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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

Book Review: Ladies of Gothic Horror: A Collection of Classic Stories edited by Mitzi Szereto

Ladies of Gothic Horror: A Collection of Classic Stories edited by Mitzi Szereto

Midnight Rain Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1794556317

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Next time someone says that women can’t write horror fiction, point them to this book. In Ladies of Gothic Horror,  Mitzi Szereto has collected 17 stories by women writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries that will creep you out, chill your bones, and check the locks on your doors.  While some names may be more familiar to readers of supernatural fiction, such as Mary Shelley, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, many of the stories are by women writers better known for other works: Edith Nesbit is chiefly known for her children’s books, Elizabeth Gaskell for her social realist novels, Edith Wharton for her novels about the American upper class, Virginia Woolf for her modernist and feminist writings, Helena Blavatsky for her theosophical and occult work. Szereto follows each of the stories with a detailed biographical note about the author, when that information is available (very little is available on Eleanor F. Lewis, who evidently wrote only two stories– it’s too bad she didn’t write more).

Many of these women were supporting their families by writing for magazines, and their writing can be dramatic, depending on stereotypical characters, but they also skillfully build suspense and atmosphere, administer retribution, and illuminate tragedy.  Standout stories include Gertrude Atherton’s “Death and the Woman”, which manages to create dread and suspense without ever having the main character leave her husband’s bedside;  Edith Nesbit’s “Man-Size in Marble”, in which a newlywed husband discovers why you should pay attention to your housekeeper; Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “The Cold Embrace”, in which a young man learns that having your fiancee return from the grave is not actually romantic; Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”, in which an American couple discover that an English haunting is no joking matter; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Elia W. Peattie’s “The Room of the Evil Thought” and Eleanor F. Lewis’ “The Vengeance of a Tree” are brief, terrifying stories of strange hauntings. Helena Blavatsky’s “The Ensouled Violin” is positively gruesome. The collection ends with Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House”, a much lighter piece than the rest, that provides a satisfying conclusion.

Ladies of Gothic Horror does a valuable service by spotlighting supernatural and gothic works by women writers better known for other work and by introducing some of the 19th and early 20th centry women writers of supernatural fiction that can still be found in print (some, like Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Wind in the Rose-bush, are even available free on Kindle).  While there are a few writers, like Eleanor F. Lewis, who may have been previously unknown, this book makes a good starting place for further investigating works by women writers of supernatural and gothic horror from the time period. There are few other anthologies similar to it that are still in print, although I expect we will see more now that people are discovering women writers of horror through the just-released Monster, She Wrote by Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson, which we recently reviewed.  Ladies of Gothic Horror is a great opportunity for widening your horizons and experiencing the chills, suspense, and terrors, that can be found in these women’s works. Highly recommended.

 

 

Posted on September 18, 2019 by , Reply

Interview: Lisa Kroger and Melaine R. Anderson, Authors of Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

Monster, She Wrote  I’m so pleased that our reviewer David Simms had the opportunity to meet and interview Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson, the authors of Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction.  As a librarian, I am really happy to have a reference work that covers women who might not necessarily be in other reference volumes on horror writers. It often can be a puzzle simply to identify them!

Lisa is also a co-host of the bi-monthly horror podcast Know Fear.

 

Interview with Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson

 

David: This is such an important book. What prompted you to write it?

 

Lisa: I have my PhD in 18th Century British literature, with a focus on the Gothic writers. I suppose my interest began then, when I saw these spooky stories that were predominantly written by women. I have always loved horror, but the names that tend to be discussed are male: King, Poe, Lovecraft. I love them all, but I also wanted to have a discussion about the other giants in the field. I guess you could say that I wanted to write the history of horror, told only with the women writers. I wrote it with my coauthor, Melanie Anderson, who I met in graduate school. We quickly discovered a mutual love for horror and speculative fiction. The earliest seeds of this book started there, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

 

Melanie: Ever since graduate school, and including my first academic book, most of my scholarship has focused on the fiction of women writers, and in particular, supernatural fiction. When you think of Gothic or horror texts of American literature, men’s names come up quite a bit, but there were other voices in conversation with them. I wanted to share these women writers Lisa and I were finding with people who just love to read horror, or the supernatural, or the weird.

 

David: I’m embarrassed to have never heard of so many of these authors. You have placed these titles front and center to so many readers and writers. Which was your greatest find?

 

Lisa: The greatest and most frustrating was Eli Colter. We found her when reading through the old Weird Tales issues. Her short story “The Last Horror” is a great example of the “weird Western,” and it holds up even today. It’s an eerie, creepy tale. The problem with Colter is that there is very little known about her today. We had a hard time even finding biographical information on her–some places were still referring to her as “he.” But that is one of the purposes of this book: to reintroduce these women to a new set of readers.

 

Melanie: I agree with Lisa that Colter was probably our greatest find, and one of the more difficult ones because of lack of information. Many of the pulp writers felt mysterious to me because there was this impermanence to the work. Plus, they were focused on placing stories and not as personally visible. Another interesting find from the early pulp years was Gertrude Barrows Bennett, not because she was completely unknown, though her work had fallen out of print at times, but because she was known primarily under her pen name Francis Stevens. When we think about the beginnings of weird fiction, we have a very male picture in our minds, but that can be expanded a bit.

 

David: Which of these stories has resonated the strongest with you? How about the lives of the writer?

