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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: I Dream of Mirrors by Chris Kelso

I Dream Of Mirrors by Chris Kelso

Sinister Horror Company, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1912578078

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

File this short novel under the “mind-blowing, mind-boggling, weird horror” category. There. It’s done. Attempting to classify I Dream of Mirrors is nearly impossible to explain or put into a genre box.

It’s one of the cool stories of weird fiction, which can include horror, dark fantasy, sci-fi, or bizarro fiction. Readers who crave the out-there settings and characters of Jeff Vandermeer, Neil Gaiman, and John Langan will find plenty to lose themselves in here, with a tale that, while heady and intelligent, keeps itself grounded.

Kurt wakes up to an apocalypse caused by Dunwoody, a manic billionaire who has changed the world through technological brainwashing.”People” who have been affected at first appear to be zombies, but are actually willing participants in Dunwoody’s new world order, that harkens back to an 1984 motif. The ones who resist are the outsiders: those who have crushing pasts that leave them strugging to survive. Kurt teams up with Kat to battle the People and Dunwoody, along with a bevy of other odd characters, each with his or her own mind-bending backstory.

At the heart of this story is a search for identity, as Kurt has no recollection of his life before the change– who he was, or what he did. The transmissions from Dunwoody’s tower and hallucinations attempt to convince him that he’s merely a part of the system, a figment of humanity’s imagination that never existed in the physical world. What could be considered an exercise in finding one’s identity morphs into something that reaches much deeper, yet still can be completed in one surreal sitting.

What raises I Dream of Mirrors above the mass of weird fiction floating through the stratosphere is Chris Kelso’s writing. He crafts every sentence into something that both engages the reader and detaches them from reality. Add him to a very short list of newer authors to place on the “must read” list. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

 

Posted on June 21, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Broken Lands by Jonathan Maberry

Broken Lands by Jonathan Maberry

Simon and Schuster, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1534406377

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

I will be honest, I am not a fan of zombie fiction.  As a reviewer, I am putting my feelings about the genre as a whole to the side to review Broken Lands because it is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. I know Jonathan Maberry is a talented author whose work in both the adult and young adult categories has been judged as outstanding, not just in the community of people who write horror fiction or love zombie fiction but by other reviewers, including librarians (and librarians are not an easy audience to impress).

Broken Lands is the first book in a follow-up series to Maberry’s YA series Rot and Ruin. That series introduced backstory on how and why the apocalypse happened and introduced the teenage Benny Imura as a main character. Previous to writing the Rot and Ruin books, Maberry wrote adult zombie fiction starring a special ops soldier, Joe Ledger. I have not read either the Rot and Ruin books or the Joe Ledger books, so Broken Lands is my introduction to Benny and his friends and to Joe. Benny and Joe each have their own, narratives, which alternate with a third narrative involving Gutsy Gomez, a teenage girl who is uncovering a disturbing secret about her town and its involvement with a secret military base nearby (For purposes of representation, Gutsy is essentially uninterested in sex or romance, although she is described as bi, and she has a kiss with Alice, a lesbian).

The book starts out strong, with an abrupt hook that introduces and characterizes Gutsy and the world she’s living in with just a few words, enough to make even a reluctant reader curious enough to turn the page. Her story mainly takes place in and around New Alamo, a town of indeterminate size in New Mexico that was formerly an internment camp for undocumented immigrants. Maberry takes no time to ratchet up the suspense and action. Short sentences and plenty of white space push the reader on through not just Gutsy’s actions but her thought processes as she observes the cemetery. I wasn’t wild about Maberry’s characterization of grief as something that you work your way through and eventually come out of healed, but his portrayal of Gutsy’s grieving, and how horrific it is to have the person you are grieving come back from the dead to attack you, I thought was spot on. She’s a girl who thinks and acts and doesn’t slow down. Her friends, Alethea and Spider, are loyal and supportive, and secondary characters are developed enough for the reader to care about them, at least a little.

Then we switch to Benny and his friends, in Reclamation, California, a town of about 16,000 people that they helped to defend and rebuild. Reclamation has managed to connect with eight other towns in California and the new American government being established in Asheville, North Carolina, but Asheville has suddenly gone silent, and Joe Ledger, who was on his way from Reclamation to Asheville by helicopter, has disappeared. Benny and his friends decide to steal six “quads” (small four-wheeled vehicles), from the town, tie up the guards on watch duty, and go off to search for Ledger and then on to Asheville. Experienced, tough, and with varying levels of skill in combat, Benny and five friends take off across unknown country. Teenagers do a lot of unwise things, but this choice, for me, went beyond normal levels of maladaptive judgment. I am not a young adult, though: maybe actual teenagers would find this plausible.

