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Murder Most Foul: Violent Death in Children’s Literature

The Boston Globe just published an interview with Michelle Ann Abate, a professor at Ohio State University who has just published a book about the tradition of murder and violence in children’s literature (a really interesting take on the “scaring the children” theme). I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the interviewer edited the interview for publication, but for some reason both he and she come across as seeming surprised that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature, and she’s actually quoted as saying that “the story of violence and books for young readers hasn’t been told before”.

I have to say that I am surprised at the surprise that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature. It’s a frequent reason that books are banned (although racism, explicit sexual situations, and profanity currently top that). Going back in history, even after you progress past Grimm’s fairy tales, there’s no lack of violence and death. Andersen’s tales often end with death. “The Little Match Girl”, for instance, freezes to death on the street.

 

Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, is a classic children’s book, with lovely illustrations. Here’s one for a story about a girl with matches who burns to death!

 

 

And let’s not forget the Gashlycrumb Tinies.  Poor Kate! Childhood used to be a much different creature than it is today, a point that Abate does make, and attitudes toward parenting tended toward the didactic and scaring kids into behaving. It is interesting to note, though, that Hoffman wrote the book to entertain his young child, and in spite of the terrifying stories and illustrations, there are a lot of adults who remember it as being funny when they were kids.  There’s a darkness inside children that a lot of grownups don’t want to admit is there.

“K is for Kate who was struck with an axe”

Moving on to more recent times, we have the parents of the kids in  Julian Thompson’s The Grounding of Group 6, who send their kids to a school that guarantees they’ll be permanently lost in the woods; the viciousness of the children in William Sleator’s House of Stairs; the matter-of-fact euthanasia of children and the elderly in Lois Lowry’s The Giver;  the government approved murders of “extra” children in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden; the chilling account of the Holocaust in The Devil’s Arithmetic;  the supernatural terrors from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; the death of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Death, and especially murder, can be scary in books, but nowhere near as scary as daily life. Processing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a lot more difficult for my kids than processing The Tailypo. 

Many people– librarians, critics, parents, academics– have considered the story of violence in children’s books. Nearly every year there’s at least one article about how children’s literature has gotten too dark. I would say that it’s an aspect that people either choose to avoid (it’s not difficult to avoid children’s books containing murders) or take for granted. When something like The Hunger Games or Goosebumps becomes massively popular, violence in children’s books comes into the spotlight, but even when it’s not in the spotlight, there are people who notice it, study it, and write about it. I think as transmedia platforms become more popular we’ll see more of this come to light, as books and visual media connect in more ways than ever, and this is definitely a topic worth paying attention to… but if the study of violence in children’s literature hasn’t been noticed before, it’s only because people didn’t want to see what was really there.

Posted on August 28, 2013 by , Reply

Memorable Short Stories

 

After my last post on how short stories are awesome, it was suggested to me that maybe I could make a few recommendations. So here you go– my totally subjective choices. These are stories that I personally have found memorable– either because I never, ever want to read them again, or because they draw me back, again and again. A few of them may not be in print anymore, and some are considered classics (you might have read them in school) but some are relatively new. Some might be considered YA, but don’t feel excluded! They are great reading for us older folks too.  And I’d say nearly all of them have either a creep factor, or a fear factor (with the possible exception of “In The Jaws of Danger”. Almost all those images are clickable, just in case you’re interested in checking out these authors on your own. If you have a memorable short story of your own that you would like to share, I’d be very interested in your comments!

Please don’t be thrown off by the overuse of blockquotes. It’s hard to tell when I’m formatting what it will look like when I’m done, and frankly, while I was a little startled to see how it looked when I previewed it, I’m way too tired to fix it right now. Thanks for understanding!

 “The Lurking Fear” by H.P. Lovecraft

My best friend in high school handed me her used copy of  The Lurking Fear and Other Stories and said “You’ve gotta read this”! I handed it back to her after reading just this story, and have never read Lovecraft since. It terrified me that much.

 “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

Anyone who has made it through high school without reading “The Lottery” should go do it right now. It is a chilling tale.

 

“High Beams”, collected by Alvin Schwartz

I love to tell this story to kids at Halloween, but it’s hard to go wrong with any story by Alvin Schwartz.

