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Musings: Thoughts on Why There Aren’t More Male Protagonists in YA Horror

Over at Ginger Nuts of Horror, school librarian and YA dark fiction reviewer Tony Jones gave his thoughts on why there aren’t more strong male protagonists in current young adult dark fiction.  You should read his article first, because these are my thoughts after reading it. Tony knows a lot more than I do about YA horror, but Monster Librarian has been around since 2005 and I’ve read and written about a fair amount of YA and middle grade horror in that time period. Here’s a list of titles I put together in June, and as you can see, most of them are not very recent.

Tony suggests that the paranormal romance trend kicked off by Twilight at about that time turned a lot of boys off from reading horror, and I’m sure that was true,  at the time. In 2019, though, some teenagers might not even be aware of Twilight (quote from my daughter: “I’m not sure what it’s about. Doesn’t it have a black cover with a disembodied hand holding an apple?”). Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was a big name before Stephenie Meyer came along, and what kid knows her books now?  There were a couple of other trends that hit in the 2000s as well, the biggest one being Harry Potter. I will say that in 1999 I never would have guessed it would take of like it did, but Harry Potter has had an enduring effect on fantasy literature, complete with fearsome and bizarre creatures and terrifying sorcerers. That kind of fantasy quest fiction with a dark edge overwhemed a lot of the series horror popular in the 1990s with fantasy quest knockoffs. Tony brought up The Hunger Games as an influence, and we did start seeing a lot of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction around that time, with zombies becoming popular as well. There was more focus on relationships, and sometimes romance, but there were probably at least an equal number of zombie and dystopian titles with girls and boys as protagonists.

So what’s happening now that is different? Well, we’ve kind of moved through that fear of a far future apocalypse because it seems imminent, and the problems and fears kids are facing today have once again changed. And one of the ways they have changed is that the fears of girls, women, and other marginalized groups are taking up space that they didn’t before. and privilege has complicated the dynamic.  A lot of the books we see coming out have to do with agency being stolen, reproductive rights being limited, and things that are spinning out of control for people who already didn’t have much. With women writing most of YA horror, I’m guessing that’s where much of the horror lies.  Privilege is more complicated than just that, though, as evidenced by the clueless half-white, half Puerto Rican female protagonist from Vermont in her interactions with Puerto Rican residents in Five Midnights by Ann Cardinal Davila or wealthy Hanna and undocumented Nick in Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. It is possible to write characters of teenage boys with nuance, and as the mother of a teenage boy, I am desperate to see it.  The #OwnVoices movement, focused on finding and publishing diverse stories by diverse authors, especially in children’s and young adult literature, has also picked up some steam. Pitch Dark by Courtney Alameda is a great example of that, with both male and female point of view characters.

I agree with Tony that there are a lot of kids who skip straight from Goosebumps to Stephen King: in fact, research by Jo Worthy from more than 20 years back documents conversations between middle schoolers who do. In fact, teen readers are even likely to read and recommend adult fiction to their peers, if the “YA Council Recommends” shelves at my public library are any indication. At the same time, there are plenty of kids who don’t want to make that jump all at once. The Last Kids on Earth, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Captain Underpants  remain popular at the middle school level, and graphic novels of any kind are constantly checking out.  Rick Riordan’s quest narratives also stay popular, because they allow kids to gradually level up, with the first Percy Jackson series appropriate for elementary kids and the most recent series, Trials of Apollo, of interest even to adults. Riordan isn’t writing horror, although there are certainly horrific and gruesome elements in his work, as well as comedy and in-jokes. Even when Riordan has a male point of view character, though, we get to see the uncertainties and growth that take place in his protagonists– they aren’t stock characters. Kids devour those books– I have been hearing about the release of the newest one for what feels like eons now.

Back to those kids who skip over YA and go straight to the adult stuff: while lots of us may remember reading adult horror at a relatively young age, it probably wasn’t checked out from the school library. It’s not a recent thing that middle school libraries aren’t stocking Stephen King. If you headed over to the high school in my community, it looks like they have his complete collection, but while an informal poll I did awhile back showed that Gen Xers and millenials as young as 8 had read IT, that doesn’t mean they were getting it at their school library, or even that they’d want to, and definitely they are not finding in in the middle school collections here. Some books are “underground reading”, the kind that you want to pass around with your friends without actually telling the adults in your life about, and Stephen King, before he gained respectability, used to be one of those authors. Roland Smith writes “creature thriller” type books, such as the Cryptid Hunters series and others of his books, but there’s not much in YA horror that I can find for those who love the “man vs. nature” conflict. There doesn’t seem to be a Guy N. Smith for the YA crowd (if there is, I want to know). Those readers do really have to move on to the kinds of titles that used to be found in the horror sections of used bookstores.

