Reading in the Dark

Horror in Children's Literature and Culture

Jessica R. McCort

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781496806451
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Contributions by Rebecca A. Brown, Justine Gieni, Holly Harper, Emily L. Hiltz, A. Robin Hoffman, Kirsten Kowalewski, Peter C. Kunze, Jorie Lagerwey, Nick Levey, Jessica R. McCort, and Janani SubramanianDark novels, shows, and films targeted toward children and young adults are proliferating wildly. It is even more crucial now to understand the methods by which such texts have traditionally operated and how those methods have been challenged, abandoned, and appropriated. Reading in the Dark fills a gap in criticism devoted to children's popular culture by concentrating on horror, an often-neglected genre. These scholars explore the intersection between horror, popular culture, and children's cultural productions, including picture books, fairy tales, young adult literature, television, and monster movies. Reading in the Dark looks at horror texts for children with deserved respect, weighing the multitude of benefits they can provide for young readers and viewers. Refusing to write off the horror genre as campy, trite, or deforming, these essays instead recognize many of the texts and films categorized as "scary" as among those most widely consumed by children and young adults. In addition, scholars consider how adult horror has been domesticated by children's literature and culture, with authors and screenwriters turning that which was once horrifying into safe, funny, and delightful books and films. Scholars likewise examine the impetus behind such re-envisioning of the adult horror novel or film as something appropriate for the young. The collection investigates both the constructive and the troublesome aspects of scary books, movies, and television shows targeted toward children and young adults. It considers the complex mechanisms by which these texts communicate overt messages and hidden agendas, and it treats as well the readers' experiences of such mechanisms.

Introduction

Why Horror? (Or, The Importance of Being Frightened)

JESSICA R. McCORT

On one level it’s like a ghost-train ride or a furious rollercoaster dash. There’s an exhilaration to feeling scared, to feeling the inevitable threat of our mortality, without any actual danger. We can shrug it off, mock the specter of death with impunity, get an adrenaline rush without the need to face real danger. In this context, children can realize, at least implicitly, that looking at the scary side of life—loss, bereavement, fear, the monster under the bed—is possible. They can examine these emotions, even play with them, and by so doing gain some power over them. After all, aren’t we told by behavioral scientists that that’s how the more intelligent animal species (including the human species) learn—by playing? Horror fiction isn’t going to make everyone stable and save society from the ills that horror fiction often depicts, but it can offer a safe forum for examining, and maybe lightening, the dark. Horror stories provide a playground in which children (and adults) can play at fear. And in the end they’ll be safe and, hopefully, reassured. Overall, it seems better than repression.

—ROBERT HOOD,
“A PLAYGROUND FOR FEAR: HORROR FICTION FOR CHILDREN”

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG GIRL, I WAS FASCINATED BY MY MOTHER’S PRIZED set of Poe, a centenary collection of his works that came in five compact volumes. Wrapped in stately gray covers that belied their nature, they were housed behind the glass doors of the bookshelves that buttressed the fireplace in our living room. These books, purchased as a set at an auction, were completely forbidden. I could look, but I couldn’t touch.

On my seventh birthday, my mother selected one of the books, had my friends and I corral our sleeping bags around her favorite chair, and read to us from “The Tell-Tale Heart.” My earliest memories are of my mother’s voice, changing shape and texture as it wove stories for me, her voice so intertwined with the tales that even now, as I read them to my own children, I can hear her intonations, the distinct sound of her. This, however, was a new story, filled with images that unsettled as they settled. I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out—“Who’s there?” (Poe 354).

“The Tell-Tale Heart,” a terrifying story if there ever was one, left black trails on my thoughts. My child’s mind fixated on the old man’s filmed-over eye and the young man’s murderous hatred (along with his inability to keep his mouth shut). As I grew, the old man and his nemesis stayed with me, and other frightening figures began to line up behind them: the Headless Horseman, Bloody Fingers, Maleficent and the Evil Queen, Dracula, Princess Mombi and the Wheelers, Sauron, It, and Leland Palmer. That birthday, however, stands out in my memory as my initiation into a grim world marked by a dark aesthetic and the rhythm of a good ghost story.