“The Tell-tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe is a master of the short story form. “The Tell-tale Heart” is only one of many memorable stories he has written: others include “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury is another master of the short story. This list would be a much longer one if I included every story by him that I have found memorable. If you can believe it, I first read this in elementary school as part of the Junior Great Books program. I always found “The Veldt” to be a creepy story, and now that I’m a parent living in a hyperreal world, it’s chilling. Other stories I considered listing here included “A Sound of Thunder”, “There Will Come Soft Rains”, “The Flying Machine”, “The Third Expedition”, and, of course, Bradbury’s homage to Poe and to monster movies, “Usher II”

 

“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut

Ah, the nightmare of a world where everyone is required to be average. Welcome to the Monkey House, which contains “Harrison Bergeron” also has a memorable title story involving Ethical Suicide Parlors, and one of my favorite stories of redemption ever, “The Kid Nobody Could Handle.”

“The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell

“Survivor” has nothing on this masterpiece about hunter and hunted.

“Leinengen Versus The Ants” by Carl Stephenson

I can’t think of a better illustration of “man vs. nature”, which is probably why this story appeared in my high school English textbook. By the way, this particular book I’ve linked to here also has some other great stories, including Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”.

“We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman does a wonderful job with the short story form, be it in the flash fiction format used in Half Minute Horrors, the parody of “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire”, or the poetic brutality of “Harlequin Valentine” (both in Fragile Things). “We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” is, for me, anyway, unforgettable.

“The Open Window” by Saki

Saki is brilliant. “The Open Window” is extremely creepy. Another story of his I find very thought-provoking is “The Toys of Peace”.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A hallucinatory, semi-autobiographical tale of one woman’s descent into madness, this is also a vivid illustration of how many women with intelligence and will were treated at the time that it was written.

 “Monster” by Kelly Link

“Monster” could have been just a tale about bullying gone horribly wrong. But it’s much more frightening than that. It’s nearly impossible to go wrong with this collection, though. There are notably creepy, weird, and fantastical stories in here. Kelly Link is a true artist.

 “In The Jaws of Danger” by Piers Anthony

That cover image illustrates “In The Jaws of Danger” pretty effectively. Who knew dentistry could be so hazardous? Young Extraterrestrials is a book I treasure. It is filled with great stories, as you would expect from anthologists like Greenberg, Waugh, and Asimov. I can’t begin to tell you how many of their anthologies I devoured as a kid. Unfortunately it is now out of print.

“Mother of Monsters” by Guy de Maupassant

This is a truly horrifying story of calculated and twisted cruelty to children in the name of profit and fashion. Maupassant doesn’t need to get graphic to illustrate the tragedy and horror of the situation and of the culture that encourages it.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Alaya Dawn Johnson

This  fantastic story appears in the YA anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns. It’s about a zombie and a human who fall in love, and the sacrifices they both make to be together. There are many strong stories in the anthology, and it is well worth it to check it out.

 

“Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov

If the stars should appear for just one night in a thousand years, how would humanity react? The answer: not well. This is classic Asimov. I read it first in high school, and I keep coming back to it. Make sure you’ve got the story and not the novel.

 

 

 

Posted on July 30, 2013 by , Reply

Summer Reading Is Killing Me, Part One

You know it’s coming up soon. The summer reading lists from school, the summer reading programs at the library (and in other places too– my kids’ tae kwon do studio holds a summer reading program, if you can believe it)!

What to do for the kid who wants a scary book for his summer reading? On the Indiana K-2 state recommended reading list, the only book that probably qualifies is Where the Wild Things Are. So is there anything out there that didn’t win the Newbery Award that a monster-loving kid could get into? Of course there is!

Between the point where all reading is grown-ups reading aloud to kids, to the point where kids are fluently reading chapter books, is a transitional category of books called easy readers. Easy readers were pioneered by Dr. Seuss and Else Holmelund Minarik and have been a blossoming category of books ever since. They’ve come a long way since Margaret Hillert’s Happy Birthday, Dear Dragon.

 

 

And here are a few books that might catch your early reader’s interest.

