The Best Dark Fantasy Books

There are plenty of dangers and terrors in the fantasy genre. What makes something truly dark fantasy?

I don’t really know! That’s the main problem…

Haha!

Fantasy in general is a very broad genre, definitions-wise. It’s becoming increasingly narrow as the commercial world brackets it into ever-more specific forms of sales categories. But for me, particularly when I was growing up, that ‘fantastica’ definition of fantasy was the one that made sense to me. So lots of my reading practice when I was young – which I think informs what I do now – was a combination of literary fiction; weird things in general, whether they’re fiction or non-fiction; what used to be thought of as pulp fiction; and all forms of just very odd stuff. I used to read everything, basically. I’d read the back of the toothpaste packet if I had nothing else to read.

So dark fantasy as a genre, for me, encompasses a whole bunch of stuff – like The Iliad, for example, or The Odyssey. They’re both fantastic, unless we’re people who believe in ancient Greek theology, and also very bleak and real and dark, and fantastically interesting and unpleasant. I used to read a lot of Camus, which had a similar thing… Various forms of books had these elements of world building that weren’t familiar to me, whether that happened to be 1930s-40s France, or people who were ill, or anything, really… It was still a ‘fantastic’ thing to me. And then there were obviously the things that were marketed as fantasy as well. Lord Foul’s Bane, which I’ll talk about later, I read growing up and it had the same atmosphere to me as a lot of the other things that I was reading – but it mentioned Tolkien on the front, and the image on the cover was of a landscape unfamiliar to reality. But in terms of a qualitative difference between the things that I had been reading, and the things that were marketed as fantasy, I didn’t really understand – and still don’t really understand – what the difference is.

Well, I do understand – it’s a commercial necessity and a bookshop requirement to have certain things in certain places, and to be able to quickly market things to people who’ve already bought things of a similar vibe. I’m not completely other-worldly! But in terms of what it means for me as a writer, I choose not to believe that’s what the definition is. I think my books get marketed as dark fantasy in the US and Russia and in other territories, but not so much in the UK. For me, it doesn’t feel any different to my stuff that was marketed as literary fiction, which is a similar testing of the real, and unpleasant nightmarish entrapments of the self, and all of that jazz.

So I hope that vaguely answers the question…

Yes, definitely. Your first choice, though, is indisputably a classic of the fantasy genre. Can you tell us about The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper?

Yes. This is a story about a boy who comes of age. It’s around his eleventh birthday, which coincides with the winter solstice. It’s a book that’s very British – some people think of it as English, but there’s quite a heavy Welsh aspect to it, too – depicting a dark, folkloric, oppressive coming-into-reality that children go through. I think it’s one of the reasons why I felt attuned to it as a child: it marks the character’s move into adulthood too young, and an understanding of the world that takes away all of the certainties and the pleasantnesses, and replaces them with dark, historic, unpleasant facts about the past and about the way the world is.

Essentially, he’s a character who understands that he has a role in keeping back the dark. There are two sides in the books, the light and the dark, and the magic that goes along with those things is often tied in with the magical landscape – standing stones and stone circles and Arthurian legend and Cornwall. The book before, Over Sea, Under Stone, is mostly set in Cornwall and has to do with Arthurian legend –  and rather than being things that you can stick on a tea towel and sell by the seaside, the myth and legends of Britain are understood as an unpleasant closeness and threat. The darkness had never gone away, and the obligation to fight it back had never gone away. And as a child, the character is given a sense of happiness and homeliness against which these terrible facts about the past rise up.

I think one of the things that fantasy is good at, without freaking everybody out too much by giving them argument, is allegorizing our relationship with our world in particular ways. For me as a kid, The Dark Is Rising really allegorized my passing from a state of childish lack of knowledge, into understanding that the world was a terrible and dark place with a horrible history, and all of the obligations to fight against that hadn’t gone away. We hadn’t won, and there was instead this terrible looming, foreboding sense that you’re going to be aggressed against by the forces of the past and of darkness. That in general seems to be oppressing me still now, particularly in things that I write. Trying to think about what I write, why I do it, I think it’s that gloomy, beautiful, situated, historic, allegorization of, you know, the nightmare of existence…

It’s interesting that you brought up the cosy world he’s experiencing this nightmare from. Because I do think of it as dark fantasy, but I also think it’s masterfully cosy.

