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Charlie Higson Guest Post: The Cosy Apocalypse

Charlie Higson is the author of the YA zombie novel The Enemy and its just-released prequel The Dead, which was released on June 14 in hardcover here in the United States (if you live in the UK, it’s been out there for many months already). Here at MonsterLibrarian.com we are lucky enough to be part of a blog tour for The Dead, and I’d like to share with you what Charlie Higson wrote for us in a guest post on the “cosy apocalypse” and YA fiction. The part I really enjoyed is this:

As the father of three boys I try to encourage my children’s wild urges (within reason of course), and help them find harmless outlets for their fascination with violence. Boys want to grab spears and paint their faces and run around shouting. We all stifle those urges as we grow older, we repress ourselves, so is it any wonder we fantasise about things blowing up and falling apart?

Why would anyone read horror fiction, dystopian fiction, fiction about the end of the world? These are questions I’m asked all the time (frequently by relatives), and it’s great to see a writer as talented as Charlie Higson put it right out there on the page.  And now I’ll stop writing, and you can read it all for yourself below. It is absolutely worth it to take the time.

Charlie Higson Guest Post: The ‘Cosy Apocalypse’

 

I’m always getting very erudite e-mails from kids in America talking about ‘dystopian fiction’. It used to make me think that, to be bandying around such highfaluting phrases, American kids must somehow be a lot more intellectual than British kids, but then I found out that ‘dystopian fiction’ is being taught in many US schools.

And there is no shortage of dystopian fiction on the bookshelves, from The Hunger Games, to Maze Runner, Gone, Matched… and of course my own Enemy series. The description ‘Dystopian Fiction’ makes it all sound terribly heavy and gloomy and pessimistic, and I prefer another phrase that has also been bandied around a great deal recently – ‘The Cosy Apocalypse’. Because, let’s face it, the appeal of dystopian fiction is not that we‘re all terrified of the Apocalypse, it’s not that we’re dreading the subsequent process of running around some barren wasteland filled with the remnants and relics of our society, picking up weapons and blasting away at each other. The appeal is that we would all secretly love it to happen. Come on, it’d be FUN!

It’s like all those American survivalists hiding out in the wilderness, armed to the teeth and priming their mantraps. They claim they’re merely getting ready in case the worst happens and society falls apart. But we all know that every night they pray that it will happen. They would like nothing better. They want society to fall apart, so that they can go out and shoot people just like in the wild west, or Mad Max, or all those violent computer games. The Worst? No, it’d be THE BEST!

We love the idea of the apocalypse. People wondered recently why so many idiots followed that crackpot American preacher who predicted the end of the world. It’s simple. They really, really wanted it to happen. Apocalypse stories are at the heart of every major religion. The Greeks had a series of golden ages that all ended badly, Vikings had Ragnarok, the Bible is full of them, from the flood, to the plagues to Revelations. Our endless appetite for movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow show that we like nothing more than a good old-fashioned apocalypse.

There is a strong self-destructive (or even just destructive streak) in human beings. The more we are forced into cities and complex societies, rubbing up against each other, having to obey a complex set of written and unwritten rules and laws, having to pay our taxes, and keep up with the latest trends, and get our kids through school and negotiate dinner parties, moody partners, tricky relatives and troublesome neighbours, the more we have to worry about the environment, the global financial crisis, how computers and technology are taking over our lives… the more we want to throw all our clothes off and run down the street dressed only in a leather loin cloth, screaming. We just want things to be SIMPLER. If only a nice cosy apocalypse would come along and sort everything out, wipe the slate clean, we could start again.

I saw a fantastic production of Lord Of The Flies in London last week at the beautiful open-air theatre in Regents Park. With its tall trees and dense shrubbery surrounding the stage area it was a magical and very apt setting for the play, enhanced by a set that included half a wrecked aeroplane. It was interesting to watch William Golding’s story unfold. His original version of the book started with a nuclear explosion and was about the end of the world, and the message that we are teetering on the brink of disaster comes across very strongly. We human beings are messing everything up. The theme of the book/play is the split between sensible Ralph and Piggy and their friends trying to impose some sense of law and order, and Jack and his choirboys descending into savagery. I know whose side we’re supposed to be on, nice Ralph and gentle Piggy, but I must say Jack’s lot looked like they were having a lot more fun. I think William Golding hated children. He was fairly uninterested in his own and as a teacher in a boy’s school he was much more interested in being a writer than teaching his pupils, who I reckon intimidated him. He was freaked out by the boys’ wild urges. As the father of three boys I try to encourage my children’s wild urges (within reason of course), and help them find harmless outlets for their fascination with violence. Boys want to grab spears and paint their faces and run around shouting. We all stifle those urges as we grow older, we repress ourselves, so is it any wonder we fantasise about things blowing up and falling apart?

