New Directions in Children's Gothic

Debatable Lands

Anna Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317444237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Children's literature today is dominated by the gothic mode, and it is in children's gothic fictions that we find the implications of cultural change most radically questioned and explored. This collection of essays looks at what is happening in the children's Gothic now when traditional monsters have become the heroes, when new monsters have come into play, when globalisation brings Harry Potter into China and yaoguai into the children's Gothic, and when childhood itself and children's literature as a genre can no longer be thought of as an uncontested space apart from the debates and power struggles of an adult domain. We look in detail at series such as The Mortal Instruments, Twilight, Chaos Walking, The Power of Five, Skulduggery Pleasant, and Cirque du Freak; at novels about witches and novels about changelings; at the Gothic in China, Japan and Oceania; and at authors including Celia Rees, Frances Hardinge, Alan Garner and Laini Taylor amongst many others. At a time when the energies and anxieties of children's novels can barely be contained anymore within the genre of children's literature, spilling over into YA and adult literature, we need to pay attention. Weird things are happening and they matter.

1 ‘Do Panic. They’re Coming’

Remaking the Weird in Contemporary Children’s Fiction

Chloe Buckley

Weird children’s fiction is a relatively recent and unlikely amalgamation of literary forms. The Weird is described by China Miéville as ‘a rather breathless and generally slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic … featuring non-traditional alien monsters … [focusing] on awe and its undermining of the quotidian’ (2009: 510). Primarily associated with early twentieth century writer H.P. Lovecraft, the Weird crystallizes in short stories written in Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s, collectively referred to as the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ after one of Lovecraft’s monstrous creations. Unlike other manifestations of the fantastic, such as fantasy and Gothic, the Weird does not allow for cathartic narratives of expulsion or comforting narratives of mastery. In this ontological horror there are no heroes: everybody dies or goes insane. Conversely, Children’s literature traditionally functions to encourage readers to identify positively with its protagonists, who undergo experiences of maturation in narratives structured around growth and restitution. Despite their seeming incompatibility, however, recent children’s fiction by Derek Landy – the Skulduggery Pleasant series (2007–) – and Anthony Horowitz – The Power of Five series (2005–2014) – appropriates the Weird into the traditional structures of children’s literature, reworking and reshaping each in response to the other. The inclusion of Weird monsters and ontological horror into the terrain of children’s fantasy undermines and complicates the stories of maturation and mastery they promise. Likewise, the manifestation of the Weird in children’s fiction results in a remaking of the form, suggesting new ways of reading the Weird.

Until recently, Weird fiction was not very visible in popular culture. In the past decade, however, ‘Cthulhu’ has emerged from the shadows of pulp magazines and roleplaying games into the mainstream. Initially, this was confined to adult texts such as Comedy Central’s South Park.¹ ‘Cute’ versions of Cthulhu have also become visible in merchandizing, comics and online culture (see Mizsei Ward 2013). These comedic and cute versions of Cthulhu, as well as the sale of Cthulhu cuddly toys on Amazon, indicates a change in the way the Weird is being read and appropriated, and further suggests that it is increasingly available for use in children’s texts. For example, a recent episode of the children’s animated series Scooby Doo! Mystery Inc. (2010–) pits Scooby and the gang against a tentacle-faced monster, ‘Char Gar Gothakon’, whose other-worldly shriek renders his victims gibbering wrecks. ‘Char Gar Gothakon’ has materialized from the pages of books written by a troubled college professor, ‘H. P. Hatecraft’. Luckily for Scooby and the gang, this terrifying monster turns out to be ‘Howard E. Robertson’, Hatecraft’s biggest fan. Whether all viewers get the reference or not, the names ‘Gothakon’, ‘Hatecraft’ and ‘Howard E. Robertson’ refer to writers and works from the ‘Weird’ tradition. Scooby Doo appropriates these cult figures and situates them in a parodic homage, inviting child and adult viewers alike to get in on the joke. This use of the Weird undermines the way in which it is usually read by critics. Whilst Scooby Doo’s Cthulhu episode lends some support to Miéville’s assertion that the tentacle has become ‘the default monstrous appendage of today’, it also suggests that the Weird is no longer a signifier of ‘crisis-blasted modernity’ (Miéville 2008: 105, 128). This incursion of Weird into children’s texts bears more critical attention than it has heretofore been given, precisely because it does not fit within usual critical discourse about either children’s fiction or the Weird. This double transformation is evident in the work of Derek Landy and Anthony Horowitz. Both writers incorporate the irreverence and playfulness that can be seen in Scooby Doo! yet also manage to retain the ontological horror of their source texts. Their work combines bleak terror with meta-fictional playfulness, transforming the cultural work Weird can do and using it, in turn, to reshape narratives of maturation.

