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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: Slasher Girls & Monster Boys edited by April Genevieve Tucholke


Slasher Girls & Monster Boys edited by April Genevieve Tucholke

Speak, 2015

ISBN-13: 978-014751408

Available:

 

 

Slasher Girls & Monster Boys  is an anthology of stories by YA authors, including Kendare Blake, Jonathan Maberry, Carrie Ryan, Leigh Bardugo, and Marie Lu. Each story is based on a horror movie, television show, or fiction, or some combination. Strangely, the inspirations for the stories are only indicated at the end of each story, upside down in tiny print at the bottom of the page. Observant fans with a wide knowledge of the genre will probably be able to hazard some good guesses, but it really doesn’t matter– the theme is incidental, and the stories stand on their own.

Some stories stand out more than others. Nova Ren Suma’s “The Birds of Azalea Street” is a creepy tale about three girls who uncover a neighborhood pedophile. April Genevieve Tucholke’s “The Flicker, The Fingers, The Beat, The Sigh” riffs on I Know What You Did Last Summer, with an outcast girl from school as the victim. The awfulness of the teenagers, and the regret and memories of the narrator, as well as the eventual consequences, are what make this a horrific and tragic story. In “Fat Girl With a Knife” Jonathan Maberry gives us a great character with a taste for revenge who discovers a talent for zombie-killing. I would love to see him do more with this character, as it felt like this ended too quickly.  Megan Shepherd spins a story about a girl who outwits death in “Hide and Seek.”  In “Sleepless”, Jay Kristoff pulls the rug right out from under your feet, just when you think you’ve figured out what’s going on. This is one of the best stories in the book.  In Marie Lu’s powerful “The Girl Without A Face” a boy at the height of privilege is forced to face the consequences of raping a girl who died by suicide by her ghost. What part of this story is most horrifying is up to the perception of the reader. “Stitches”,  by A.G. Howard, while it required a significant suspension of disbelief as regards medical procedures, is an imaginative twist on Frankenstein, and a great character study of a girl whose abusive father makes a deal with a “collector” to have her amputate his body parts and replace them with others in order to pay the bills. Finally “On the I-5” gives us the story of a hitchiker ghost out for revenge.

Some stories didn’t hit quite the right note with me. Carrie Ryan’s “In The Forest, Dark and Deep”, is a surreal, disturbing, and bloody take on Alice in Wonderland. It’s one of the truly horrific tales in the set, but I’m not sure most teens will have the patience for the style. “Emmeline”, by Cat Winters, mixes up several movies and books to create a supernatural tale set in the era of World War I, setting up an uneasy Angela Carter-esque romance that can only end badly. While I enjoyed the story I don’t know that it has a contemporary enough tone to appeal to modern teen readers. “Verse Chorus Verse” gets into the price a parent is willing to pay for their child’s fame, and the build-up is freaky, but as it’s mostly told from the parent’s point of view, it didn’t seem to really belong in a YA anthology.  In”The Dark, Scary Parts and All” a bullied, grief-stricken girl is offered the power to do her worst, if she’s willing to take it. The relationships and decisions in this story just felt off.  “M” is a strange little story that seems to belong more in an Agatha Christie novel than in an anthology of horror stories. I wanted to like it more, as there was a very Edward Gorey-esque influence, and the choice of a blind main character was interesting, but it wasn’t enough. “A Girl Who Dreamed of Snow” seemed more like fantasy than horror, with a shaman girl  sacrificing the men who kidnap her to appease spirits who will end a plague and save humanity from extinction.

A strong majority of the authors in this anthology are women, which seems to be the case overall in YA horror right now, as are the majority of the protagonists. In the cases where the story is told from a boy’s point of view, he is not usually presented in a terribly sympathetic manner, and generally it’s difficult to believe he isn’t getting his just desserts. Very few stories stood out to me as presenting a woman with agency: “Fat Girl With a Knife” has a main character who’s already out for revenge against the school bullies when a zombie outbreak starts, “A Girl Who Dreamed of Snow” has a girl with a plan in place that she carries through, and the girl in “Hide and Seek” is smart, strategic, and tricky. I loved seeing these characters take charge.

