Dan Waters | Musings of the Monster Librarian

October has so much going on in it that it’s easy to lose track of Bullying Prevention Month, but I thought I’d take a minute to write about it here.

This month one of the Kindle books for $2.99 or less is Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories. Dear Bully is a collection of stories and essays by seventy children’s and young adult authors (mostly YA) in which they share their experiences with bullying– as victim, bystander, or bully. And their essays cover a myriad of bullying situations, some of which maybe you or I might not have considered, because they don’t exactly fit the stereotypical situation. There are stories of kids who were physically and verbally attacked by the school bully, or tormented by rumors and names spread by their classmates. There are stories of teens who were isolated and emotionally drained by boyfriends, manipulated by fair weather friends, joined in with the school bully either for praise or out of fear, were bystanders, acted thoughtlessly, abandoned or were abandoned by friends for no apparent reason, and bullied other kids. There are stories of heartbreak, failure, regret, of rising above, of finding true friends, of surviving and, eventually, thriving, of wanting to change the way we treat each other.

Many of the writers who participated in this project talked about how it shaped them into writers. Among the essays are a few by writers identified with the horror genre that I found really interesting. The first, by R.L. Stine, author of the scary (and funny) Goosebumps books, talks about how he was chased and physically bullied by much older kids for a long time– and one day dragged by them to a supposedly haunted house and forced to spend the night… and how he finally turned the tables on them. In his story he writes about how the sheer panic he felt in being chased by these bullies every day is something he has never forgotten and drives his writing of the Goosebumps books. In interviews, Stine has maintained that nothing scares him, so in addition to being a powerful piece of writing it was fascinating to get this glimpse into his past.

Dan Waters, author of the Generation Dead books, wrote his story from the perspective of an author and adult who received a powerful impression of the awfulness of teens bullying other teens and decided to address it in his writing (adding a few zombies into the mix) Some of this is information he’s shared before– we interviewed him several years ago and he talked about this a little– but it says a lot about the state of the world that bullying has reached such levels that even just a television special could inspire him to address it by writing horror fiction.

There are other fantastic essays in Dear Bully, and even if you’re too late to get your own copy at Amazon, I hope you’ll look for it at the library. Here’s a list of YA fiction(some older titles, and some current) that address some of these themes. Some don’t necessarily fall into the category of horror, but all of them address bullying and intimidation and their consequences in some way:

YA Fiction with Bullying Themes

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck (reviewed here)

Burn for Burn by Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian (reviewed here)

Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan

Shine by Lauren Myracle

ghostgirl by Tonya Hurley

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters (reviewed here)

Are You In The House Alone? by Richard Peck (reviewed here)

Hannah’s Story: Vampire Love Never Dies by Giulietta Maria Spudich (reviewed here)

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

Daniel Waters is the author of the massively popular Generation Dead books. He has just come out with a new book, Break My Heart 1,000 Times from Hyperion. Dan was kind enough to share a memory of a spooky event at his local library that he used in his new book for Teen Read Week.

Haunting the Library

by Daniel Waters

There is a little library in Connecticut that haunts me. The Raymond Library is located in Oakdale, the small town where I grew up (which has at least a passing resemblance to Generation Dead’s Oakvale) and is an odd looking building, half ancient brick, stylized and gabled; the other half industrial and featureless, a 1970’s addition attached like a prosthetic tail from the side of the older, more attractive building. The Raymond Library haunts me because it is a place that helped solidify my love of books and reading, and also because of the ghost I think I saw there.