 

Lisa: I will always love Shirley Jackson, and I think that her story still resonates with me. She was a brilliant writer, but I think her talents weren’t always recognized. She wrote a few domestic stories, about her time raising her children. There seems to be this tension between what was expected of her as a mother and a professor’s wife and what was expected of her as a writer. It was as if she had two lives that couldn’t co-exist. A story that’s often told of her is when she was in the hospital having one of her children, and the nurse was taking her information at the hospital. The woman asked Shirley Jackson what her occupation was, and Jackson told her she was a writer. The nurse looked perplexed and said, “I’ll just put down housewife.” That is amazing to me! This is the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, for goodness sake. But I think she resonates with me because I see Jackson as a genius, yet the world around her sometimes didn’t recognize it, and that was probably solely because of her gender. I’m going on a tangent here, and I certainly don’t consider myself on Jackson’s level, but her story resonates with me. I think male writers with less talent have been called a genius when she was often overlooked.

 

Melanie: It’s hard to choose one woman, but Margery Lawrence’s independence fascinated me. I was familiar with her name from reading occult detective fiction of the early twentieth century. I didn’t, however, know about her interest in the occult, attendance at seances, and ghost hunting activities. While she did marry, she published an article titled “I Don’t Want to be a Mother” in 1929 in Cosmopolitan, and she was not afraid to travel. I think we have this idea of how women of previous generations existed in the world, and women like Lawrence add to and change that traditional image.   

 

David: Which story, or author, did you find most intriguing in your research?

 

Lisa: I love Margaret St. Clair. Read her stories “The Man Who Sold Ropes to the Gnoles” or “Horrer Howce,” which are so much fun and just well written overall. Plus, her life story is fascinating. Her research led her to basically practice a form of Wicca. She went from growing up in Kansas, the daughter of a politician, to living with her husband in California, spending her days gardening and learning about Wicca and writing about the occult. She just sounds like such a fascinating person.

 

Melanie: I also was intrigued with Margaret St. Clair. She was one of the first women pulp writers we learned about, and I’ve enjoyed reading her work. Dorothy Macardle was another of my favorites. I like a good haunted house book, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard of her book The Uninvited (also known as Uneasy Freehold). I think I discovered it through reading about the 1944 film adaptation. I find her melding of her knowledge of psychology with actual ghosts in a house to be fascinating. Most writers want to have it be one or the other, even if the end is ambiguous. But Macardle had ghosts that haunted people because of specific reactions to loss and seemed to want to emphasize the connection between hauntings and traumatic memories. Her life was fascinating as well. She was fiercely committed to her political views and to her writing.

 

David: Lisa, you’re also a writer. I hear you had a recent sale. Anything you can share about it?

 

Lisa: I have a short story coming out with Cemetery Dance, so look for that in a future issue. I have a few other projects up my sleeve, and I hope I can share some of that news soon.

 

David: With the uptick of amazing female horror writers, do you predict a resurgence of those written about in Monster, She Wrote?

 

Lisa: I hope so. But the women in our book are such a small percentage of the women writing horror and its related fields. There are so many more women writers to discover. I hope this book will just be a starting point. I want people to find new authors, but I also want people to be inspired to go and find authors they haven’t read, especially women, because there are so many out there.

 

David: Which writers do you find most fascinating in the current trend horror literature? Any favorite books?

 

Lisa: A personal favorite of mine is Carmen Maria Machado. Her Body and Other Parties blew me away when I read it. Every story in that collection is heartbreakingly good. I also love Lauren Beukes. I will read anything she writes.

 

David: You live in New Orleans, a mecca of gothic fiction. How inspiring do you find this setting for your own writing?

 

Lisa: I live just outside New Orleans, along the Gulf Coast. It is a Southern Gothic setting through and through. Just along my street, there are giant oak trees with gnarled limbs that hang over the paths, Spanish moss hanging low. There are literal swamps nearby with green water and gators. It’s a beautiful scene, but there’s a deadliness to that beauty, you know? If you’ve ever read Michael McDowell’s book The Elementals, then you know what I mean. That book could take place in my hometown. Plus, New Orleans has its own history and lore, steeped in vampires and ghosts. It’s one of the only places in the world where the “For Sale” signs will say if a house is haunted or not. It’s a selling point. Stories just seem to naturally form in this place, and it is infectious. It’s hard not to fall in love with storytelling in this place.

 

David: What’s next for you? Would you like to continue bringing to light more unsung heroines or delve deeper into your own fiction?

 

Lisa: I think I will always be looking for interesting women in history to uncover. I’m drawn to women’s stories, just like I’m drawn to women characters in fiction. I definitely want to explore more nonfiction, maybe a follow-up to Monster, She Wrote or some other aspect of history, but I also want to expand my fiction. I have some short stories I’m working on now. I also am interested in psychological horror, so I’ve been playing around with some novel ideas. I will always love anything to do with a cult, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t write a cult story one day.

 

David: You’re well versed in so many areas of horror and speculative fiction. Do you have any recommendations for hidden gems in film, television shows, art, comics, etc?

 

Lisa: Women are the ones to watch in the horror genre. One movie I love is The Invitation, directed by Karyn Kusama. It is so well done. I am often surprised that more people haven’t seen it. Another creator I love is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It’s not horror, but her television series Fleabag is two perfect seasons of storytelling. For graphic novels, I love the work of Emil Ferris and Emily Carroll. I don’t know if any of these really qualify as “hidden gems,” but I will always recommend their work.

 

Editor’s note: Check out our review of Monster, She Wrote here.

Posted on September 1, 2019 by , Reply
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