 

There Is a Bird On Your Head! (Elephant and Piggie) by Mo Willems

Before getting specific to monsters, chills and thrills, first I have to recommend above and beyond almost any other easy reader the Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems. They are so absurdly funny that you probably won’t mind reading them over and over again and again. And your first grader will probably be able to read them to you, too.  There Is a Bird on Your Head! won a Geisel Award, and for good reason. You just cannot go wrong with Mo Willems. Unfortunately, once you’ve read all of the books, you will find there really isn’t anything else like them. I asked the librarian at our library, and she couldn’t come up with anything. If you do find something that measures up, I want to know!

 

The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

Maybe you never considered this interpretation, but a lot has been written about the creepiness of  this book, with a giant intruder breaking in to the children’s house while their mother is gone, and causing havoc.

 

Spooky Hayride by Brian James (Level 1)

Who spooks who?  How spooky IS the hayride, anyway? This book uses very simple and limited vocabulary and still tells a story with wit.

 

Looking for Bigfoot by Bonnie Worth (Level 4)

Kids transitioning to easy chapter books may miss out on some of the more complex easy readers. Looking for Bigfoot is aimed at kids who can read paragraphs independently and is as long as some of the shorter chapter books, at almost 50 pages. This is more of a nonfiction title about the mysterious cryptid than a scary story, but monster loving kids may still get into it.

 

Beastly Tales:  Yeti, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster (Eyewitness Readers) by Malcolm Yorke (Level 3)

When it comes to Bigfoot, there’s no such thing as too much, at least in this house.

 

In a Dark, Dark, Room and Other Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz (Level 2)

Alvin Schwartz’s name should be familiar: he’s the guy who compiled the classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its sequels. We get questions here every once in awhile where someone who can’t remember its name describes a story from this book. It may have been around long enough for you to remember reading it as a kid yourself, but it never gets old.

 

Ghosts! Ghostly Tales from Folklore by Alvin Schwartz (Level 2)

Alvin Schwartz collects together ghost stories for early readers.

 

No More Monsters for Me! by Peggy Parrish (Level 1)

This is a classic I Can Read story.  Minneapolis Simpkin desperately wants a pet, and when she encounters a monster, she sneaks it into her house. Sneaking a monster into the house, she discovers, really is not a good idea.

 

I Spy A Scary Monster (I Spy)  by Jean Marzollo (Level 1)

It’s I Spy–you can’t go wrong! You can read this with the earliest readers. The objects they are supposed to find in the photographic spread  on the page opposing are pictured next to the clue, so words can be matched with pictures, and then discovered in the photo.

 

Amanda Pig and the Awful, Scary Monster (Oliver and Amanda) by Jean Van Leeuwen (Level 3)

Amanda overcomes her fear of bedtime monsters when Oliver helps her build a monster trap.

 

The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches by Alice Low (Level 4)

Alice Low wrote several children’s books with witches as characters. According to a reviewer at Publisher’s Weekly, this is “an irresistible way to add joy to the scarey fall holiday.” But you can also read it as a way to add joy to your summer holiday.

Three Claws in the City (Meet the Monsters of the World) by Cari Meister (Level 3)

This is one of a series about some monsters that are more funny than frightening. Their look: cartoony. Their names: Snorp, Ora, Moopy, and Three Claws. The publishing imprint, Stone Arch, also published the early graphic novel series Monster and Me by Robert Marsh.

 

Don’t Go In The Water! (Easy-to-Read Spooky Tales) by Veronika Martenova Charles

This book is also part of a series of ten books, and the books, while labeled “easy to read,” have not been leveled. They are 56 pages long, which is long for an easy reader, but the books, depending on the child, are readable by first and second graders. Each book has three ‘spooky tales,’ loosely related to a folktale, and the ending of the last story is open ended. These would probably be appreciated most by the kids who REALLY are looking to be spooked, and not just those who want a mildly funny monster story.

 

The Vampire Bunny (Bunnicula and Friends) by James Howe and Jeff Mack (Level 3)

Who knew that James Howe’s classic middle-grade novel Bunnicula would spawn so many sequels and spin-offs? This is one of an entire series of Level 3 easy readers starring the characters from the original novel. This one follows the plot of the book fairly closely.

 

Hope that gets your early reader started for summer reading! Enjoy!

 

 

 

Posted on May 7, 2013 by , Reply
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