My guess is that Maberry wanted us to see what the wasteland beyond California looked like and to get a preview of the zombie hordes that is stomach-dropping dreadful. There is a lot of zombie fighting, including a battle with a zombie silverback gorilla and an absolutely horrific experience in a state prison where the locked-up prisoners, all zombies, are in starvation mode. There’s also observation of their bizarre surroundings, including mutations from chemical spills, bioweapons, and radioactivity, and growing dread as they witness intelligent zombies directing endless hordes of shambling horrors. While Asheville is in the South, Benny and his friends find themselves driven further and further south, towards the Mexican border, because the radioactivity, mutations, and zombies all have to be avoided. And because there are six teenagers in various states of romantic involvement, there’s also teenage drama. It could be that the character development of the teenage characters all occured in the previous series, but aside from Benny (the point of view character) and Chong (who is holding off zombification with medication only available in Asheville) the characters sort of blended together for me.

Finally, we have a storyline where a hunter tracks down Joe Ledger, whose helicopter has crashed, and they turn out to be former comrades. They decide to go to New Alamo to hunt for a weapons cache and then head to Asheville together. I enjoyed the Joe Ledger storyline. I could tell that Maberry was comfortable writing Ledger and it was interesting to watch the relationship between Ledger and his new partner.

All three sets of characters collide as a horde of  hundreds of zombies overtake and burn down the secret military base where scientists have been running experiments on the citizens of New Alamo (because apparently it’s okay to conduct racist, fatal scientific experiments on undocumented immigrants) and head for the walls of the town. Benny and three of his friends sneak in through a tunnel infested with zombies, killing everyone in their path until they reach the interior. Gutsy and her friends and neighbors (about ten of them are named) defend the walls. Ledger wades straight into the middle of the horde and starts cutting zombies down. The hunter, who turns out to be Benny’s older half-brother Sam, uses a sniper rifle to take down zombies one at a time. This small group of people who have not coordinated in any way defeat and kill all the zombies, including any bitten or killed townspeople. Gutsy then discovers the director of the hospital and the leader of the scientists from the military base attempting to escape with the records of their experiments, and stops them. The book ends with a shocking reveal which I can’t give away, but which will definitely send readers after the next book.

My overall impression is that Maberry does a great job creating suspense and action with a very economical use of words, and uses vivid language to describe the mutating, destroyed land that the characters must cross. The grave-robbing and scientific experimentation in New Alamo contributed to a rather heavy-handed critique on immigration policy, but the introduction of Gutsy Gomez, whose experience of these was intensely personal, led it to be a very strong storyline. Here was a girl who put her grief on hold to deal with life-and-death issues and did what had to be done, even at great personal expense. Maberry certainly manages to instill a feeling of dread and horror with the zombie hordes and one-on-one battles, even those that are only implied (the final time Gutsy and her friends have to kill her already dead mother is not depicted, but it doesn’t have to be to get the emotional impact) and the human horror, of what military scientists were willing to do to innocent people, is appalling. It’s not for nothing that Maberry has a reputation as a gifted horror writer.

However, I felt that he depended far too much on his readers’ knowledge of backstory for characters from previous books. As someone who hasn’t read any of Maberry’s zombie books, I felt lost among the characters that carried over from his previous books. The transition between narratives was often clunky, with Maberry spending a long time in one narrative, then cutting out to a different one that I had lost track of, and switching time periods back and forth. I would have liked to see more of a focus on Gutsy’s story (and maybe Ledger’s). Based on the sudden ending, I assume that there is going to be a second book, and perhaps a better choice would have been to focus on Gutsy in this book and Benny in the next (Rick Riordan did this successfully in his Heroes of Olympus books, in which the first book focuses on a newly introduced character and the second switches to a character from the previous series). There is good action and suspense, some pretty raw horror and violence, and some compelling writing and description. Readers of Maberry’s previous books will probably like this one, but it’s not the one to start with, and I suspect it’s not nearly his best work.  Recommended for public libraries, high school library media centers, readers of zombie fiction, readers who enjoyed the Rot and Ruin books, and for Jonathan Maberry fans.

 

Editor’s note: Broken Lands is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by , Reply
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