Despite the proliferation of Weird in contemporary pop culture, critics continue to associate it with a specific historical context. Emerging at the end of the nineteenth century in the work of proto-modernist authors, such as Arthur Machen, Weird fiction crystallizes in the work of Lovecraft between 1905 and 1935. China Miéville argues that it is the trauma of the first world war that provides the ‘foundational underlying crisis’ for Weird fiction to emerge in this period (2009: 513). Weird fiction breaks with the teratology and tropes of its parent genre, which were ‘profoundly inadequate’ in the face of the war (Miéville 2009: 513). Likewise, other critics define the Weird through the distinct break it makes with Gothic. Fred Botting argues that Lovecraft’s work distances itself from ‘Gothic formulas and limitations’, positioning it as a radical form, dealing with the limitations of everyday perceptions and experience, and, ultimately, the cosmic insignificance of humanity (Botting 2012: 287, 283). Similarly, S.T. Joshi, argues that the Weird is a more ‘advanced form’ of gothic (1990: 7) because it moves ‘the locus of fear from the mundane to … the ‘“Great Outside”’ (Joshi 2001: 2). Recently, Lovecraft has become popular with philosophers aiming to break with what they see as an entrenched Kantian – or ‘correlationist’ – mode of thought in Western philosophy (Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011). Lovecraft’s work is especially valued in this debate since it exemplifies what some philosophers have named ‘Weird Realism’ (see Harman 2012). Elsewhere, the Weird tentacle is being championed as a pedagogical tool since it offers ways of thinking about the ‘unteachable moment’ (Luckhurst 2014). What these critics have in common is their insistence on the fact that Weird fiction is a radical form of literature, one that exceeds what has come before in its themes, monstrous teratology and affective aims, and one that sits on the margins, in opposition to mainstream modes of thought.

However, none of these accounts of Weird fiction satisfactorily explains the work Weird does when it appears in the form of irreverent cartoons, soft toys or children’s books. Indeed, since critics are invested in a definition of Weird as a form of literary modernism, its pop cultural manifestations have been little discussed. Joshi, for example, is dismissive of most popular, mass market Weird fiction

Weird writing has certainly proliferated since Lovecraft’s time, and especially since about 1970, but it is not at all clear that much of this mass of writing has any literary significance or much chance of survival … the amount of meritous weird fiction being written today is in exactly inverse proportion to its quantity.

(Joshi 2001: 1)

Though it is important to note that Joshi writes at the beginning of the twenty-first century, before the Weird became more visible in popular culture, the notion of ‘meritous fiction’ he posits is unlikely to embrace texts like Scooby Doo! Joshi has done valuable work in bringing Weird fiction to the attention of the academy, arguing that it is a legitimate object of study. However, the position of Weird fiction now is vastly different to what it was in 2001, and critics no longer need to mount a defence of the form on the basis that it is ‘worthy’ literature. Indeed, a defence in these terms implicitly devalues popular fiction, which is critiqued by Joshi as ‘mere shudder-mongering’ (2001: 2). Joshi’s hierarchy of Weird fiction is informed by subcultural elitism, as well as intellectual snobbery. The desire for Weird to remain a ‘small modicum of genuine literature’ read by a ‘discriminating audience’ implies a distaste for mainstream audiences that can be likened to the way subcultures dread their practices ‘gushing up’ to the mainstream (Joshi 2001: 3; Thornton 1995: 5). Concomitantly, Joshi’s ‘discriminating audience’ must have the correct literary tastes and cult knowledge to evaluate Weird fiction as worthy, or not. Child readers are implicitly excluded from this. It is because of these various critical and cultural investments in the Weird, then, that no critical attention has been paid to Weird children’s fiction until now.

