Something cool about The Silt Verses is that, it’s definitely a story about religious oppression: there are official religions, and there are illegal religions, and Carpenter and Faulkner’s religion is super illegal to practice. But their religion is neither a depraved weird horrible thing set against a loving, just, peaceful, merciful, ~ normal ~ official religion; nor is it loving, just, peaceful, and merciful in contrast to the depraved and evil official religions. The worship of the Trawler-Man has a lot of body horror and human sacrifice… but all the official, legal, normalized religions also involve a lot of body horror and human sacrifice. It’s human sacrifice all the way down in this world!
Vaughn, I think, states the theme outright: at least you get to choose the thing that eats you. What I’m starting to get is the thing that makes the Trawler-Man illegal is that he’s regional, specific, and unmarketable. The legal and official gods like the Saint Electric, the Petropater, and the Slag King are the ones connected to industry, ones that money and control can be wielded through. Sweet Jolly Crunch-Tooth as a god of farming and harvest was canonically deliberately invented to usurp the thousand different harvest gods and unify all the farmers under a single god to be more profitable and commercialized. These popular gods still demand sacrifices, of course, but it’s in the name of industry, or modernity, or convenience, or products. The military has a god to assuage and give courage to soldiers; the police invented The Cloak, a god of police to do the same for cops, and it was signed off on as an official god when higher-ups realized they could send officers out with The Cloak as their ride-along and thus have to pay fewer people. And yet these cynically-created gods aren’t fake, either. They are very real.
What’s especially interesting is that local and regional and personal unmarketable illegal gods aren’t any better than the official ones. The Trawler-Man, god of a specific river, still demands drowned sacrifices. The Elk of Birch and Bone seems to be a very local god of a specific forest, of wilderness and hunting, and it also requires deeply disturbing body-horror sacrifices. There are gods like the Hollow or the little boy’s god of thunder that are accidentally called into being and given power and form through just a few individuals wanting something and naming something and nobody actually wants that god to exist and nobody actually wants that god to do what it does. Being afraid of or fascinated a thing is enough to call a god into being. And that god then immediately starts eating people.
It’s fascinating. I’ve heard that The Silt Verses gets really into critiques of extractive capitalism, and I’m starting to see that take shape. That this form of human sacrifice is good and necessary, but that form is tragic, and that form is evil. That the official, licensed, universal gods of capital and progress and industry and markets are what you’re encouraged to sacrifice your life to, and the small, weird gods of your local woods or your local river are weird and scary and also a distraction from what you should be worshipping and therefore banned. That even so, you can accidentally—or even intentionally—invent something that consumes you.
And in this world, something will end up consuming you. If you’re lucky, you get to choose what it is.
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