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Book List: The Dangers of Reality Television

People have been fearmongering about the dangers of television for decades. Before television became common in every household, they warned of the effects of comic books and rock and roll. More recently, criticism has been aimed at violent video games, heavy metal, and the Internet. But always there in the middle, media critics have had something to say about television, and usually it’s not good.

But as a culture, we got used to television. Then the same old thing, year after year, got kind of boring, and the question for the networks and the cable channels became “what do we do now?” Because we could record the shows and skip past commercials, television shows had to be edgy, to provide something different that would catch our attention enough to really grab us for long enough to get us to sit through an entire show, every week. And what’s more interesting than peeking into someone else’s life?

Actual reality isn’t all that interesting to watch, and it’s also got some really disgusting moments. Who wants to stare at people watching TV, or clipping their toenails? No, it’s the drama of taking people out of their own reality and making them interact in a completely unreal, compressed, environment that is so fascinating. A show like Survivor is kind of like a nonlethal re-enactment of Lord of the Flies— you watch it knowing every episode will mean the end for one of the characters. Watching The Osbournes gives the viewer a window into a world that’s totally bizarre to the rest of us, but normal for the participants. You know it’s all edited to create a storyline that will fit into a half hour or an hour of television, but it gives you a thrill.  And it gives viewers a window that not only allows them see what’s going on, but to separate from it. It’s kind of like watching the gladiators in the ring at the Coliseum, from the stands. It’s a game, but it’s not.  And that’s what makes reality television the perfect setting for a horror story. Here are seven novels that take advantage of the worst aspects of reality television to create nightmares for their characters. As always, not every book on this list will be appropriate or appreciated by every person, so know your reader!

 

 A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (pre-order)

This book messed with my head. It holds a funhouse mirror up to the creepiness of media manipulation. At the center of the story is Merry. As a child, she witnessed unexplainable and disturbing behaviors from her older sister that became the center of a reality television show, and resulted in family tragedy. The novel itself approaches the story from many angles. Merry as as a young adult, years later; Merry as a child living through the events that changed her life; and a mystery blogger dissecting the show in minute detail all get their say. This was sent to us for review, and is not even out yet, but it falls in the category of “unforgettable” for me.  For the purposes of this list, though,  it succeeds tremendously as a mind-bender that indicts the media, and especially reality television, for altering events, and lives, to fit a predetermined narrative.

 

 The Running Man by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

The Running Man takes place in a dystopian future where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is so tremendous that the desperate are willing to put themselves in lethal, televised ‘games’ for others’ entertainment. It’s a fast-paced, gripping, terrifying, science fiction thriller. When Stephen King wrote The Running Man in 1982, I am sure he had no idea how prescient the book would be.  At that time 2025 must have seemed endlessly far into the future, and the first reality television show was years away from being created. And yet, as we approach that time, much of what he predicted has become reality– affordable health care still hasn’t made the scene, income inequality has become more and more severe, and people are still bloodthirsty, greedy, and selfish. King created a horrifying world that has become even more so as time marches us forward to his future, set in the year 2025. As a reader’s advisory note, there is also a movie, with Arnold Schwarznegger, and a great media tie-in to one of the lesser-known works of Stephen King.

 

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

A gritty, desolate atmosphere pervades Broken Monsters. While it’s framed as a serial killer novel, it is bizarre from the very beginning, with the discovery of the first body. As you might expect with either a serial killer novel or a horror novel, there’s a fair amount of gore, but it doesn’t overwhelm the story. The plot follows the detective on the case, her daughter, a homeless man, an Internet journalist trying to get his YouTube videos to go viral, and the serial killer. This is a memorable book for me not just because of the storytelling, character development, originality, and atmosphere of the story but also because of the effect the Internet journalist and his videos have on the events of the story. While Beukes is taking a larger look at how social media affects our reality, it’s the journalist’s actions during the climax of events that really struck home with me.

 

 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

For those who have never heard of The Hunger Games, it’s a YA dystopian novel in which a totalitarian government randomly chooses two candidates from each of its districts to participate in a televised competition in which the participants all attempt to kill each other in order to be the last one standing.   The wealthy can slant the competition by providing favorite competitors with gifts. This is media used as not just an opiate, but as a weapon. It’s gripping, suspenseful, and manages to effectively integrate both friendship and love into a very hostile and dangerous situation that most people really do see as a game. It is the first in a series that also includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay. All of the books have been made into movies. In a move that is painfully ironic, the CW is making a reality show based on the book.

 

 Kitty’s House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn

This paranormal novel is the seventh title in the Kitty Norville series. Talk show radio host and werewolf Kitty Norville agrees to participate in an all-supernatural  reality television show, expecting it to be a typical reality show with a focus on the drama that emerges from forced interpersonal relationships. Anyone who has read Agatha Christie can probably guess what starts happening once the participants arrive in the remote mountain lodge where the show will be filmed. Fans of Kim Harrison may enjoy this one.
 Fragment by Warren Fahy

Scientists on a ship in the South Pacific who are participating in an “educational” reality television show, SeaLife, land on a remote island, only to be attacked by bizarre predators, with the cameras rolling. Is the footage real, or is it a hoax? The U.S.  government doesn’t wait to find out– it blockades the island to prevent the creatures from escaping, Botanist Nell Duckworth, one of the participants on the show, is on the team of scientists that is sent to investigate the giant, ferocious, arthropods that populate the island. Grounded in science, this frightening, fast-paced thriller has been compared to Jurassic Park.