As this little anecdote suggests, I initially came to horror through my mother’s voice. This implies that some of us who love frightening stories have inherited the desire to interact with them, that we have been taught to appreciate the frightening by those who have appreciated it before us. One of the lessons I learned that night was that the Poe volumes were not off limits because my mother thought they were inappropriate for an impressionable and voracious young reader like me. They were off limits because she valued them so highly. When I turned seven, she knew that I was old enough to treat them with a careful hand and a curious mind. My love for the genre, however, can only be partly chalked up to my childish desire to snuggle down near my mother and feel the strings of my nerves rise and fall as her voice led dramatically to each story’s crescendo. I realized fairly early on that there must be something more, some deeper switch that got flipped only when my imagination was ignited by fear.

Not every child likes horror. In fact, some run from it as fast as their legs will carry them. But for certain children, horror holds a powerful allure: the more frightening a book or film, the better. Friends and family members who don’t share my appreciation for the genre are often puzzled by my affinity for frightening things, on countless occasions posing questions like “Why are you so enthralled by that stuff? What appeal does it hold for people like you?” The underlying implication to such questions is always that there is something wrong with people like me. The impetus for this book, in fact, initially derived from my attempts to respond to such queries, especially when people began to ask them about my eldest daughter.

So, then, why are some children drawn to tales dark and grim? The essays in this book seek to grapple with this question by extending the critical conversation about the gothic in children’s and young adult literature and culture to focus more on the genre of gothic horror and the appropriation and application of motifs, characters, themes, and tropes from horror texts designed for adults in children’s and young adult texts.¹ In the pages that follow, the work collected here examines different strains of children’s and young adult horror, but it does not pretend to be exhaustive (some of the texts considered are not, in fact, easily classifiable as horror, per the traditional definition of the term). The goal, instead, is to examine a variety of texts that engage, both overtly and subtly, with constructs of gothic horror in order to begin to demonstrate the pervasiveness and the appeal of horror in children’s and young adult literature, film, and television. The essays included consider an array of texts—monstrous picturebooks, cautionary tales, Edward Gorey’s illustrations of childhood death, contemporary frightening fairy-tale novels, “monster” movies and vampiric TV shows, and the Hunger Games series²—and look for patterns in the narratives’ rules of engagement with the horror genre, as well as with their audiences. In some of these essays, the authors consider the dangers of such texts, examining, for instance, the socializing influences therein that intend to distort children’s abilities to empathize with a monstrous Other. In others, they concentrate on horror’s pleasurable appeal for young readers and viewers, seeking to come to terms with why the popularity of texts specifically branded as horror for children have flourished since the late 1980s. Still others consider how horror has been appropriated in recent years by authors and filmmakers who seek to domesticate terror, riffing on the motifs of horror while simultaneously stripping them of their power to frighten. Overall, the collection seeks to investigate both the constructive and the troublesome aspects of scary books, movies, and television shows targeted toward children and young adults, considering the complex mechanisms by which they communicate their overt messages and their hidden agendas, as well as the readers’ experiences of such mechanisms.