 

Reading choices made by my 13 year old son: Anthony Horowitz (chosen but not read) Shadow Girl (read only at home) Chronicles of Elementia (his favorite book ever, at least on Monday) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Tony also discusses the gendering of book covers. It really is true that people judge books by their covers. Tony suggests that girls are more likely to pick up a book with a cover that is designed to appeal to boys than the other way around. That may be true in some cases, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case. Kids look for clues from book covers. I’ve got The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz sitting next to my sofa. It has a black cover with a shiny knife and a pencil on the front. The cover is what got my son to bring it home (not read it, but bring it home), and my daughter instantly backed away.  I also have a copy of Shadow Girl by Kate Ristau, which has an orange cover with a black silhouette of a girl on it. He read this one secretly (he even tried to hide it from me) but wouldn’t take it out of the house.  I feel like a lot of this is a cultural issue– that boys might be more likely to pick up books with girls on the cover if they didn’t think other kids would embarrass them for doing so.  It’s sad that boys and girls are shamed for things like the art on the book they’re reading.

There are many fewer male protagonists in YA horror, for sure. It would be great to see this disparity addressed, but as publishers work on increasing diversity I think this is something that is going to require thoughtful discussion in the YA literature community, as there is a feeling right now that publishing has been centering male protagonists and male authors for long enough. Rudine Sims Bishop writes that books should be both windows and mirrors, which is a great analogy, but Uma Krishnaswami takes it a step further and suggests that they can be prisms: not just showing an unfamiliar world or reflecting your own back exactly, but looking at things from a different perspective. I see this as the way that YA is going to have to move in order for boys to find themselves once again as heroes in horror fiction.

 

 

 

Posted on September 25, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

NYU Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1479800650

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

In today’s networked world, much of children’s and young adult literature isn’t limited to one reader’s immersion in the pages of a book. Authors’ worlds are reimagined in other media formats, and re-enacted, discusses, and reinvented in communities of fans of the stories. Yet, even within these imagined worlds, not everyone can find a mirror that reflects their experiences, and characters of color are often stereotyped and marginalized instead of centered. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas calls this the “imagination gap” and suggests that this may be one reason children of color may choose not to read.  In The Dark Fantastic, Thomas takes an intersectional approach, using”critical race counterstorytelling” to center four girls of color from television and movies based on children’s and young adult fiction that have developed fandoms: Rue, from The Hunger Games, Bonnie, from The Vampire Diaries; Gwen, from Merlin; and Angelina Johnson, from Harry Potter. Thoma uses an autoethnographic approach to explore her perspectives on these as an academic, a participant in fan communities, a reader, a watcher, and a person of color, at a variety of ages.

Thomas explains that the role of darkness in speculative fiction, or the “fantastic” is to disturb and unsettle. Even if initially there was a different reason why darkness represented a frightening or monstrous unknown Other, it’s now inextricably bound up with our thinking about race.  She defines the cycle of the “dark fantastic”, which can always be found in fantastic and horror fiction: spectacle, hesitation, violence, haunting, and, finally, emancipation. It is rare to see a dark-skinned hero, or emancipated character, meaning readers of color looking to identify with characters like themselves get the message, at least on some level, that they are the monster. Centering characters that are the “dark other” in the fantastic and placing them in unexpected roles leads to readers and fans challenging or rejecting the representations, especially once the story has been been reimagined on the screen where everyone can see what before was just in one person’s imagination.

Thomas chose to center her narratives on characters that are not centered in the texts they appear in . She explored the representations of these characters onscreen and in the texts the screen versions were based on, and the reactions of fan communities, like the outrage at the casting of mixed-race actress Amandla Sternberg as Rue in The Hunger Games, despite author Suzanne Collins indicating in the text that Rue had dark skin, or at the casting of mixed-race actress Angel Coulby as Guinivere in Merlin, since according to many, she didn’t have the “legendary beauty” expected of Arthur’s queen.  The “imagination gap” here is pretty clear. Too many people simply weren’t prepared to accept these mixed-race actresses as innocent or beautiful, and missed out on the essential meaning of these characters or enjoyment of the story.  The exploration of the treatment of Bonnie Bennett of The Vampire Diaries is interesting, because in the books, the character is named Bonnie McCullough and is a redheaded Irish witch from a line of druids who has a relationship with a major love interest.  On the television show, her background was completely revised and she ended up as a much less sympathetic character, taking a much smaller role. Even in horror, with vampires as major characters, a girl of color still ended up as the “dark other”.

