young lads who are just her son's age, or more likely she doesn't care. None of these boys tell their fathers or mothers, or the fathers and mothers don't care, either. It's not as surprising that they don't tell Hamlet about the abuse, because Hamlet is thick and also it would spoil the "surprise ending," but none of them seem particularly angry at Hamlet, even when he's constantly driveling on about his father. You'd think one of them would snap and throttle the moron.

This all leads up to a hilarious ending where everybody dies screaming about man-boy love, and Hamlet slips off to hell. It turns out that his ghost dad totally messed with Hamlet's head so they could have sex in hell forever! This is supposed to be creepy, but since King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet are the awfulest people in a sea of lazy jerks, they really do deserve each other--and it's not like what they're doing is really wrong, because they're already in hell, right? At least Hamlet will be forced to find something to do other than whine about his father not loving him enough. Maybe that is the true punishment.

It's easy not to take "Hamlet's Ghost" seriously, because it's just so terrible. But it's hard to read it only as a direct denunciation of homosexuality--not because Card isn't a homophobe (he is) but because the story doesn't seem connected to any sort of realistic adult sexuality. In the world of "Hamlet's Ghost," the only real sexual option seems to be homosexual pedophilia. Every other sexual predilection is either a only vague possibility or explained away as a nasty side effect of homosexual pedophilia. Yes, post-gay therapy and other such nonsense tend to "explain" homosexuality as the result of molestation, but usually they at least attempt to portray heterosexuality as normal or at least common. In "Hamlet's Ghost," there are no heterosexual adults. Everyone's sexuality is either very, very latent or fixed by an incident that took place well before puberty.

It's too odd, and I've been reading more Card to see what textual path eventually led up to the whole Vortex to NAMBLA Hell ending. More on that later.