That is the appeal of dystopian fiction. A simpler life in a nice blasted wasteland somewhere. In all these cosy apocalypse stories 99% of the world’s population is wiped out, thus giving a lot more room and freedom to the 1% who survive, and in our fantasies we are part of that 1%, not part of the 99% who have been turned into compost. We will make it through and find ourselves a bazooka and we will be all right. That’s the cosy part. We won’t all die, and those of us who survive can rebuild a better world.

My Enemy series started with a fantasy that I had when I was a kid – wouldn’t it be fantastic if all the adults in the world simply disappeared? I wrote a couple of stories along those lines when I was younger and even wrote a long experimental (unreadable) science fiction book in which characters end up living in the Natural History Museum in London (just as they do in my new series). It’s always been a fantasy of mine to be allowed to go into all those places that are closed off to us and play. To go into the museums and dress up in the clothes, and use the weapons, and drive the vehicles. To live in Buckingham Palace, or the Tower of London. I figured it was a good background for a kids’ series. All I had to do was work out how to get rid of the pesky adult in such a way that I would leave the structures intact (a quandary that weapons designers have been working on for some time now!) A disease that only affects people over a certain age was the obvious solution.

My series is only superficially grim and pessimistic; at its heart it is a fantasy, a glorious optimistic piece of escapism (in which, admittedly, a lot of nice kids do get killed and eaten). I think kids like to read about coping in a world without adults (which is surely the appeal of boarding school books like Harry Potter). My books have been compared to Lord of the Flies but I think in the end my message is very different. Unlike Golding, I happen to like kids. I like teenagers. I like their wildness and sense of life and I feel that deep down most of them are fundamentally decent. I believe that, left to cope for themselves (and we’ve seen this happen with street kids in the Third World) children are actually pretty good at looking after themselves and don’t revert to mindless savagery. That’s what I want to get across in my books. I want to empower kids.

That was the starting point for the series, but I then decided I wanted to liven things up a little. So I didn’t kill off all the adults. I kept some as basic cannibal zombies. I seem to have caught a wave of the undead, and added my germs to the zombie plague that is taking over Western culture and the minds of our young people. In my next blog I will look at the appeal of zombies and try and figure out why they are everywhere at the moment.

Posted on June 25, 2011 by , 1 comment

Summer Reading At The Library

Summer reading programs are a big focus for libraries at this time of year.  I have to admit that I am not good about keeping track of my kids’ fifteen minute increments  (this is how our library tracks summer reading) probably because they spend SO MUCH time with books. But not everyone spends hours poring over Halloween cookbooks (my son demanded we go to the library today with some urgency so he could check out their copy of Ghoulish Goodies again) and Dr. Seuss. Either way, summer reading is a great excuse to read with your kids (even if it’s a recipe for Mummy Dogs or Spiderweb Cupcakes).

Here at MonsterLibrarian.com we thought we’d recognize some of the libraries that have linked to us as a resource. Clearly they have exceptional librarians if they’ve recognized the importance of providing readers advisory in horror fiction. And they also have summer reading programs.

The Rochester Public Library has summer reading programs for both kids and teens (the teen program starts today). I LOVE the theme for the kids’ summer reading program- “One World, Many Stories”. How cool is that?

The Inola Public Library doesn’t appear to have a summer reading program, but I read the history of the library, and it was a grassroots effort(started by the Inola Homemakers’ Extension Club) to establish it. I can only say that I think the people of Inola, Oklahoma rock.

The Lorain Public Library System has a summer reading program that makes me wish I were a teen in Lorain, Ohio. Teens can actually enter a drawing for a Sony Pocket reader! In addition to programs for kids and teens, there is also an adult summer reading program that runs through August 6. I don’t know why this information is so carefully hidden- I couldn’t even discover the theme of the program. Go sign up.

Morton Grove Public Library puts information about their summer reading program right there on their homepage. Way to go, guys! They also are using the “One World, Many Stories” theme, and have programs for kids, teens and adults.

St. Charles City-County Library District is also using the “One World, Many Stories” theme for their children’s program and the theme “You Are Here” for their teen program. You can access information about the programs from their homepage, but you’ll have to sit through a little slideshow of upcoming programs to get to it.

I think this “One World, Many Stories” theme is so great! It sure beats the summer reading theme at our local library, “Sit! Stay! Read!” Go sign up for summer reading at your own library today!

