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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

Book List: The Hunger Games and Battle Royale

With the news that a prequel to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is upcoming, Monster Librarian brings forth a blast from the past, compiled by Dylan Kowalewski in 2012 just before the first movie was released, with reviews by Jim Cobb and Michele Lee.

The Hunger Games and Battle Royale

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is an incredibly popular dystopian young adult series that has crossover appeal that very few other books have had, as both adults and teens love the books, and tomorrow The Hunger Games movie will open at theaters across the country.

Before Suzanne Collins had teens dueling to the death, there was another dystopian novel that had teens battling each other for survival, called Battle Royale.  Battle Royale was written by  Koushun Takami and was originally published in 1999.  The book is set in an alternate world in Japan, where a totalitarian government, in order to terrorize the population, renders a school bus full of middle school students unconscious, only to relocate them on a small island where they are given random weapons and are forced to battle each other until there is only one survivor. It has also been made into a well-regarded, controversial film that has been compared to A Clockwork Orange with a not-so-wonderful sequel, and a manga series.  Battle Royale is explicit in its violence, much more so than The Hunger Games, and that’s unexpected to many fans of Collins’ books who have heard that The Hunger Games is based on Battle Royale, but it has devoted fans of its own. Since the film was released, “battle royale” has taken on a new meaning– a fictional narrative or mode of entertainment (such as a video game) where a group of people are told to kill each other off until there is just one survivor.

So if you are a fan of The Hunger Games with a strong stomach, you might want to take a look at Battle Royale.

Speaking of  The Hunger Games, Jim Cobb of  Survival Weekly reviewed the first two books for us and Michele Lee reviewed the third and last one, Mockingjay. if you haven’t read the books yet now is the time to stop by your local library and pick up a copy!

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Scholastic Press, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-0545310581

Available: New and Used

In the not-so-far-off future, the United States has been decimated by disaster and war. It is now a country called Panem, and is broken into twelve districts. There were at one time thirteen districts, but one of them tried to rise up against the government, referred to as the Capitol, and was annihilated. Katniss, our main character, is from District 12, the poorest district. The reader may infer that this district is located in an area corresponding to Appalachia. Capitol citizens may enjoy fine food and drink, but those who live in District 12 subsist on dog, wild game, and grains.

Each year, two delegates (one boy, one girl, aged 8-18) are chosen by lottery from each district to compete in the Hunger Games. The Games are held in a different environment each year and are televised to the masses across the country. It is a battle to the death among the delegates. Think Lord of the Flies meets The Running Man.

During the current lottery, Katniss’ young sister, Prim, is chosen. As allowed by the rules, Katniss immediately volunteers to take her place. Katniss knows sending Prim to The Hunger Games is nothing but a death sentence. Her intention in volunteering has nothing to do with wanting to compete. Rather, she is trying to save her sister.

Katniss is a hunter who has spent years learning the ways of the woods– tracking, fishing, trapping, woodcraft. Her mother is an herbalist who has taught her what plants heal and how to use them. To feed her family, Katniss has taken down all manner of wild game… but can she kill another human being?

The characterization in this book is phenomenal. You feel the emotional conflict within Katniss every step of the way. The other characters have distinct personalities that are realistically portrayed. Some are sympathetic, others not so much. Readers find themselves rooting for certain characters and hoping others are taken down quickly.

The action sequences are well planned and executed. They are both exciting and brutal. These might be kids, but they are kids who want to win at any cost.

This is one of my favorite reads this year. It is written for the young adult crowd (grade 7 and up). The book is the first in a trilogy, with the third book set to hit bookstores in a few weeks.

Highly, highly recommended.

Reviewed by Jim Cobb

 

Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)by Suzanne Collins

Scholastic Press; 1 edition, 2009

ISBN-13: 978-0439023498

Available: New and Used

Catching Fire is book two in the Hunger Games trilogy. It begins a short time after the end of the first book. Katniss and Peeta, our star-crossed lovers, have returned to District 12 victorious. They are given new homes for their families, as well as wealth and status. For a brief period, all is well. Katniss also learns of a rumor about District 13. All her life, she has been told District 13 was uninhabitable, due to being destroyed by the Capitol in a war whose end result was the creation of the Hunger Games. She is now told there are indeed people living in District 13, people who are working to overthrow the Capitol.

As part of their duties as Hunger Games victors, Katniss and Peeta are to tour the entire country of Panem, visiting each district in turn. On the day they are to depart, Katniss is confronted by President Snow. He is not at all happy with how the Hunger Games ended, and believes there is a resistance movement sweeping through the districts that has chosen Katniss as their symbol of rebellion. President Snow explains to Katniss she must prove to the entire country her defiance in the Hunger Games was not an act of rebellion but instead driven by her love of Peeta.

During their victory tour, Katniss witnesses firsthand both acts of defiance among the populace and the Capitol’s iron-fisted way of dealing with those acts.

The next Hunger Games is a Quarter Quell. This occurs every twenty-five years and allows the Capitol to introduce some sort of twist to the event. This time around, it is determined that the participants will be chosen from all living previous Hunger Games victors. Katniss and Peeta are headed right back into the arena, with every opponent being someone who has survived previous Hunger Games.

Twists and turns abound in this book, but it does suffer from what I call “middle book syndrome.” In almost every trilogy, the middle book is the weakest of the three. The first book is usually exciting in that there is a goodly amount of world-building. The reader learns who to root for and who to despise. The second book often is not much more than a lead up to a dazzling conclusion in the third volume.

In this particular case, Catching Fire does contribute to the overall story. It is well-written and the characters are fleshed out well. But the reader, knowing there is another book coming, might feel this book goes a bit slower than necessary. Certainly by the time the actual Hunger Games begin, the reader is almost out of patience.

Overall, the book is a good follow up to the first volume, but it does move slowly. Recommended for all those who loved the first Hunger Games book.

Reviewed by Jim Cobb

 

mockingjay

 

 

 

 

 

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Scholastic, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0545663267
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

Ye gods, what a mule kick in the heart this book is. Katniss has seen the destruction of her town and most of the people she knew. She’s faced the Arena twice for the amusement of her world, and had to kill, and face her own death. Now she lives in the tunnels of District 13, being forced to become the star of the revolution.

Once again she’s trading her own well-being for that of others, but District 13’s president is determined to keep Katniss on a much tighter leash. War brings out a side of Gayle Katniss doesn’t like and Peeta, left behind in the Arena break out, is being tortured into playing Katniss’ opposite, moral booster for the Capitol and President Snow.

Even once rescued, Peeta has been so twisted by trackerjack venom and psychological reconditioning that he tries to kill Katniss more than once. Katniss, trying to deal with how very broken she is, has no real support, and at times it seems no one even cares about her, just The Mockingjay.

War isn’t prettied up at all for readers, which is a mixed blessing since there’s no real diluting of either battle, nor Katniss’ emotional trauma. Collins doesn’t even pretend that Katniss, or Peeta, or Gayle are valiant defenders of anything. They are people picking sides and fighting for what they feel is right, but in the process the tragedy they cause is just as real as the harm they endure spurring them to fight.

While it isn’t pretty, Mockingjay is an amazingly soulful story, sure to resonate with readers, teens and adults a like. Definitely a recommended read, but with a caveat for caution for anyone with trigger issues.

Reviewed by Michele Lee

Posted on June 24, 2019 by , Reply
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