It is. That darkness against the homeliness and the pleasures of family is one of the things that Susan Cooper does really well. Uncle Merry, for example, is a figure that everyone’s delighted to see, and he’s full of good cheer and all of that kind of stuff. But he also forces them to do some terrible things, and to confront terrible facts about their own existence in the world as it is, and is forcing them not to be children – pushing them into responsibilities and situations which adults would find frightening, let alone children.

Now I think I’m wondering whether I just copied everything from The Dark Is Rising without realising it… But it’s that sense of having obligations that the adult world brings in on you, that undermines but also makes shine out the pleasantness and cosiness of the world.

It’s the second book in the series – can readers start here?

Yes. They’re all standalones, essentially, and The Dark Is Rising is where things really took off for me. It was still a little bit Five-Go-Wild-in-Dorset-ish in the first book, I thought. There were dark aspects, in that they were chased by sinister figures, but it was largely more of a holiday-adventure type book. But The Dark Is Rising was where it started to get very much darker.

Your next choice is a much less obvious one, but fascinating… Please introduce Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber.

This is the kind of book that undermines the generic conventions that we imagine every book must possess nowadays. It’s the account of a German judge in the late 19th to early 20th century, and problems with his mental health. He developed what they thought of as paranoia in the German medical system, but which we probably think of as some form of schizophrenia now, which led to him being put into an asylum under the tutelage of the German state – which meant that he wasn’t allowed to leave. Some people were allowed to leave, but he wasn’t. He had to argue to the authorities, particularly the people who were running the asylum and his doctors, that he was capable of managing his own affairs. So he wrote a series of memoirs, almost like a diary, but revised and accompanied with legal essays that were designed to prove to the world that he was, in fact, a rational human being; and that his delusions, his hallucinations, were similar in order to anybody’s religious convictions. His delusions are written up in this very analytic, logical, distanced, objective form.

Essentially, he believed that God was turning him into a woman, because God had become entangled with his nerves – because his nerves had become so agitated that God, who is essentially made of nerves, was being drawn down to earth from heaven by his attachment to Schreber’s nerves. And the only way that God could free himself from this was to send Schreber mad, and also then to scour the earth of everybody else, and impregnate Schreber so that he could then repopulate the earth.

Oh, wow…

So you wouldn’t imagine it was going to be a very easy task for him to elucidate this mythology of hallucinations, this religion of hallucinations that he created, and still manage to get out of the asylum – but he did. It was so logically outlined, and clearly backed up with references – to ideas that might seem to us to be very bizarre pseudoscience, but were pretty standard dinner table ideas, like, “Where does the soul live? Well – the soul lives in nerves.” That was a pretty common understanding of neurology back in the late 19th and early 20th century, when the mystical and spiritual were normalised.

The book itself then becomes this hybrid of extreme logic and bizarre metaphysics, which I think is something that fantasy as a genre shares. It takes the logic of reality, and shifts the metaphysical bases to create these fantasy reals, or these secondary worlds as someone like Tolkien would call them. I think that’s the same thing that happens in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. While it’s technically nonfiction, it would be hard to imagine a nonfiction in which we also believe that a man was actually connected to God’s nerves and was drawing him down to earth, and that the world had been scoured – and he had this idea that everybody around him was what he called “fleetingly improvised men”, with one of those German hyphenated nouns, and that they were all non-existent until he addressed them, at which point God then fleetingly improvised them to convince him that he was going mad… Those things obviously can’t be true. So what are they? They must be a form of fantasy, whether that’s a fantasy with an ‘f’ or a phantasy with a ‘ph’.

I find very interesting that uncomfortable juxtaposition between things being true and things being demonstrably false. I think one of the pleasures of fantasy is that the sophisticated writer of fantasy can do that same work – can convince you that something that is demonstrably false is, in fact, true, at least at the level of your emotional engagement with it – and to a certain extent your intellectual engagement with the allegory of it.

