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Teen Read Week: It Came From The Library! Join the Conversation on YA Literature, Reading, and Libraries!

It’s Teen Read Week! Today, you (by which I mean everyone) can join the Twitter conversation on teen reading and young adult literature (pretty much anything remotely related to these topics is fair game– for more information click here), via the hashtag #TRW12. Or, if you don’t tweet, you can go here to share what you’re doing for Teen Read Week.

Teens can vote to choose next year’s Teen Read Week theme here.

And everyone can (and should) check out the Teens’ Top Ten list here, to find out who the winners are! Nominees included some fantastic and terrifying choices, including All Good Children by Catherine Austen, Ashes by Ilsa Bick, Across the Universe by Beth Revis, the creepy Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, and two Stoker nominees– A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and This Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Oppel(Kenneth Oppel wrote an awesome guest post for us earlier this week– check it out! I really recommend you check out the entire list of nominees and not just the top ten, because many of the great books I mentioned above did not make the actual list, but every single one I listed is an AMAZING read.

Have a thrilling day!

Posted on October 17, 2012 by , Reply

Teen Read Week: It Came From The Library! Kenneth Oppel on Frankenstein

Kenneth Oppel is the author of  two novels (so far) about the young Victor Frankenstein, This Dark Endeavor (reviewed here) and Such Wicked Intent(reviewed here). He has also written many other books, and received a Printz Honor Award for his novel Airborn in 2004. We asked him to share what influenced him to write the story of Victor Frankenstein. It was pretty neat to learn that Frankenstein is one of his favorite books! You can see what he wrote back to us below.

 

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 From Kenneth Oppel:

 

Frankenstein is one of my favourite novels, and I wish I’d written it. Unfortunately, it was written two hundred years ago by a 19-year old genius called Mary Shelley. Arguably, Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, the first monster novel, the first horror novel. Not only is it an incredibly gripping read but, like all the best literature, it tackles weighty themes: reckless human ambition, the ethical implications of scientific pursuit, the creator’s responsibilities to his creations, and the perils of really, really bad parenting. All things that are still relevant today.

 

A couple of years ago, while re-reading the novel, I was struck by how quickly Victor Frankenstein’s youth is described – and one line in particular stuck out: “No youth could have passed more happily than mine.” Now, remember that this is a kid who goes on to dig up corpses, chop them up, sew the body parts back together, jolt them with electricity in the hopes of revivifying them, and creating life from death. Doesn’t sound like a very happy youth to me. What might have happened to Victor to lead him to become the “mad scientist” we all know? That, I thought, would make an interesting story.

 

A few pages later, Shelley goes on to give a helpful clue: “I entered with the greatest diligence into the search for… the elixir of life…. What glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!”

 

Right away I had an image of a teenager who was curious, ambitious, arrogant, and probably obsessive. Obsessions are a staple of literature — every great character has one. Whether it’s a desire or an aspiration, or the simple will to survive, there’s something that drives every hero — and every reader to keep turning pages.

 

Sixteen year old Victor Frankenstein is a fantastic character to work with. He’s the embryonic form of the man who will go on to dig up corpses, chop them up, suture then back together and jolt them with electricity to try to create life from death. Now that’s an obsession! When you read about people who create a work of genius, whether it’s an invention or a work of art, there’s often a strain of compulsion or even madness that motivates them and keeps them working tirelessly towards their goal — often at great emotional cost to themselves and those around them. Off the top of my head it could be as various as Howard Hughes (with his movies, or his Spruce Goose), or Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) or Philip K Dick (who wrote himself to death).

 

Victor’s search for The Elixir of Life makes for an excellent quest. But it seemed to me there had to be something more behind it. What if Victor needed the elixir for a personal purpose? Was he himself ill? Or maybe a friend, parent – or a beloved sibling?

 

And so, in my alternative Frankenstein mythology, I decided that Victor Frankenstein had a twin brother, Konrad — who has an entirely different personality, and is a much steadier sort than Victor — and just that much better at everything.

 

It was tremendous fun to learn about the real Mary Shelley and her sources for Frankenstein. I’m sure plenty of my readers will pick up on all the references to the real Mary Shelley and the fascinating and tragedy-filled life she led. From my point of view, all this material was source material for me. I used Mary Shelley’s family as a basis for Victor’s – and stole characteristics from her husband (Percy Shelley) and friend Lord Byron to build Victor’s personality and backstory. When you’re reimagining a literary classic, you want to preserve the tone of the original, and this was one way I could do it.

 

And I loved writing Victor. As a writer I think you strive to create characters that exercsie the full range of human behaviour and emotion — and often these things are not heroic or noble or attractive. Victor is certainly a larger than life characters. He’s smart, arrogant, rash, selfish, but also loyal and loving and brave — in short, he’s no more an antihero than most of us on the planet. It’s huge fun to let loose a character with a temper, but also with a passion and a plan. I think you sympathize with Victor’s sense of inferiority around his perfect identical twin, and any reader would sympathize with someone who tries so hard to be good at things, in the shadow of another. Sometimes envy makes people do rotten things. So Victor’s not always nice, but you always want to watch him — and I think you want him to get what he wants, even if it’s a bit appalling. I mean, he’s Victor Frankenstein, not Harry Potter.

Posted on October 15, 2012 by , 1 comment

RA For All: Horror: 31 Days of Horror Project

MonsterLibrarian.com was pleased to be included in Becky Siegel Spratford’s project 31 Days of Horror over at her blog RA for All: Horror. Becky is the expert in reader’s advisory in the horror genre, so if you haven’t heard of her and are looking for a great resource go check her blog out!

The post went up a couple of days ago. Click here to go directly to our guest post there. I hope you’ll also take some time to see who else is featured over there this month– so far, it’s been interesting! Or, if you would rather just keep reading, I’ll include what I wrote below, although none of the links that I included there are active. But you really should go check RA for All: Horror out.