Thomas argues in favor of consciously intervening to change culture. Publishers, reviewers, booksellers, librarians, educators, and marketers need to recognize the parts they do play and can play in bringing new stories and diverse talents to readers and audiences in order to close the “imagination gap” and open up what Thomas calls “infinite storyworlds”.

The way Thomas linked literature to other media and both individual and networked fandom has given me a new way to think about fantastic literature and media adaptations, and the way fans and fan creators connect with them– or don’t (This essay by Laurie Penny, which I just discovered, gives additional context and dimensionality to Thomas’ ideas). It also provides lot of food for thought as regards centering characters that are usually on the margins, and the way the construction of darkness in fiction may be affecting reading motivation.  As Thomas notes, things in the world of children’s and young adult transmedia are changing faster than they were, in part due to the spread of technology that allows more input from collective audiences and fandoms, and diversity is increasing. I look forward to the time when we will start to see the imagination gap lessen, and more minds open to opportunities for storytelling that reflect multiple representations.

This is essential reading for scholars of children’s and young adult literature and media, but Thomas’ cycle of the dark fantastic applies across all fantastic literature and media, and if you are interested in how race, technology, and imagination are intersecting and playing out in our culture, this does a very good job of providing a framework for understanding.  While she didn’t read it cover-to-cover, my 11 year old daughter is still talking about ideas she encountered in this book, which says a lot about its relevance, originality, and accessibility. Highly recommended.

 

Posted on August 29, 2019 by , Reply

Book List: Grady Hendrix’s Summer Scares Recommendations (Middle Grade)

Well, we’re about halfway through summer now, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have time for more summer reading!

The HWA’s summer reading recommendation program, Summer Scares, is ongoing. Earlier this summer, I went over committee member Kiera Parrot’s middle grade suggestions, but she isn’t the only one on the committee to have made additional recommendations.  Grady Hendrix, author of a number of excellent books including the reference book Paperbacks from Hell, which covers paperback novels from the 1970s and 1980s, recommended a few older titles.

 

Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn

HarperCollins, 1987

ISBN-13: 978-0380704422

Available: Library binding, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

 

You might remember that Kiera Parrot recommended a recent book by Mary Downing Hahn, The Girl in the Locked Room, in our previous booklist of middle-grade recommendations for Summer Scares. Mary Downing Hahn has been writing since the 1970s, and Wait Till Helen Comes is one of her earlier books.  Published in 1986, it has received multiple reader’s choice awards and was made into a movie. A reread of Wait Till Helen Comes shows that it is still seriously creepy. The story starts with narrator Molly’s mother remarrying to a man named Dave, whose daughter Heather is troubled and possessive of her father after her mother died in a fire. The new family moves to a converted church in the middle of nowhere, under Molly’s protest. Molly’s mother tells Molly that as the older child, it is her responsibility to take care of and get along with Heather, who is openly hostile to both of them, to Dave’s obliviousness.

Together, Molly and Heather discover a graveyard on the property, with a stone that has the initials H.E.H, the same as Heather’s. Heather becomes obsessed with discovering who it is, and Molly witnesses her having a conversation with a ghost girl called Helen. When Molly brings it up with their parents, Heather denies it and Dave and Molly’s mother dismiss it as superstition and imagination. When Heather and Molly are alone, though, Heather threatens Molly, and one day when the family is out of the house, they return to discover that Molly’s and her mother’s things have been destroyed. Once again, their parents accuse Molly of making things up to make things more difficult for Heather.

After learning that Helen drowned after escaping a fire where her parents died, and that a number of girls have drowned since then in a nearby pond, Molly decides she must break Helen’s hold over Heather before someone dies. The climactic scene between Helen, Heather, and Molly, will leave your heart pounding fast.  While far from perfect, the story is atmospheric, suspenseful, and compelling enough to overlook any flaws, especially if you’re 9 years old. The book does deal with death, grief, and suicide, so some people have raised objections to it in the past, but in the fantasy context I don’t think it’s likely to lead to more.