I can remember dozens of the books that I checked out during the frequent trips my mother made there in my childhood. I checked out some of those books so many times I can still remember their locations on the shelves. Books on cartooning and dinosaurs, Dr. Seuss–my two favorites were If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus, which I must have loved for their variety and invention, because I’d no desire to run anything, either then or now. I checked out the Thornton Burgess anthropomorphic animal tales by the armload, the Golden Press Doc Savage hardcovers, the big illustrated Alfred Hitchcock anthologies–Sinister Spies, Haunted Houseful, Ghostly Gallery. Also the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, which I preferred over The Hardy Boys series although I read dozens of those, too. At some point I drifted upstairs, where the “adult” books were, and found The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, which I read with a companion reference to Tolkein’s works with all the place and character names; it had a wraparound Hildebrandt Brothers painting of the Fellowship heading off on their adventure. They had a spinner rack of paperbacks that you could take on the honor system; if you decided to keep one you were expected to leave one in return. I regularly fleeced the rack of science fiction and horror, replacing them with books from my parents’ stacks. I read through all the Ian Fleming James Bond novels (I still love series characters), and from there found Hemingway, Orwell, Salinger, Jackson and dozens of others.

I went to the Raymond Library until I entered high school, when other demands on my time–and my mother’s time, as she took a job late in my middle school career– kept me from visiting. I remember, or half-remember, the way I sometimes do when I get the sense that something subtly significant has happened when there is no overt signal of an event’s significance, that on my second to last visit I was looking through the nonfiction books upstairs and I noticed a sort of reading nook at the back of the library, set in front of one of the thicker old windows of the original building. As I remember it, there was a antique reading chair that sat on a small rug placed over the wooden floorboards and a small table. I had some time to kill, so I sat in the chair, and before opening my book, I looked out the window.

I saw a little blond boy, maybe five or six of age, standing outside in the grass. He was turned towards the road away from me and although I couldn’t see his face he seemed familiar. I thought it was odd that he was standing there, because there wasn’t really a play area at the library, and the entrance and parking lot was on the other side of the building. I opened my book, and when I looked up he was gone. Maybe I’d read a page, a paragraph or a single line, and real children are quick, almost as quick as ghosts, but at the time I thought the boy had vanished. It didn’t bother me, though. I started reading.

There’s a scene in Break My Heart 1,000 Times set in a library that’s similar in some respects to the Raymond Library. I detest spoilers, so I won’t go into what happens beyond telling you that one of the main characters encounters a ghost in the library there and his life is changed in a very subtle and profound way. That scene may be as close to autobiography as I get in my fiction.

A pipe burst in the Raymond Library a few years ago, and thousands of children’s books were lost. I happened to visit there in the final stages of the remediation; the nook I had remembered was walled off, the carpeting in the main area torn up and tossed in a dumpster at the edge of the parking lot. I went to the basement where the remaining children’s books were, and although the shelves were in disarray I could sense that many of my old friends, not visited for a couple decades, were among the casualties. I felt a profound sense of loss.

I think that I have seen more than a few ghosts in my lifetime, but I’m not certain that I believe in them. I definitely believe in hauntings, though. The little boy I saw? Maybe he was a ghost, in the classic supernatural sense. More likely he was a bratty kid who was testing the limits of his mother’s patience, one who finally complied with his mother’s wishes to “Get over here, right this instant!” in the exact moment I glanced at my page. Or–and this is the theory that I ascribe to–he was a projection of my own subconscious. That he was my ghost, both in the sense of being created by me and literally me, a me now gone. Was he–I–purposely standing with his/my back to me, his current older self? Or was it the library we were turned away from? Was there a reason he was facing the road? Wouldn’t it have made more sense if I’d spotted him/me at the top of the stairs leading to the children’s section?

These and a dozen similar questions spring to mind and the real answers will always remain just out of reach. Those questions and their lack of answers area part of the reason why I love ghost stories so much, and why I loved writing Break My Heart 1,000 Times. Ghost stories remind us of what has passed forever, and they remind us of what is to come. Such haunting reminders can be comforting or terrifying, and they sometimes they can be both simultaneously.

I’m glad that I saw the boy and I’m grateful for all of the associations and questions his sighting triggered; all was experience essential to my development as a writer. But I’m also very glad that the boy did not turn around, because who knows what I would have seen, staring into the spectral eye of my own ghost?