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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

Booklist: The Magicians by Lev Grossman and Doors To Other Worlds

I recently discovered The Magicians while surfing Netflix. Yes, I know I’m late to the party. It’s based on a book of the same name by Lev Grossman, and I’m going to say that in this case the show is much better than the book. The Magicians tells the story of Quentin, a nerdy, WASPY, and very unhappy teenager obsessed with a series of fantasy novels about four children who escape the real world through portals to a magical world called Fillory where they go on quests and eventually become kings and queens. Quentin turns out to have magical powers and receives an invitation to attend a school of magic. Brakebills, which he travels to through a portal. Despite being located in upstate New York, it is always summer there. Unfortunately, eventually the students graduate, their idyll ends, and they have to function in the real world. Quentin and his friends find the means to visit Fillory through a portal, but they haven’t been invited or given a quest and they’re just as lost there as they are anywhere else. It’s like forcing your way into Narnia, a child’s world, after already getting jaded and aging out.

Reading The Magicians is kind of like reading Harry Potter if the characters were always drunk, the teachers weren’t involved in students’ lives, and there was no plot or character development except that Quentin isn’t unhappy all the time when he’s at Brakebills.  The characters are mostly unlikable and the story is mostly uninteresting. The characters that are most interesting to me in the television series are ciphers in the book. The action and character development that keep me going back to the show were probably the only reason I managed to get to the end of the book– I kept waiting for something to HAPPEN.

But what the book did do was make me think about the stories I know that do have portals and doors to other worlds (and the Neitherlands in The Magicians very much reminded me of the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew). Some of them may make you roll your eyes (I know there are radically differing opinions on the Chronicles of Narnia) but they are an essential part of many stories. You might not even realize how many portals there are.

Rudine Sims-Bishop writes

“Books are sometimes windows, offering visions of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”

If you are a reader, you know what she’s talking about in a figurative sense. Here is a short list of books (that do not include The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter) that have literal windows, portals, and doors.

 

Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak.

In this strange and beautiful picture book, Ida’s baby sister is kidnapped by the goblins, and Ida climbs out the window backwards (accidentally) to search for her. This book inspired the movie Labyrinth, and you can spot it in the main character’s bedroom if you search for it.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire.

Portals and doors show up in a lot of Seanan McGuire’s books, but this spare, poetic novella is heartbreaking. What happens to the children who go through a doorway to another world when that world no longer wants them, or they can’t find their way back? It’s not a pretty thing. McGuire has written two other related titles, Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Beneath the Sugar Sky, but while I also enjoyed them, Every Heart a Doorway is, in my opinion, the standout.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

There’s nothing officially magical about finding the key and opening the door to the Secret Garden except for the changes it makes in two prickly, miserable, spoiled, lonely children. There is plenty to find fault with in The Secret Garden: there are racist comments about Indians, and negative stereotypes about disability. But there is so much to love, as well, in the ugliness, anger, fear, grief, and finally, after the door is unlocked, the joy we see in Mary and Colin. That’s especially true if you have read the gratingly irritating Little Lord Fauntleroy(I have), in which Burnett spends most of her time describing the titular character’s physical and moral perfection and engaging personality as the cure for his grandfather’s awful behavior and treatment of others.

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

Vellitt Boe is a middle-aged professor of mathematics at Ulthar Women’s College in the Dreamlands who is sent to retrieve a gifted student who has run away with a man from the waking world. This novella is a response to a Lovecraft story called The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I have not read (and didn’t need to in order to enjoy it)  but is apparently a polar opposite, with a male adventurer from the waking world adventuring through the Dreamlands. This is an inversion of the portal story, in that there is someone from the portal world who travels into ours as an adventurer, rather than the other way around.

Eric by Terry Pratchett

This loose take on the Faust story is not Terry Pratchett’s strongest book by far, but it does have entertaining moments. It also has multiple portals and, yes, a literal door. Rincewind is the Discworld’s worst  and unluckiest wizard, who by pure chance hasn’t yet met a fatal end (he is also one of my least favorite characters, but works out perfectly for this story). He is accompanied by the exceedingly loyal and carnivorous Luggage wherever he goes.  While passing though the Dungeon Dimensions, somehow he has been summoned by Eric, a thirteen year old demonologist, who insists that Rincewind grant him three very grandiose wishes, which Rincewind fulfills in his typical unlucky and nearly-fatal manner. In the meantime, a struggle for power is going on in the city of the demons between those who like doing things the old-fashioned way and the current king, who is trying to modernize.  For Rincewind and Eric, the only way back home is through the door to Hell, but they’ll have to work their way through the mutinous members of a newly-established bureaucracy and a number of people who are unhappy with them for things they said and did on their journey, but relieved to see them go.

 

Reader’s note: The quote from Rudine Sims Bishop originally appeared in “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” in Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, volume 6, no.3.

Posted on March 13, 2018 by , Reply
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