Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.
“It is true, there are many bad people; there are more of them than in the past, but that is because there are more people, meaning the population has tripled; there must be three times more bad people.”