It Just Ain’t Cosy If Everything’s Rosy

I feel like I’ve been bombarded with cosiness lately. Shop windows, promotional emails, messages from coffee shops trying to entice me to try their latest seasonal latte laced with diabetes-flavoured syrup… they’re all telling me it’s cosy season. Plus my online book club is reading a book this month that’s billed as ‘cosy science fiction’: ‘Floating Hotel’ by Grace Curtis, which is kind of like The Grand Budapest Hotel only… IN SPACE!

There has been a bit of cosy trend in book publishing these past few years: cosy crime, cosy fantasy, even cosy horror. Low stakes, nice people, happy endings. It’s almost like people want to use comfort-food fiction to escape a grim and depressing reality.

I am, however, finding the best cosy read at the moment — the book that makes me feel all warm and snuggly — is The Terror by Dan Simmons, an historical horror novel about the ill-fated Franklin Expedition. It’s a grisly tale of desperate explorers, stuck in the Arctic labyrinth, surround by the pitiless ice, slowly being destroyed by cold, scurvy, starvation, and their own squabbling. Oh, and there’s a hideous monster stalking them that occasionally rips someone to pieces. I think it’s probably supposed to be a metaphor for the hubris of these men of Empire thinking they can conquer every part of the Earth with their steamships and their canned food (much of which turns out to be contaminated).

It’s a great read, and it was adapted into a critically acclaimed TV show that has inspired a devoted fandom. But it’s not what most people would consider ‘cosy’. Why, then, do I find it such comforting fodder? Well, because I can read it, curled up in my nice warm bed, and put all my petty concerns in perspective. A broken washing machine, backache, troublesome young boys… my life is easy really, compared to the men of the Franklin Expedition, losing their feet to frostbite and contemplating cannibalism. It helps that the book’s setting is distant from me in both time and place: all this horrible stuff is happening elsewhere, and elsewhen.

I personally find books that are supposed to be cosy less satisfying. Call it a neurospicy thing, but to me, narratives without much conflict feel like food without much flavour. One example is the cosy fantasy book ‘Legends and Lattes’ by Travis Baldree, about a retired orc adventurer who opens a coffee shop. Now I’m not criticising anyone who enjoyed this book — and it’s been popular enough to spawn two sequels — but I found it lacking in crunch. I just kept on wanting there to be more to this cutesy story than there was — like, I dunno, health problems caused by unpasteurised milk, or a band of young writers and revolutionaries using the coffee shop as the base for an attempt to overthrow a corrupt government. For me, this book felt… decaffeinated.

I’ve had similar problems with other books that skim over the darker, more tangled side of life, whether the setting is contemporary or historical or fantastic. I can’t read Regency Romance that treats early nineteenth century England as a playground of carriages, balls, and Empire Line dresses, while ignoring the underlying realities of poverty, colonialism, and social unrest. Sorry.

To bring things back to the book I first mentioned, Floating Hotel, I’ve found so far that it manages to combine the cosy elements of found family and a luxurious setting with enough background tension around the Galactic Government, Imperial spies, and an ever-living Emperor to keep me interested. And, while I’m prepared to concede that my taste for The Terror as a comfort read is unusual, I would like to submit for general consideration this proposition: true cosiness needs contrast. After all, why is this the cosy season? Because the weather’s horrible, that’s why. Curling up indoors with a blanket and a hot beverage feels good when there’s rain lashing against the window. While low-conflict, low-stakes stories don’t particularly appeal to me, this perhaps reflects that fact that, despite the struggles of parenting while neurospicy, I have a pretty comfortable life. If my life was harder, I’d probably want to read something with softer edges too.

Either way, it’s the contrast that makes it work. Just as you can’t have light without darkness, you can’t have cosiness without the cold outside.