Castaways by Brian Keene

Trigger warning for graphic rape, gore, and violence. There are a lot of horror readers who enjoy having these ratcheted up– and this novel does that. This is Keene’s tribute to the work of Richard Laymon. According to reviews I’ve read, it’s not Keene’s most original work, either in style or content, although it’s well-paced and reasonably suspenseful, so if you are looking for a good introduction to Keene’s work, you might want to try a different book. However, the plot certainly fits our theme: contestants on a Survivor-style reality show, Castaways, are trapped on the island by a storm. The island, originally thought to be deserted, is in fact populated with monstrous cannibals with horrifying plans for the women trapped on the island.

 

 

 

Banned Books Week: America’s Top Ten Countdown

 

Hey, it’s Banned Books Week!  The news is out now from ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom– the top ten banned and challenged titles for the year! And we’re counting them down here, just like Casey Kasem!

Thank you, Casey Kasem, for counting them down with us!

At number 10, Beloved by Toni Morrison took the place of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  Both titles are often challenged, and have appeared on and off the top ten list over the last several years.

At number 9, newcomer The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls took the place of The Gossip Girls series by Cecily von Ziegesar, a series that has been in and out of the top 10 over the last ten years.

At number 8, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a favorite here that’s no stranger to challenges (last seen on the top ten list in 2008), jumped back into the top ten, displacing What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones, which also made the top ten in 2010 and 2011.

At number 7, newcomer Looking for Alaska by John Green displaced Brave New World  by Aldous Huxley. Brave New World had been in the top ten since 2010.

At number 6, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, which also made the list in 2008, took the place of the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor,  which has made the list three times in the past ten years.

At number 5,  the heartwarming story of a penguin family, And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, moved The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie… but we haven’t seen the end of that, so stay with me! As a side note, And Tango Makes Three has been number one four times and number 2 once in the past ten years already. Those penguins are alarming folk, apparently.

At number 4, the controversial erotica title Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, overshadowed My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy by Dori Hillestand Butler.

At number 3, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher displaced… The Hunger Games trilogy. Yes, really. With all the media attention directed to The Hunger Games, I’m kind of surprised those books didn’t make the top ten.

At number 2, guess what shows up? The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie actually moved UP the list, displacing The Color of Earth, a Korean manga series, entirely.

And… the number one banned or challenged book in the United States this past year is….. drumroll, please….

CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!  

Now, I’m not a fan of potty humor, but really? What does this say about us as a society that the books most objected to in the country are challenged because of poop jokes?  Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series knocked the series ttyn; ttyl; l8r, g8r by Lauren Myracle out of first place. Both series have had frequent appearances, in the top ten, though. That means her books will probably be back.

Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to have a list like this every year? It’s great to hear how we should all promote literacy and do our best to put books into kids’ hands, to give them ownership. But look at the books in our top ten countdown here. Every one of them is a book a teen or child might read. Some might only read them in school, but some of them are absolutely written for and intended to be set in the hands of the people we want to be growing readers and thinking individuals. So a book makes a few people uneasy. How can we dare to take it away from everyone?

And that’s the Monster Librarian, counting them down. America’s Top Ten Banned Books. Now go find a copy of one and read it! And find a second one, and give it to a teen or child who otherwise might miss out on some really good reads. Or at least some quality potty humor.

 

 

 

 

Murder Most Foul: Violent Death in Children’s Literature

The Boston Globe just published an interview with Michelle Ann Abate, a professor at Ohio State University who has just published a book about the tradition of murder and violence in children’s literature (a really interesting take on the “scaring the children” theme). I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the interviewer edited the interview for publication, but for some reason both he and she come across as seeming surprised that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature, and she’s actually quoted as saying that “the story of violence and books for young readers hasn’t been told before”.

I have to say that I am surprised at the surprise that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature. It’s a frequent reason that books are banned (although racism, explicit sexual situations, and profanity currently top that). Going back in history, even after you progress past Grimm’s fairy tales, there’s no lack of violence and death. Andersen’s tales often end with death. “The Little Match Girl”, for instance, freezes to death on the street.

 

Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, is a classic children’s book, with lovely illustrations. Here’s one for a story about a girl with matches who burns to death!

 

 

And let’s not forget the Gashlycrumb Tinies.  Poor Kate! Childhood used to be a much different creature than it is today, a point that Abate does make, and attitudes toward parenting tended toward the didactic and scaring kids into behaving. It is interesting to note, though, that Hoffman wrote the book to entertain his young child, and in spite of the terrifying stories and illustrations, there are a lot of adults who remember it as being funny when they were kids.  There’s a darkness inside children that a lot of grownups don’t want to admit is there.

“K is for Kate who was struck with an axe”

Moving on to more recent times, we have the parents of the kids in  Julian Thompson’s The Grounding of Group 6, who send their kids to a school that guarantees they’ll be permanently lost in the woods; the viciousness of the children in William Sleator’s House of Stairs; the matter-of-fact euthanasia of children and the elderly in Lois Lowry’s The Giver;  the government approved murders of “extra” children in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden; the chilling account of the Holocaust in The Devil’s Arithmetic;  the supernatural terrors from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; the death of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Death, and especially murder, can be scary in books, but nowhere near as scary as daily life. Processing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a lot more difficult for my kids than processing The Tailypo. 

Many people– librarians, critics, parents, academics– have considered the story of violence in children’s books. Nearly every year there’s at least one article about how children’s literature has gotten too dark. I would say that it’s an aspect that people either choose to avoid (it’s not difficult to avoid children’s books containing murders) or take for granted. When something like The Hunger Games or Goosebumps becomes massively popular, violence in children’s books comes into the spotlight, but even when it’s not in the spotlight, there are people who notice it, study it, and write about it. I think as transmedia platforms become more popular we’ll see more of this come to light, as books and visual media connect in more ways than ever, and this is definitely a topic worth paying attention to… but if the study of violence in children’s literature hasn’t been noticed before, it’s only because people didn’t want to see what was really there.