The work of Derek Landy and Anthony Horowitz is able to challenge the elitist valuation of Weird as necessarily literary, philosophical, and radical since they combine the radical horror of the Weird with other reading pleasures. Both Skulduggery Pleasant and The Power of Five blend the Weird with traditional fantasy and, as long running series, these texts are shaped by mass-market forces. For example, more than one reviewer describes Skulduggery Pleasant as Harry Potter-meets-Lovecraft (Authortrek 2014). In terms of sales, the success of both series suggests that the Weird is becoming increasingly marketable. The first novel in Horowitz’s series was recently adapted as a graphic novel, with the others soon to follow, and a Skulduggery Pleasant film is in development. Despite their mass market appeal, however, both series retain the bleak horror of Lovecraft’s work. For Joshi, this horror is epistemological since Lovecraft reveals that our knowledge of the universe is flawed (1990: 7). For Miéville, the horror is ontological: ‘The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact’ (2005: xiii). Skulduggery Pleasant and The Power of Five produce and play with notions both of ontological horror and epistemological anxiety. The first books of each series reveal a hidden world of Weird magic existing alongside everyday reality. This is not the ‘sword and sorcery’ magic of traditional fantasy, but dangerous power employed against monstrous entities: ‘The Faceless Ones’ (Skulduggery Pleasant) or ‘The Old Ones’ (The Power of Five). The protagonists are tasked with protecting the oblivious inhabitants of the real world from terrifying outer beings seeking to reclaim dominance on earth in a way that recalls Lovecraft’s most famous short story, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, in which he suggests that it is only a matter of time before the Old Ones arise (Lovecraft 1963a: 57). For Miéville, the discovery of Cthulhu and the other ‘Old Ones’, in its ‘recruitment to invented cultural memory … back-projects their radical unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself’ (2008: 113). In the first Power of Five novel, the protagonist, Matt, must confront the a priori nature of the Weird, described as ‘living on one side of a mirror: you think there is nothing on the other side until one day a switch is thrown and suddenly the mirror is transparent’ (Horowitz 2005: 214). The horror comes from an awful epistemological error, and Matt is forced to unlearn the ontology of his childhood. Even the Bible has it wrong: ‘The Christian church talks about Satan, Lucifer and all the other devils. But these are just memories of the greatest, original evil: The Old Ones’ (Horowitz 2005: 214). For Stephanie, in Skulduggery Pleasant, the adjustment to a Weird world is also destabilizing: ‘Bit by bit, she was seeing how close magic had been to her when she was growing up, if only she had known where to look. It was such a strange sensation … Better get used to that feeling’ (Landy 2007: 187). Stephanie is forced to view all aspects of her world anew, and Weirdness increasingly permeates even her own home.

There is a unique variation here on the usual Weird narrative found in Lovecraft’s stories, in which an adult protagonist uncovers the terrifying truth about the universe. In both of these fictions, the discovery that ‘en-Weirds’ the universe is made by a child on the cusp of adolescence. Stephanie is 12; Matt is 14 and their rite of passage between childhood and maturity involves a shift into the Weird. In Raven’s Gate, Matt leaves the care of his Aunt and enters the LEAF project, a rehabilitation programme for young offenders. As well as struggling to come to terms with his adolescent abandonment issues, Matt has to cope with the discovery that his new foster carers are cultists who want to sacrifice him in order to bring the ‘Old Ones’ back into the world. The book begins with Matt travelling to Lesser Malling, a village modelled on Lovecraft’s degenerate and isolated New England hovel, Innsmouth (Lovecraft 2000). The unnatural woodland surrounding the village denotes the shift into the Weird and Matt notes that ‘nature wasn’t meant to grow like this’ (Horowitz 2005: 86), recalling Lovecraft’s description of the ‘deep woods that no axe has ever cut’ in West Arkham where ‘the hills rise wild’ (Lovecraft 1963b: 176). Yet it is not simply the movement into a Weird landscape that creates ontological horror. Rather, it is Matt’s growing understanding that what he encounters in Lesser Malling will transform him forever. There is no escaping the terror of the Weird: ‘The darkness was waiting for him. He was like a fly on the edge of a huge web’ (Horowitz 2005: 86). Here, the Weird is figured as a threshold that must be crossed as part of the maturation process, but crossing the threshold means entering the jaws of the monsters waiting on the other side, with no hope of triumph or return.