 

The House With a Clock in Its Walls (Lewis Barnavelt, #1) by John Bellairs, illustrated by Edward Gorey

Puffin, 2004 (reprint edition)

ISBN-13: 978-0451481283

Available: Library binding, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

First published in 1973, this is another classic, not just in middle-grade horror (or Gothic mystery, if you’d rather), but in children’s literature. It is 1948, and 10 year old Lewis Barnavelt’s parents have died, so he is sent to live with his eccentric Uncle Jonathan. Jonathan and his neighbor, Mrs. Zimmerman, are magicians, and Jonathan’s house previously belonged to Isaac Izzard, a warlock, or black magician, who has a clock with an unknown purpose ticking away in the walls. As a result, Jonathan has filled the house with clocks to cover over the sound. It’s enough to make a magician uneasy enough to stop the clocks in the middle of the night, and Lewis is just a kid.

If Lewis only had to interact with Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmerman, the book would be filled with oddities, quirky moments, minor wonders, and an illustration of what the friendship of long-term, close, and very different friends looks and feels like. And it does have those things. But when school starts, Lewis has to find a place among his peers, and as he’s not athletic, he’s soon left in the dust. One of the popular, athletic boys breaks a leg and starts spending time helping Lewis with athletic skills, and in hopes of continuing the friendship Lewis boasts of his uncle’s magical powers, first claiming that Jonathan can block the moon and then suggesting that the two boys use his spellbook to raise the dead. Sneaking out in the middle of the night, Lewis and his friend recite the spell in front of an unknown tomb and really do manage to raise the dead. Unsettled by his experiences with magic, Lewis’ friend abandons him, leaving him on his own, to deal with the person he has raised from what turns out to be Isaac Izzard’s crypt– a person who wants to find the clock in the walls of his uncle’s house.

This is a great book for so many reasons. Lewis himself is kind of an oddball kid, reading historical lectures late into the night and reciting Catholic prayers when he’s anxious. Awkward around his peers, he is interested in puzzles and spells, and brave enough to confront his fears. While he doesn’t want to admit his mistakes, in the end he takes responsibility for his actions and resolves what has become a terrifying situation in a creative way. In a strange environment, he adapts to becoming part of the rather odd friendship/family of Mrs. Zimmerman and Uncle Jonathan, who may bicker with each other but are loyal and stand up for each other when it counts. You might have to get today’s impatient kids to stick with the book through the first few pages of Lewis’ train ride and Latin recitations, but upon meeting Uncle Jonathan, they’ll want to know more. Even though the story has a slow build, it is interesting along the way, and once it speeds up, readers won’t want to stop.

I can’t not mention that Edward Gorey illustrated this book. His illustrations are what set the mood for the story, and the book wouldn’t be the same without them.

 

Gegege no Kitaro  (The Birth of Kitaro) by Shigeru Mizuki

Drawn & Quarterly, 2016

ISBN-13: 978-1770462281

Available: Paperback

 

Kitaro is a manga series by artist Shigeru Mizuki that dates back to the 1960s, described by David Merrill as ” the seminal yokai-busting horror-fantasy-folkore-adventure-comedy manga”. The titular character, Kitaro, is a young boy with one eye who serves as a diplomat between humans and yokai (Japanese folk monsters).  Originally a more adult title called Graveyard Kitaro, the series really took off when it was retooled as GeGeGe no Kitaro to be more of a funny-scary series for elementary-aged kids, and was even spun off into several different television shows.  While Kitaro is somewhat of a pop culture phenomenon in Japan, it hasn’t been well-known in the United States. The publisher Drawn & Quarterly has been releasing English-language volumes of Kitaro over the past several years. The first is out of print, but The Birth of Kitaro shares Kitaro’s origin story, so it might be a good place to start. I haven’t had the opportunity to examine these myself, but I saw and (briefly) blogged about Mizuki’s yokai art last year, and it is amazing. For some adult manga lovers, Kitaro may have more nostalgia or historic value than anything else, but it looks to be a great choice for middle-grade readers who love monsters.

 

Wait Till Helen Comes and The House With a Clock in Its Walls are pretty well known in the world of children’s literature, but Kitaro won’t be familiar to a lot of librarians or middle-grade readers. Summer Scares gives you the opportunity not only to introduce some old, familiar favorites, but to bring to light some lesser-known titles that deserve more of a spotlight and increase the breadth of kids’ exposure to manga as well as to creatures and stories from another country and culture. Enjoy!

 

Posted on July 10, 2019 by , Reply
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