This book is a perfect example of how you can read for empathy without having to insist on the truth of a thing. Sometimes when we’re reading, we think, “This isn’t true”, or “I don’t agree”, or “I don’t believe what this person’s saying”. I think it’s a problem with realists, in general – and I have some experience of realism, so it’s not like I’m completely anti realism – but it insists on  verisimilitude, or at least a relationship with the outside world that is kind of one-to-one in some way, and I just don’t think it’s possible or desirable. I think also it leads to people just reading to see themselves represented back to themselves, which I don’t think is a very healthy way of reading in the world.

So with something like Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, even if you don’t want to consider it to be a fantasy novel, you should read it just as a means of understanding what fantasy really is – and the extent to which all of our realities are formed in the same manner, whether those things happen to be arguably true or seemingly false. Those contingencies around ‘arguably’ and ‘seemingly’ give you an option to have the same epistemological relationship with the text, regardless of whether you choose to believe that to be true or real or not.

It sounds like it’s dark on two levels – the world he’s hallucinating is as a dark one, but so is the reminder of our tenuous relationship with reality.

Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. For me, both as a human being and a writer, that’s central: I think it is worrying, at the very least, that provisionality, that fragility of your own conception of the real. I have my own relationship with mental health issues, as we all do, but also I think the culture we live in as ill. You couldn’t really imagine it to be anything else, given the kind of things that it does in the world. And I think that too solid or transcendental a definition of the real ends up with systems which do terrible things, despite the fact that what they’re really doing is just reifying a form of aggressive, paranoid illness against the world. You’ve got to find some way to undermine that, to not get to the point where you think it’s perfectly appropriate to wreck everything or to kill indiscriminately, and imagine it’s all fine. One of the things I really like is the sense you get seeing someone trying to propagandize about something which you don’t believe, and then you realize, they’re using exactly the same techniques as the people who are saying things that you do believe…

You’ve written about Schreber yourself in Playthings, and another presumed schizophrenic in Lucia, but now you’ve taken a turn into what would more firmly be classified as dark fantasy. Could you tell us about Mordew, and the journey from your ‘realism’ to your ‘fantasy’?

That’s right, I have supposedly taken this movement from something that deals with people with schizophrenia, into the type of writing which could be bracketed as dark fantasy. But I don’t think I’m doing anything different, right?

Mordew is a book about a child who is being persecuted in a city in which God’s corpse is causing strange magical effects at the level of the street. This child has a history that gives him some kind of power. He doesn’t understand how to use it. All he knows is that it’s attracting the interest of other people. His father, the master of the city, is giving him powers that he can’t control and doesn’t know how to use. Okay, so that’s a relatively traditional magical-boy-coming-of-age type thing. But let’s imagine instead that I’d written that as a piece of realist fiction. The text then becomes a piece of schizophrenic delusion-making, right? So rather than me reading about people who already have schizophrenia and saying, “This is how we might write literary fiction about people like that”, we’ve made this switch to “This is what literary fiction would look like if you are a schizophrenic – this is what the real looks like when you have problems with understanding reality, when the real is not an obvious thing for you” – and you as a reader are invited to occupy that same world.

I think that a lot of what happens in fantasy writing, particularly dark fantasy writing, is coming to terms with the fragility of reality and also the problematization of it, and the bleeding into the real of nightmares.

Particularly in the next book in the series, in Malarkoi, the nightmarish quality inherent in the real is what the book is about. Now that, to me, is a kind of realism – it’s a kind of psychological realism, which borrows the systems of dark fantasy writing and fantasy writing in general, in order to trick people into coming to terms with some of the strange things that happen in the real! That was the aim for the realist fiction too, to enforce in the reader a kind of temporary schizophrenia. It’s doable in literary fiction, but I think it’s actually easier to do in fantasy fiction. People can co-opt the experience back into “Isn’t it bizarre, isn’t it weird?”, and just enjoy it on that level, which is fine; but I think also it does the same work of undermining reality, of undermining your sense of the real, at least temporarily. Because of the structure of the book and the necessities of publishing I’ve had to rein it back in again, otherwise people would hate it. But for a time at least, there are periods in which I think reality for the reader becomes destabilized and uncomfortable. That’s reconciled as you get towards the end of the series.

That’s what’s interesting about dark fantasy and weird fiction in general: that sense of destabilization of the real, that can either lead to a different understanding of your own reality, or just be fun – it’s fun to be weirded out, either way.