While I found this anthology to be a mixed bag, it covers a lot of ground, and I think most readers, especially girls, will find something to enjoy. Recommended.

 

Contains: gore, violence, murder, torture, references to pedophilia, references to rape, references to suicide, body horror

 

Editor’s note: Slasher Girls and Monster Boys was a 2019 Summer Scares YA pick. 

 

Posted on September 11, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Not Even Bones (Market of Monsters #1) by Rebecca Schaeffer

Not Even Bones  by Rebecca Schaeffer

HMH Books for Young Readers, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1328863546

Available: Hardcover, paperback, and Kindle edition

 

If you are planning to start this book, make sure you have plenty of time to finish it, because if you put it down, unless you have a very strong stomach, you may find it difficult to pick it up again. I have addressed content issues within this review, but please see the content warning underneath, as it includes items suggested by the author. 

Not Even Bones is a YA novel set in Peru that takes place in a world teeming with “unnatural creatures.” Some of these, like vampires, are dangerous. Others simply have unusual abilities. While there is an organization, INHUP, tasked with protecting harmless unnaturals, it isn’t effective at policing the black market in unnaturals’ body parts. Nita’s mother hunts and kills unnaturals, and brings them to Nita for dissection and packaging. Nita loves dissection, so she tries not to think about who the dead bodies might have been when they were alive, but one day her mother brings home a living unnatural whose parts will sell better if they’re fresh, and Nita can’t deal with cutting pieces of a living person, so she sets him free. Shortly after, Nita, who has an unnatural ability to heal herself, is kidnapped for sale on the black market herself  and imprisoned in an isolated market on the Amazon in the midst of the jungle. Believing her mother has sold her, Nita decides she must rely on her own resourcefulness to escape, something she becomes even more certain of when she realizes her kidnapper employs a zannie, an unnatural who feeds off the pain of others and is willing to torture them to get his meal. Even a zannie has his limits, though, and Nita and the zannie, Kovit, team up to escape from the market.

Schaeffer does not pull her punches in this book. There is no question that the main (and most of the secondary) characters have done terrible things, unapologetically, and Schaeffer has Kovit explicitly make this point:

“I like it better when people remember who I am. The only thing I hate more than being demonized is when people actively ignore what I do or try to make excuses for it… When they try to make me sympathetic, moralize all the decisions that aren’t moral.”

Nita and Kovit are desperate people, and in the course of the story Nita crosses moral lines she didn’t even know she had, to the point that Kovit warns her that the only thing keeping them from becoming true monsters is setting limits, however arbitary, and sticking to them no matter what.  The gore, gruesomeness, torture, and especially cannibalism was difficult for me to handle (although much is only implied, what we do see is more than enough, and cannibalism of any kind is usually a deal-breaker for me). I can’t recommend it generally to teens, unless they have a very strong stomach and a sophisticated understanding of morality, because in spite of their monstrous actions, their often selfish motivations, and this explicit reminder that they are not sympathetic characters, Schaeffer still managed to have me rooting for Nita and Kovit. They are victimizers, but they’re also victims of both biology and circumstance.

Schaeffer’s imagination is incredible, her world-building is fantastic, and the characters she takes time to develop fully are many-faceted and complex. I can’t think of too many horror novels set in South America, but it was a great choice for this book. Another unusual choice, especially because the book is set in South America, is that Kovit is Thai, and while it isn’t actually necessary to go into this detail to move the story along, this background does come up in an explanation of his origin as an unnatural specific to Thailand, how colonialism has affected the perception of “zannies”, his family, and how he ended up in this particular situation. I haven’t seen many Thai characters in YA fiction, so this was kind of neat to see.

This is both a physically and emotionally gut-wrenching book, both hard to put down and hard to pick back up, but the cliffhanger ending and memorable characters ensure that, despite the difficulty I had with the body horror (especially the dissections and the cannibalism) in this book, I will be looking out for the sequel, Only Ashes Remain, out soon.

 

Contains: Gore, violence, sadism, death, mutilation, dissections, body horror, cannibalism, torture, dismemberment, mention of suicide, mention of animal abuse.

 

Posted on August 23, 2019 by , Reply
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