Posted on June 12, 2011 by , Reply

The Dark Side of YA Fiction

As I’m sure many people know by now, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal by their book critic decrying the graphic portrayal of some very dark corners of the teen experience in some of the current crop of books in YA fiction. The author reminisced about the good old days- the days when there was no YA fiction, meaning teens’ choices for learning about the world were the same as adults’ (Lolita, anyone)?.  then about the early days of YA fiction, where the authors just wrote about gang violence, murder, bullying, sex and sexuality, drug and alcohol abuse, and  religion (these are some of the issues that come up in The Outsiders, Forever, The Chocolate War, Deenie, Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret and Go Ask Alice, all books either mentioned by name or by authors mentioned by the writer of the article) It’s the current crop that’s worrisome to her, though, primarily because it makes explicitly visible the things some “gatekeepers” don’t wish to acknowledge about the interior lives (and exterior activities) of the lives of many teens today.

I think it’s contemporary books about contemporary teens for contemporary teens that really bother her, as she recommended several really excellent books with controversial or dark themes and adult content in a sidebar… but nearly every one of them took place in either the future or the past, and several of them wouldn’t be considered part of contemporary YA literature. Fahrenheit 451 is a great book for teens to read (I read it when a parent tried to have it banned from my middle school’s curriculum) but there’s no reason to turn away from YA books that have similar themes but take place today and involve teenage characters (I do wonder why it”s recommended just as a book for boys- really, it’s a book I hope everyone reads). Angelmonster is a fantastic book, but it’s hard to get darker than the early life of Mary Shelley.

There is a place of darkness in the mind of a teenager. It’s what compels us (as teens- I was one once) to investigate the horror, unfairness, and damage of the world around us.  It’s why assassinations and serial killers fascinate some of us, and (I am not trying to trivialize this in any way) why I read everything I could about the Holocaust and immersed myself in research on the Warsaw Ghetto Massacre. It isn’t necessary for every teen to read Robert Cormier to understand that there is hopelessness and evil in the world. But I still will never forget The Chocolate War, because it makes that understanding so personal.

Now, it is incredibly uncomfortable to read some of these books. The emotional impact can be considerable, and really disturbing (I think even more so for some adults). But it also opens doors, ones that lead to understanding by teens with limited experience of the world (and if you think those doors won’t crash down on them once they get to college, you’d be very wrong) and to validation for teens who think they’re alone in the world. The idea that their situation is not unique (and pretty much every teen thinks their situation is unique)  may never occur to them if they don’t encounter it in a book, which can lead to some much scarier consequences than a teen who reads the first chapter of The Hunger Games and decides it’s not their style. So many YA authors are flooded with letters from readers that say “You saved me”, or “I need advice” that Maggie Stiefvater (author of Shiver, among other books) wrote an article in Knowledge Quest (the journal of the American Association of School Librarians) discussing the responsibilities of the YA author to the teens who send these letters.

If these books were forced on teens, that would be terrible. We say on this site that if a book is not for you, you should put it down and find another.  But when they didn’t exist, it wasn’t because some of these problems didn’t exist. It’s just that people were afraid- nobody wanted to acknowledge them. Annie On My Mind was the first book that exposed me to the difficulties faced by teens who discover that they’re gay; Night Kites was the first mention of AIDS  I encountered that showed compassion. I needed those books at that time in my life. a time where an ad for a help line for gay teens was censored from my school’s newspaper because no student there  could possibly be gay. That’s not gatekeeping- that’s denial. I can only be glad that there are books now that address these topics, and many others,  openly.

Nobody’s making parents give these books to their kids.  They aren’t the only books available to teens, by far. I wouldn’t call it censorship for a parent to direct their child’s reading. Censorship is government-enforced. For someone recommending Fahrenheit 451 as a great read for teens, Meghan Cox Gurdon is awfully enthusiastic about controlling access to these materials for ALL kids, not just for the ones whose parents don’t want them reading Wintergirls. And if a kid’s not ready for or interested, it’s unlikely that they’ll read it or, if they do, understand it. Got a problem with the darkness in YA fiction? A lot of women my age first read Clan of the Cave Bear when they were barely teens, and that certainly wasn’t YA.

With so many types of books, so many authors with stories to tell, there’s something for pretty much everyone. That’s good. It means it’s a lot more likely that, one day, someone who needs it will leave the cave and see the light ahead.

The world is wider than the book critic at the Wall Street Journal would like teens to know. I often read the books section of the Journal, and they publish an article at least once a year about how dark YA fiction is, as if that’s news. Writers or readers of dark YA fiction (or the genre of your choice) shouldn’t need to justify themselves to anyone. Certainly not someone who recommends some rather dark fiction herself.

Posted on June 9, 2011 by , Reply
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