You mentioned Susan Cooper’s hero being an innocent boy, and we have the same thing here – he’s not a dark antihero. He’s a typical fantasy innocent setting out on his quest.

Exactly. I think that’s something the reader shares, going in; the sense of, “Okay, here we go! We’re going to see that progression from weakness to strength – from someone being bullied by the world, to someone expressing themselves forcefully against the world.” And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s real. I think you can start off with that, and you go off with that intent, but then quickly find that there isn’t a space for you to exert yourself and express yourself and make the world right. I think every time you try to do that, you just make everything worse! That’s essentially the ‘progress’ of the books’ hero, Nathan – it started out bad and then it just got worse.

You also mentioned the book of the exhibition L’Amour Fou in your list of candidates for this shortlist… I’m curious how the surrealists fit into all these ideas you’re working with?

My background is not actually in writing; it’s as an art historian, originally, and a philosopher to a certain extent. There was a period going into early modernism, the 1920s and 1930s, where in the world of visual arts people started to think seriously about how you could disrupt people’s experience of existence. Surrealism was one of the major artistic movements that tried to do this work, to destabilize your understanding of what it was to be a human being, in exactly the same way as the existentialists did. And there are two big strands of surrealism: the dreamy, Dali-esque Breton-ish type surrealism, which is a lot about dreams, and a kind of pleasurable aesthetics. But there was another dissident side of surrealism that went off in a different direction, some of it was based around photography, other parts were around sculpture – people like Bresson and Giacometti. There were a series of photographic interventions into surrealist art that dealt with things like abattoirs, or strange sexual perversions, that kind of stuff…

L’Amour Fou was a surrealist photography exhibition I went to see when I was about 16, I think, at the Hayward Gallery, and I had a cold. I always think when I’ve got a cold I have the flu, but anyway I had a fever, that was the important part. I wasn’t feeling 100% on top of things, and it’s a funny age, 16, and I was there with my dad and my stepmother which was always very fraught… And then we went to see this exhibition, which was full of this crazy material that really wired my brain weirdly. The real world suddenly seemed like an extremely frightening and uncomfortable place, full of things that look like things you recognize from the real, but weren’t quite right… This feverish state took over. And I think that’s something that surrealism does really well: it aestheticizes feverishness.

I’ve always been interested in, and continue to be interested in, how the real changes depending on your psychological state. Because it oughtn’t to, it seems to me; or if it does, then what is the ‘normal’ psychological state? Because it isn’t transparent. I think the normal psychological state may be just as contingent and weird as the feverish psychological state, and I think that that’s something that surrealism and its attempt to abnormalize the normal tries to put across, particularly in photography. These are photography exhibitions, so you can’t say, “It’s just a weird painting, it’s not something that exists”. These are things that exist, and also upset your understanding of what it is to be a person in the real world.

It’s these kinds of existential crises that I think contemporary culture seems to want to marginalize into complete non-existence, preferring for everybody to be extremely certain about everything that they do. Because they are right, and everything is true, and they understand everything, and they get to do whatever it is they want and say whatever it is they want aggressively in other people’s faces. I don’t think that’s the way of things. I think we’ve lost our path to a certain extent – not to say that the Surrealists were great people, or that surrealism offers a liberal utopia for us all to live in, but it does do that work of upsetting and undermining our acceptance of the real as a thing that we can rely on.

Well, I think that vibe sets the stage beautifully for your next choice, which is another dark fantasy classic: please tell us about Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

Yes, so The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a book that I think everybody should read. It’s essentially a series of feminist retellings of fairy tales. The most famous one, I guess, given that it was made into a film, was The Company of Wolves.

