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Do We Need More Kid Horror?

Derek Faraci at Blumhouse.com has written an article titled “We Need More Kid Horror“He claims that today’s generation of kids will be the first to grow up “without nightmares caused by authors, artists, and filmmakers”. The world, he says, has decided it’s not okay to scare kids anymore.  Kids would rather watch Minecraft videos on YouTube than horror movies these days.

While it’s very possible that some kids would rather watch Minecraft videos on YouTube, that doesn’t mean they aren’t exposed to horror in its various guises. I have a 10 year old son who is obsessed with Minecraft, and that’s where he learned about slasher movies and horror video games. It’s where he learned about Slenderman. (thanks a bunch, Mojang, for enshrining a fictional character that inspired two girls to stab a friend multiple times into a children’s video game). If you want to learn about any kind of monster or cryptid, he’s your go-to guy. There’s no lack of resources to feed his nightmares. Visit the library and you’ll see.

According to Faraci, “horror is more than fun. It’s more than entertainment.” Parents should be using it to teach their kids lessons.

Gee, way to drain all the enjoyment out of the genre. You may have noticed that horror, as a genre, doesn’t get a lot of respect. A lot of kids who do read it are doing it under the radar, and they like it that way. In some of the research, they’re called “underground readers”. They don’t want horror to teach them a lesson. They get lessons at school. They want to read (or watch) something they actually enjoy. If, as a parent, you have a genuine love of the genre that you want to share, great. That’s what will engage kids. If, as a parent, you have grave reservations about sharing your love of the genre, you should probably know that eventually your kids will get into your stuff and decide whether they want to read or watch horror anyway.

I do agree with Faraci that horror gives us a way to experience fear in a controlled way– you can always close the book or turn off the television if things get too intense– but how many of us are thinking about that when we read? If it’s not fun, if it’s not entertaining, if there’s no suspense, why waste your time?

Do we need more kid horror? There’s definitely a place for it! A children’s horror novel, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, even won the Newbery Award a few years back. Is there a gap where kid horror used to be? I don’t think so. But there’s certainly room for more!

 

Looking for titles? Here are our reviews of scary (and not so scary) books for kids

 

Posted on May 19, 2016 by , Reply

The Original Monster Librarian

In Memoriam: Dylan Kowalewski, The Original Monster Librarian

September 5, 1973-April 17, 2014

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Monster Librarian was the idea and passion of Dylan Kowalewski. Dylan, in a typical burst of optimism and energy, with an intense love of horror fiction, started the site at the end of 2005. Where he got the energy and conviction to start it off less than three months after our first child was born, while working full time and attending library school, I do not have the slightest idea. Library school was an eye-opening experience for him, as over and over again he ran into librarians or soon-to-be-librarians who told him they didn’t like horror fiction, didn’t want to read it, and didn’t know what to hand readers who asked for “something like Stephen King.” He was tired of going to bookstores and finding only the same three or four authors in the “horror” section. Anne Rice and Stephen King were just the tip of the iceberg, but you would never know that from looking there.

Dylan himself grew up down the street from a used bookstore called “Granny’s Attic”. Remember used bookstores? I do. The one I frequented at that age was run by a guy with a beard and a very sneaky cat, with shelves of yellow-spined DAW paperbacks. Dylan’s, apparently, was stocked with killer animal (and killer plant) books from the 1970s and 1980s. As we cleared out the bookshelves in his basement study so new carpet could be installed, he let go of a lot of books, but Guy N. Smith’s Crabs books, James Herbert’s The Rats, and many other well-worn paperbacks stayed.

While I’m not actually working in a library anymore, I do have the degree, and I’ve been a children’s librarian in a public library, a school librarian in an elementary school. I’ve also had plenty of anecdotal experiences in which I’ve run into people who were non-readers who became readers when they discovered Stephen King, or Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, or R.L. Stine. I’ve seen all of these attacked by censors and belittled as trash reading or merely a stop on the way to “real” literature.  And I firmly believe that the world becomes a better place when people learn to read and to love reading. Dylan believed that too, and felt that a lot of kids, teens, and adults, were turned off to reading because the people who have the most influence– parents, teachers, and librarians– didn’t see the value of reading horror for pleasure. He always maintained that reading for entertainment is enough reason to read– there doesn’t have to be deeper meaning, and sometimes a tree really is just a tree.

