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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

Book Review: Obsidio (The Illuminae Files_03) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrations by Marie Lu

Obsidio (The Illuminae Files_03) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrations by Marie Lu

Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0553499193

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Obsidio is the final volume of The Illuminae Files, preceded by Illuminae and Gemina. Illuminae started with the testimony of the Illuminae Group about the invasion of an illegal mining colony on an out of the way planet, Kerenza IV, owned by the mega-corporation Wallace Ulyanov Consortium (WUC), by a second mega-corporation, BeiTech Industries. An SOS call from Kerenza IV brought the only nearby warship of the United Terran Authority, the Alexander, to the defense of the colony. After crippling BeiTech’s jump platform and damaging its ships, and filled with refugees, along with two other ships belonging to the WUC, the Copernicus and the Hypatia, thousands of refugees escaped, chased by the crippled BeiTech ship Lincoln. The Alexander’s complex AI, AIDAN, which would have been able to speed things along, was damaged.

A bioweapon that BeiTech dropped on Kerenza IV during the attack infected hundreds of refugees, AIDAN, in an attempt to save the fleet, destroyed the Copernicus and took over the Alexander. Teenage hacker Kady Grant and her ex-boyfriend Ezra, now a pilot, take on AIDAN, and with its help destroy the Lincoln. The Alexander, now flooded with the infected, is destroyed in the successful attack on the Lincoln. Despite AIDAN’s participation in large-scale mass murder, Kady saves a copy of his programming onto her tablet before she escapes back to the Hypatia. Without any kind of jump platform, the remaining survivors of Kerenza IV must travel in real-time towards the nearest wormhole that opens to a jump station.

In Gemina, we learn that the BeiTech invasion forces at Kerenza IV has been unable to communicate with headquarters, and that a BeiTech spy embedded in communications at jump station Heimdall has been intercepting all messages from the Kerenza IV refugees. As a result, no one knows there has even been an invasion. An executive from BeiTech, learning from the spy that after many months of travel, the Hypatia is nearing the wormhole, sends a “cleanup team” to prevent the ship from getting through or any news of the attack from getting out. Heimdall’s commander’s daughter, Hanna Donnelly, and her drug dealer, Nik Malikov, are saved from being trapped by just missing the violent arrival of the assassins. Thus begins a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, with Hanna and Nik attempting to eliminate the various members of the kill team, psychotropic monsters, alternate realities, and, finally, contact with the Hypatia. Unable to save the station, Hanna and Nik collect as many station residents as they can onto the ship Mao, and flee through the wormhole, which collapses behind them.

In Obsidio, the refugees realize that there is no way for them to get back to a more central system, and the captain of the Hypatia decides their only option is to return to Kerenza IV. With the Hypatia falling to pieces, the decision is made to transfer everyone to the Mao and scuttle the ship. Kady argues in favor of leaving a beacon, with information about the attack, but the captain shuts her down. Determined that the destruction of Kerenza IV and Heimdall Station be documented, Kady resurrects AIDAN on the Mao, with the hope that, with help from Ezra, Hanna, Nik, and Nik’s hacker cousin Ella, it will compile the information. In the meantime, the adults from Heimdall have noticed that teenagers seem to be running things, and object strenuously, on the grounds that they are more qualified and have better judgement than teenagers do. AIDAN notes that there are more people on the Mao than life support is capable of supporting for the time that it will take to travel back to Kerenza IV.

Then readers get the surprise of discovering that there actually were survivors of the invasion of Kerenza IV. Not only did a significant number of the BeiTech forces end up trapped when their mobile jump platform (which could transport them to another system) was damaged, but there are still a number of miserable colonists, one of whom is Kady’s cousin Asha. When the resistance causes the deaths of the majority of techs on the planet, Asha gets a surprise– one of the replacement techs, who has been working on the jump platform, is her ex-boyfriend, Rhys, who just might be able to get a message out through BeiTech’s communications software. BeiTech is getting close to fixing its mobile jump platform, and won’t leave evidence behind, so the remaining colonists are quickly running out of time.

Horrific things happen in Obsidio. There were times I stopped breathing, or was nearly in tears. Kaufman and Kristoff do not pull their punches in describing the brutality and senselessness of war– and in this case, a war that doesn’t even attempt to disguise itself as anything else than an unapologetic attack on an economic competitor out of greed. Yet there are very few completely unsympathetic characters. What makes someone sign on to participate in a situation like this? How can someone willing to sacrifice his life for a cat command the death of innocent civilians? What makes someone whose job has been protecting others from harm lead a mutiny that ends in blood and death? Knowing that AIDAN has acted ruthlessly in the past, why does Kady keep bringing him back?

One thing that does really bother me is the way that the authors tried to humanize AIDAN. It is clear that by the end of the third book AIDAN is in love with Kady. But AIDAN, as Ella points out, is not a person, but an “it”. AIDAN’s meta-awareness is also frustrating. It somehow has realized that it is in a story and decided that “every story needs its monster”, so it will be the monster. AIDAN is the “Frankenstein” of the series, I get that, but that doesn’t need to be said over and over.

The book hangs on a million coincidences, but it does all hang together in the end.  Obsidio is creative in every way, from its design and the illustrations by Marie Lu (the book is a work of art), to the storytelling through the format of a collection of emails, instant messages, maps, and other documents. It does need to be read following the first two books in order to make sense, but, as long as all three of them are, it is absolutely worth it. I recommend reading this as a hardcover, so you can appreciate the illustrations and full-page designs, but I have also heard that it is outstanding as an audiobook. Highly recommended.