Angela Carter takes the safety of the fairy tale, and she flips it – so in The Company of Wolves, for example, she plays a lot with the Little Red Riding Hood trope (for want of a better word). It’s fun to see what the meaning of fairy tales is, what the use of them is; and we could argue that the Little Red Riding Hood story is a warning for girls who are coming into puberty of the dangers inherent in men, and in not listening to your matriarchs telling you how to avoid those dangers. Don’t go into the woods on your own. If horrible wolves talk to you, don’t talk back to them. Always be careful when you go into places that you’re not being fooled into getting into bed with a wolf and getting devoured. Angela Carter takes that moral tale, the moral duty of the Little Red Riding Hood story, and flips it – as she does with Bluebeard and a bunch of other recognisable tales. She makes Little Red Riding Hood’s sexuality central to it, and she writes a Little Red Riding Hood who is the danger. It’s her sexuality that the wolf is desperate for, and rather than arguing that this is a  problem for Red Riding Hood, she demonstrates that, in fact, it’s a source of enormous power – because she possesses something that these men desire, and all she has to do is manage their desire to get what she wants from the world. And she must find ways to come to terms with her own desires, and with the way the world would seek to limit women’s behaviours. She does a really good job of taking those fantastic fairy tale elements and making them real, by imposing on top of them a second-wave feminist understanding of how to deal with sexuality and with men in general.

It was one of those books, again, that I read during a formative period. There’s some theory about being 15… essentially, everything you really, really liked at the age of 15 is so embedded that you never really get over it. There’s the form of her writing, which is incredibly Baroque and dense and interesting, and also her politics, which is a feminist-Marxist approach to the world… And also this playing with real and unreal things, which is just brilliantly done. The Bloody Chamber takes things that you think are comfortable and familiar and warm to a certain extent, and then makes them feverish and bitter; but also under the aegis of that it finds ways to change your understanding of the way the world is.

The Bloody Chamber in general is a brilliant book, but if you can’t be bothered to read all of it, then The Company of Wolves is excellent, and very short, and you can see exactly what it is that she does. There’s loads of really good books by Angela Carter – I could have picked any.

Your next choice is also by a prolific author – he’s won the Man Booker prize, and the book you’ve chosen is a New York Times bestseller. Tell us about Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

So Marlon thinks that Mordew, my book, is “the future of fantasy”, and I’m loath to disagree with him, so to return the favour… But really, this is an extremely powerful piece of writing.

It’s doing a similar thing. It’s the search for a lost boy in this case, and what’s happened to him. And it’s a kind of travelog across a mythical, demon-infested Africa, full of fantastical creatures.  It’s another book that has an unusually vivid sexual component to it, kind of disruptive, and –  ‘unpleasant’ is probably the right word. It’s a visceral, aggressive denial of everyday life in the service of the spiritual and the sexual, full of quite intense violence, and quite unapologetically strange sexual practices. It’s got that uncomfortable mash-up of children and the adult world, and all of these things combine into this dizzy dream of a trip across Africa looking for someone – except it’s not really Africa, it’s an Africanized secondary world, and it’s very interesting to see what he does with that, which is extremely powerful and full of characters that are uncompromisingly bizarre. It’s a bit like Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Don Quixote… It’s one of those trips where people see a whole bunch of incredibly bizarre things one after another. If you don’t like that kind of thing, you’re not going to like this either, because it’s relatively light on the narrative. The second book is similar, but you get to cross reference the things that happen in the second book with the first, because similar things happen to a different character. So unless you like these travelog books in which a series of bizarre things are depicted to you for seemingly no reason, you won’t like it; but if you do like that kind of thing, it’s fantastically good. I really like books that you can read for pleasure, and then go back to bits of without having to think, “I’ve got to start at the beginning because the story is everything.” That’s one of the problems I have sometimes with fantasy books, that they’re very plot-ish, whereas I prefer more episodic things.

Marlon James is incredibly sophisticated at getting under your skin, and having these characters that do and say things that, while you sympathize with them, you’re also appalled by. Not as in, “Oh isn’t that awful?”, but more, “Isn’t the world bizarre?”.

It’s the third book on your list to be drawing on existing myth or fairy tale – it seems we’ve been telling these stories for a long time…

I think that’s true, and I think that anybody who says otherwise is mistaken and hasn’t read enough.

Haha, a ‘yes’ then…

I think essentially, regardless of what it is that you’re writing, you’re reiterating things that have been done before. I mean, philosophically speaking, there’s no way we would be able to recognize them if you weren’t doing that. And it’s one of the things I have a problem with in ‘literary’ fiction; is it very, very heavily concerned with an originality that the works don’t actually possess. Which I think is just silly. It’s related to the view that fantasy as a genre is not worth reading because it all reiterates the same things over and over and over again. I just don’t think people really understand originality. They’ve discussed that in the visual arts – Rosalind E. Krauss’s The Myth of the Avant Garde, for example, is a very obvious demonstration of the fact that there is no originality, there’s nothing new. But I don’t think that’s a problem, in the same way that I don’t think we all as human beings have to be new, have to be doing things differently. We just have to be, and to work out what that is.