These novels negotiate, then, the parameters of the maturation narrative as well as those found in a typical Weird tale. In the past two decades, the ‘felix culpa’ or innocence-to-experience narrative can be seen in a number of popular children and Young Adult fantasy and gothic texts, such as Garth Nix’s Sabriel (2002), J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995–2000). Weird fiction is not a good fit with this narrative, however, since epistemological horror posits knowledge as disastrous rather than empowering. The unfortunate protagonist ends up dead or irrevocably insane. Indeed, Lovecraft’s human characters are actually unimportant; instead the ‘phenomena’ take centre stage (Joshi 1990: 74). Yet Landy and Horowitz incorporate this Lovecraftian contempt for character into the character driven narrative structures typical of children’s fiction, setting up maturation narratives premised on the protagonist’s eventual triumph or mastery. This narrative trajectory of mastery (at a cost) negotiates the anti-Enlightenment bias of Weird fiction. As Joshi states, Lovecraft in particular had ‘an extraordinarily low opinion of people’s ability to deal with certain types of knowledge’ (Joshi 1990: 205):

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far … but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light.

(Lovecraft 1963a: 47)

In The Power of Five and Skulduggery Pleasant knowledge of the Weird universe is corrosive, a taint that the protagonists will never be rid of. In Skulduggery Pleasant, Stephanie is increasingly isolated from her family as she learns more about the Weird world. For example, her Uncle Fergus is frightened and disgusted by the ‘filthy magic’ she is learning and orders Stephanie to stay away: ‘I don’t want you teaching my daughters anything’ (Landy 2011: 361). Fergus’ fierce care of his daughters highlights Stephanie’s isolation: she is forced to keep most of her life secret from her own parents. Early on in Raven’s Gate, Matt too realizes that he carries the taint of Weird knowledge that excludes him from normal life. His neighbour shuns him: ‘I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was horrified. More than that. She was actually sick … She was horrified and sick because of me’ (Horowitz 2005: 184). None of the children who are inducted into the Weird universe in The Power of Five feel blessed by the knowledge they have. Throughout the series, characters repeatedly wish that they had never heard of the Old Ones. When, at the close of the first novel, Matt learns that there is a second portal that needs to be closed, he wants to give in: ‘I don’t want to know any more’ (Horowitz 2005: 282). Matt’s realization that his brief victory over the ‘Old Ones’ is temporary is too much for him to bear. In contrast to the hero narrative, which also informs these narrative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• New Directions in Children’s Gothic: Debatable Lands
• 1 ‘Do Panic. They’re Coming’: Remaking the Weird in Contemporary Children’s Fiction
• 2 Cuckoo Songs: The Changeling as Hero
• 3 ‘These are troubling, confusing times’: Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak as Post-9/11 Gothic
• 4 Figuring the Witch
• 5 Ghostly Vestiges of Strange Tales: Horror, History and the Haunted Chinese Child
• 6 Girls in Lace Dresses: The Intersections of Gothic in Japanese Youth Fiction and Fashion
• 7 The Gothic in Oceania
• 8 ‘The Gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the Gothic’: Gothicizing History and Historicizing the Gothic in Celia Rees’ Young Adult Fiction
• 9 Adolescent Angels and Demons: The Religious Imagination in Young Adult Gothic Literature
• 10 ‘Mind to Mind’: The Gothic Loss of Privacy in the Twilight Saga and Chaos Walking Trilogy
• 11 ‘THIS HILL IS STILL DANGEROUS’: Alan Garner’s Weirdstone Trilogy – A Hauntology
• List of Contributors
• Index