 

TRENDS IN THE HORROR GENRE
By Kirsten Kowalewski

Many of the trends in horror fiction right now reflect trends in publishing and reading in general. Anyone who follows books at all, or has been to the bookstore recently, will note an overwhelming number of YA titles devoted to the supernatural, as well as dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. So results of a recent study by Bowker Market Research, that show that 55% of YA books (targeted at ages 12-17) are purchased by adults reflect a notable trend not just in general but for the horror genre. The trend towards adults reading YA books is now so strong that popular writers of adult horror, such as Jonathan Maberry are now writing YA titles, and publishers of adult horror are now starting YA imprints–ChiZine Publications recently announced that it will introduce a new imprint, ChiTeen, in 2014.

Something to remember as you consider these numbers is that teens also read a lot of adult fiction. In her book Shelf Discovery, Lizzie Skurnick touches on this, as she recalls reading adult books like Jaws and raiding her parents’ bookshelves , in addition to reading contemporary YA fiction (and as Becky noted in this blog post, as teens are new to the genre, introducing them to these more mature titles is a great way to circulate your backlist). Many, many people start reading Stephen King and other adult horror novels as teens. What young adults read isn’t necessarily fiction targeted at young adults, any more than what adults read is targeted to them.

At MonsterLibrarian.com, we’ve reviewed books with monsters in them that fall all along the spectrum, and the most popular searches for book lists are for YA vampire books and paranormal romances. These are so popular that we started a blog, Reading Bites, just for this audience. However, there seems to be agreement between horror readers and librarians that the vampire novel, for the most part, has lost its bite; as one middle school librarian noted to me recently, middle school girls aren’t scared by a vampire who will take them to the prom. As vampires bleed into the genres of romance and mystery, hardcore horror readers, who prefer their monsters to be monstrous, have started to turn away from this subgenre. Make sure you know what a reader wants when he or she asks for a vampire book.

The trend in YA fiction towards dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, influenced by The Hunger Games, also seems to frequently take on a romantic angle, and often portrays the main characters as catalysts for societal change. Post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be mainly reflected in adult horror in the subgenre of zombie fiction, where the focus is usually on the survivors of a post-apocalyptic event doing their best to survive a zombie invasion. Lovers of this subgenre are sometimes content to read the same kind of story over and over—they like the fast-paced action and gore and aren’t necessarily interested in character development—but in recent years there have been some fresh takes on a genre that, while popular, was starting to get a bit stale (you can see what I mean by checking out our list of zombie titles). Mad science is also taking off in interesting directions, with plague viruses, technology gone mad, genetic manipulation, and man-made monsters showing up with frequency in both YA and adult fiction. One of the scariest books I’ve read in the past twelve months was Kenneth Oppell’s This Dark Endeavor (reviewed here), a prequel to Mary Shelley’s classic horror story Frankenstein. Both Oppell’s short novel and Shelley’s original appeared together in the same ebook. Now that’s a hook! The Frankenstein story takes a totally different turn in Neal Shusterman’s UnWholly, due out later this month. And these days many zombie books start with some kind of virus or plague, with the search for a cure a significant storyline.

Another trend in publishing and reading that is affecting horror fiction is the popularity of ebooks and self-publishing. At the time that we started MonsterLibrarian.com, horror fiction had more or less lost its home in mainstream publishing and migrated to small presses that often specialized in printing collector’s editions—beautiful, but expensive, and not easily available to the average consumer. Some of them, like Cemetery Dance and Bad Moon Books have done very well, but many times books from small presses are only available by direct order, which makes them hard to find.

As ebooks and self-publishing have exploded, horror fiction of all kinds has become much more readily available. Short pieces that weren’t exactly what a publisher was looking for, or were by unknown authors, could be (and are) presented in ebook format, and find an audience. This is great for horror readers who are loyal to a subgenre that isn’t being promoted in mainstream publishing , like werewolf fiction. There is a strong minority of readers who love werewolf horror (enough that we hosted a Werewolf Month for several years), but there are few current werewolf horror books (here’s our list of werewolf titles). A search for “werewolf horror” on Amazon.com brings up over 1,000 titles, mostly self-published ebooks. It’s hard to know what the quality of a self-published book will be before you read it, but many ebooks are very low-priced. Some authors are now publishing serials, with an attempt to hook an audience with episodes of a continuing story. Authors whose rights have reverted to them can introduce their books to a new audience. Small presses sell books in ebook format as well as collector’s editions, making those available to a wider audience. And current mainstream authors (like Stephen King) are finding a demand for shorter pieces . The ways that ebooks are changing publishing in general and horror in particular are many, and it’s very exciting. Unfortunately for libraries and their readers, most of these won’t be easily available through a service like Overdrive. The conundrum of how libraries can help horror readers connect more easily with ebooks doesn’t seem like one that can be solved easily.

A final trend that I see affecting the way people experience horror fiction is the way it is sweeping the media. Television shows like The Walking Dead (originally based on a series of graphic novels) have made zombies more mainstream. Movies such as Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods draw in reluctant viewers (see what blogger Barbara Vey wrote here). Apps allow you to take the experience along with you. The brand-new book Horrible Hauntings by Shirin Yim Bridges uses augmented reality technology to extend the reading experience; ghosts leap out at the reader when you point your cell phone camera at the pictures! Horror is such a visual genre that the way other media are giving readers to experience it is nothing short of amazing.

Getting the horror reader in the door can be a challenge. But the real challenge is this: with so much horror outside mainstream publishing, once you get the reader in the door, how are you going to manage to give them what they’re looking for?

Posted on October 7, 2012 by , Reply
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