And so he started Monster Librarian, writing short, objective reviews of just a few sentences, almost completely by himself, and publishing them every week, to create a resource for all those people (especially librarians) who told him “I don’t like reading horror, but I need to know about it”. For a long time that’s the only name by which people knew him. At a conference he attended, someone finally took him around and introduced him– “This is Dylan, the Monster Librarian”.  And he’s the only person who, I think, can ever own that title. At one point he worked full time, had a second job in a library, and put in probably the equivalent to a part-time job in time and effort for the site, as well as being a devoted and loving father and husband.

Most of the people who knew Dylan through Monster Librarian knew him mainly online, but both he and I have been lucky to have both authors and reviewers call us friends. This site became what it is because, in spite of his being an intensely private person, his personality and love of the genre and the horror community always shone through. Bret Jordan, Bob Freeman, David Agranoff, Rhonda Rettig (formerly Wilson), Erik Smith, Kelly Fann, Michele Lee, Colleen Wanglund, Darlene Wanglund, Dave Simms, Patricia O. Mathews, Diana Lord, Sheila Shedd, Hannah Kate, Lucy Lockley, Aaron Fletcher, Julie Adams, and so many more contributed to making this site what it is– a place where parents write to thank us for finding the right book for their reluctant reader, authors contact us to tell us that finding their book reviewed here convinced them to keep writing, small presses and self-publishers get their names out into the mainstream, Midwestern moms confess their love for horror, and librarians discover the gems of the horror genre.

The work of all these people has made the site a success.

But Dylan is the one who made it happen.

And to quote Amy Dalton,  his coworker from the Southport Library, “the only thing monstrous about the Monster Librarian was the size of his heart.”

 

If you have any memories or stories about your friendship or interactions with Dylan that you would like to share, feel free to email me at kirsten.kowalewski@monsterlibrarian.com.

 

 

Posted on April 26, 2014 by , 1 comment

YA Fiction: Too Many Girls?

It’s common to hear that the reason boys don’t read is because they don’t want to read “girl books”, and that there is a tilt in publishing, writing, and marketing toward books for girls and by women. In fact, there is a book published by the American Library Association called Connecting Boys with Books (a second edition was published in 2009) which makes the argument that boys are drawn to “boys’ books” and specific genres, and that libraries need to make special efforts to meet those needs in order to close the literacy gap. Ana at Lady Business has written a very interesting (and very long) post called Gender Balance in YA Fiction. What’s great about this is that, while it isn’t comprehensive, it’s grounded in solid data, and provides a list of further reading at the end.

What Ana did was look at the award winners from 22 book awards that include YA fiction and categorize the books according to the gender of the protagonist(s) and the gender of the author(s), and draw some conclusions based on that. From her data it looks like there are more male protagonists than female protagonists in YA fiction award winners, which is pretty interesting. And there are more female authors in YA award winners than there are males. But Ana suggests that the difference in percentages is not enough to be significant (She also broke down the data for specific awards and THAT is pretty interesting, if you want to look at it).

Ana’s research doesn’t mean that there isn’t a literacy gap, or that boys aren’t reading predominantly “boys’books”. But the assumption that this is because there aren’t enough male protagonists in YA fiction, or males writing it, clearly deserves more examination. Ana says she addressed the question of whether interests are gendered in her MA thesis, and her research showed it didn’t. I think that’s true(although obviously my experiences are anecdotal). One reason this site was started was to provide choices that could attract reluctant readers, who are frequently boys… but I have encountered so many girls and women who love scary books and horror fiction that I don’t think horror can be described as a gendered interest (although I’d love to see statistics on the readership of horror fiction). And I have also helped boys find cookbooks, animal books, drawing books. and fairytales. To me, it suggests that this is a social issue, and a difficult one. How can we(and by we I mean everybody) get boys to read all kinds of books, and respect and encourage their interests, whatever they are? That, I think, is the question.

Ana did not include the YA category from the Stoker Awards in her analysis, She has said she’s open to including information on other YA awards. It would be great if someone from the HWA could provide her with the information, which could help inform her research.

Posted on October 10, 2012 by , Reply
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