 

Posted on February 8, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Gemina (The Illuminae Files_02) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrated by Marie Lu

Gemina (The Illuminae Files_02) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrated by Marie Lu

Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2016

ISBN-13: 978-0553499155

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Gemina is the sequel to Illuminae. Illuminae is framed by a trial in which a dossier of information is submitted as part of an investigation into a megacorporation’s criminal activity. The dossier begins by telling a story about a commando attack on an illegal civilian mining colony owned by the Wallace Ulyanov Corporation (WUC) on Kerenza IV, a planet out in the middle of nowhere, by a competing megacorporation, BeiTech. A Terran Authority ship, the Alexander, that arrived in response to a distress call, and two other ships, the Hypatia and the Copernicus, escaped with many of the refugees on board. However, their ability to communicate and to travel with any speed was handicapped by damage to the ships, and especially the incredibly complex AI, called AIDAN. When AIDAN was rebooted, its perceptions of what was best for the ships caused serious damage and destruction, and the death of many of the refugees. At the end of Illuminae, the Alexander and the Copernicus have both been destroyed through a combination of a bioweapon Beitech released before the residents of the colony fled and AIDAN’s frequently homicidal choices, and the Lincoln has also been destroyed. The primary characters from that book are teenagers Kady and Ezra. Kady is an anti-authoritarian hacker genius who is able to set up a partnership with AIDAN. Ezra is her ex-boyfriend, who has been drafted as a fighter pilot.

Gemina picks up with Hypatia limping through space toward a jump point, a wormhole that would allow them to get to a jump station, Heimdall, which sits in the midst of a number of jump points and makes transit from one place to another through the jump points faster and easier. They’re desperately hoping that Heimdall is picking up their radio transmissions and coming to the rescue. Unfortunately, a BeiTech spy is embedded in the communications staff at Heimdall, and has been destroying any transmissions, so no one on Heimdall has any idea that any ship is on the way, or even that anything happened on Kerenza IV. A transmission did, however, make it through from the crippled BeiTech ship, the Lincoln,  alerting top executive Leanne Frobisher that BeiTech’s coverup isn’t as complete as she thought it was.

On Heimdall, Hanna Donnelly, the station commander’s daughter, is chatting up her drug dealer , Nik Malikov, while she prepares to make a splash at a Terra Day celebration she will be attending with her handsome, romantic, boyfriend, Jackson. Hanna may look like a fashionable, spoiled, and very privileged girl, but she’s also highly trained in strategy and martial arts (this apparently is how she spends quality time with her dad). Nik, in the meantime, has also been contacted by someone who wants to move a box of contraband into the station. A member of a family famous for their criminal dealings, he lives on the station without documentation so he can’t be easily tracked. The box arrives late, and Nik leaves to sell Hanna “dust,” the designer drug of the moment, so he’s not there when the box opens to reveal a heavily armed commando team hired by BeiTech to prevent the escape of the Hypatia, that starts its reign of terror on the station by killing almost every other member of Nik’s family.

The commandos storm the atrium, where the majority of Heimdall’s residents are celebrating Terra Day, and kill Hanna’s father. Hanna, waiting for Nik to show up, is saved because he’s late getting to her. Of all the people on Heimdall, they are the only two who have the combined luck and skill to combat the killers that have overtaken the station. It’s a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, complicated by the emotions, perceptions, and decisions of people who are not what they seem. There are stone-cold killers, spies, hackers, lovers, literal bloodsucking monsters (lanima, the source of “dust”), and evil corporate executives; there are betrayals, grief, confusion, anger, and fear; there is weird science, love, and hope in the face of horror.

Hanna and Nik, along with Nik’s hacker cousin Ella, discover the plan to eliminate the Hypatia and eventually the Heimdall, get through to the Hypatia, and with the help of Kady Grant and the remains of AIDAN on the Hypatia, manage to save many lives on the Heimdall, nearly destroy reality, save the universe, and escape through the wormhole to rendezvous with the Hypatia. Unfortunately, the wormhole is destroyed in the process, leaving the survivors of both Kerenza IV and the Heimdall far from home, and with limited options.

As with the first book, Gemina’s storytelling is unconventional, involving screenshots of messages and chats, emails, transcripts of video clips (with commentary) text designed as part of illustrations, showing movement or space, soliloquies by AIDAN, and artwork from Hanna’s journal (the journal artwork was created by Marie Lu) Page design is such an essential part of the way the book is written that I don’t think the story could be told effectively in a more traditional way. I highly recommend reading a hardcover edition: paperback won’t have the same detail and Kindle and audiobook cannot possibly do this justice.

Gemina suffers from an issue that affects many “middle” books in trilogies: while it doesn’t end in the middle of a sentence, it does end rather suddenly, leaving the reader with an unsatisfactory feeling of “wait, what happens next?” It’s also a very different book from Illuminae, much more of a horror/science fiction thriller. Hanna, Nik, and Ella are all very strong characters who developed considerably beyond their original stereotypical presentations during the story, and they’re up against the commandos, with few adults to monitor them, instead of the considerably more operatic first book with its mass murders, evacuations, space battles, military crackdowns, bioweapon-infected cannibals, and homicidal AI, in which Kady and Ezra are very much treated as teens in need of supervision. Yet the ending seemed anticlimactic, more written to lead into the third book than to finish the second. I enjoyed meeting Hanna, Nik, and especially snarky, tough, Ella (it’s great to see a disabled character portrayed as multidimensional and valued as a person) and am interested in seeing how the interactions of the people from the Heimdall and those of Kerenza IV play out in volume 3. Recommended.

 

Posted on January 25, 2019 by , Reply