We’ve come to your last book… Tell us about Lord Foul’s Bane, by Stephen R. Donaldson.

I was talking about this with somebody the other day, about how difficult it is to have unlikable characters, and whether you should make sure that everybody is engaging – someone that people can identify with and, to a certain extent, approve of. In contemporary fantasy it happens a lot, that it’s necessary to have people who are kind of relatable…

Lord Foul’s Bane is a secondary-world fantasy of the epic type, but the protagonist doesn’t believe it’s real. The protagonist, Thomas Covenant, is a writer who has, by some method – he doesn’t even understand how it’s happened – been summoned into a place that’s quite a lot like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. If you look at the cover illustrations of the original editions, it’s obviously designed to look exactly like Middle Earth. But because he doesn’t believe in it, he won’t fulfil his role as the saviour of this place. They think he’s the saviour. They brought him there because he has the ability to wield white gold, which is a kind of magical substance, and his wedding ring, which is very normal for him, is white gold; and it’s the only piece of white gold that they’re aware of in the land. This white gold should be able to kill the big bad of the land. But unfortunately, Thomas Covenant doesn’t believe it.

One of the first scenes is him sexually assaulting the first woman he meets. And this was a big selling franchise, it went on to sell millions, and was a big deal in the 1980s… People like to imagine that anything in the past wasn’t as right-on, but the 1980s seemed to me like a very heavily feminist time, at least in my world. People were talking about feminism all the time, and talking about consent in ways that we seem to imagine we’ve only just come up with. So it seems very odd to me, at that time, that this decision was taken, or was allowed as a piece of publishing; and also that it was possible to read it, and then still somehow not be completely turned off by the text. And it doesn’t get any better. I mean, there’s less sexual assault in it going forward, but his attitude to the world is, “You’re all insane. This isn’t even real. It doesn’t matter what happens here. You can all die. Why don’t you just all die and let the world die. And when it comes to the time in which I have to save it, I’m not going to do anything.” So the end of the first book is him meeting Lord Foul, who’s the kind of Sauron character, and just refusing to do anything.

That model of the hero, I thought, was interesting. It stuck with me, despite the fact that you just don’t like him – and to a certain extent, don’t like the books because of that. But there was the original trilogy, then another trilogy, and then I think five extra books that got published, and I read them all, despite the fact that I really didn’t like lots of them.

I think that’s something inherent in fantasy in general, that you like to reach the end of things. But it’s also something inherent, I think, in reality: that people aren’t likable. I mean, I’m sure you and everybody reading this are very likable people, but in general, humanity is a pretty terrible burden on the world and on each other. And I think that now, we’re desperate to represent to ourselves these utopian, positive characters within dystopias, and it causes a problem somewhere. It causes a problem in our ability to be truly radical about the things that are going wrong, and particularly for our ability to see that we are the thing that is going wrong.

It’s such an interesting inversion of what you were saying earlier, about our difficulty knowing what is real, and the dangers of being too sure of what’s real. This feels like the dangers of refusing to engage with anything as real.

I think it’s the same thing, to a certain extent. It’s our refusal to deal with other people’s reals, right? Because we’re so certain of ours. That’s what happens in Lord Foul’s Bane: he goes in so certain that his real world is real, that this other world can’t be real. And I think it’s that certainty that leads to the kind of ethical problems that we’re seeing enacted across the board – and not just in writing, obviously, but in terms of our ability to carpet bomb various areas or to do things that seem to have a Machiavellian justification, “because eventually there will be peace” or whatever it happens to be. Or just in our everyday lives, our unwillingness to listen to each other, because we’re so certain that the things that we think are really true, and that therefore anything against that is incorrect. I think that way unethical behaviours lie, regardless of where you set up, regardless of whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. I think that certainty, particularly of your own ethical position and other people’s failures, is just a mistake.

Let’s pull the rug out from under all of this. Then, when there isn’t any certainty about anything, then we see what we are, and where we are.