Before turning to these essays, however, what “horror” as a critical term means in terms of the confines of this book, especially when applied to children’s and young adult cultures and texts, must be established. First of all, the term “horror” as a genre classification proves rather unwieldy, as it can be applied to a variety of narrative types, including, to name a few, “faux horror” (a brand of horror targeted toward younger children that tends to domesticate terror and make the frightening funny), literary horror (which draws on, participates with, and often critiques landmark texts and traditions, such as fairy tales, cautionary tales, and canonized monster novels such as Dracula and Frankenstein), serialized tween/teen horror books (which encompass the horror-fiction serials of the Goosebumps variety), and young adult horror (of the Twilight brand, which is arguably actually a blend of romance, action/adventure, and fantasy infused with horrific elements).³ Further complicating the issue is that, prior to the late 1980s and early 1990s, horror was not openly considered a distinct, significant vein within children’s literature or culture, and texts were not specifically categorized as “horror stories for children” (Shryock-Hood 2). This is not to say that horror hasn’t been lurking in the children’s library for a long, long time. Consider the fairy tales written by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, for instance, in which horrific elements are central to many of the stories: Little Snow White’s evil stepmother wants to consume the heart of her innocent stepdaughter for dinner (or her lungs and liver, depending on the version you’ve read); Little Red Riding Hood is devoured by a wolf for straying from the path and, in the Grimm’s rendition, is cut from his stomach by the huntsman; Bluebeard’s slaughtered wives are ranged along the walls of his secret chamber, their blood congealing on the floor at the curious heroine’s feet.⁴ Leaping ahead to the 1950s monster craze, the bloodcurdling magazines, comics, and other paraphernalia targeted toward young readers and viewers, as Rebecca Brown notes in her essay collected here, also demonstrate that the horror genre had been both popular among and coopted by the young for many years preceding the enthusiastic publication of horror for children that emerged in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Nonetheless, among the first books to be explicitly packaged and heavily marketed as “horror literature for young readers” were horror serials that relied heavily on fright for fright’s sake, including the likes of the Point Horror novels (written by various authors, including R. L. Stine, Richie Tankersley Cusick, Carol Ellis, and Caroline B. Cooney) and Stine’s Goosebumps series, both of which, like their monster-magazine predecessors, were partially inspired by the popularity and profitability of the horror films wreaking havoc on the silver screen at that time (Wilson 2; Loer 324).⁵

Not surprisingly, as Michael Wilson has pointed out, the popular and critical response to books explicitly marketed to young readers under the umbrella of horror was sometimes unfavorable, the books regarded by some adults as dangerous influences on the imaginations of young readers: “the very use of the word ‘horror’ in what was ostensibly children’s literature was a very bold step and one that sent shockwaves through the adult world, which often manifested itself as moral outrage” (2). It makes sense, after all, that some adults have objected to other adults profiting heavily off of children’s fears; the use of fear as a marketing strategy can seem just as distasteful as the “pedagogy of fear” Maria Tatar has described in relation to the Brothers Grimm’s repackaging of fairy tales as morality machines during the nineteenth century.⁶ Stine’s books in particular have come under fire since their inception, viewed with skepticism by some for capitalizing on children’s terror while simultaneously rotting the brains of young readers. As Perry Nodelman describes, “When R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books first appeared [. . .], many parents, teachers, and librarians viewed the mere existence of the new series as a monstrous intrusion into the well-intentioned world of children’s publishing, and the content of the novels themselves as an equally monstrous intrusion into the ordinarily innocent minds of young readers” (118). Though Nodelman claims adults today are merely dismayed by the books, Goosebumps remains one of the most banned/challenged series/books for young American readers. The American Library Association ranked the books #94 in its list of the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books between 2000 and 2009. Many of the other titles listed can also either be categorized as gothic horror for children and young adults or as books often picked up by young readers that contain gothic or horror elements, including the Harry Potter series (#1), Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories (#7), Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr. Griffen (#25), Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (#74), Harry Allard’s Bumps in the Night (#93), and Garth Nix’s Shade’s Children (#95) (“Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000–2009”). From 1990 to 1999, the Goosebumps books were ranked fifteenth on the list (Scary Stories claiming the top prize during that decade) (“100 Most Frequently Challenged Books: 1990–1999”). The titles of editorials and newspaper articles that belabored the placement of Goosebumps on the banned list capture the spirit of the debate surrounding the books: “Parents Want to Get Rid of Goosebumps” (Columbian 19 January 1997); “Goosebumps against the Law? Kind of Makes You Shiver” (Orange County Register 2 February 1997); “Kids’ Author Gives Parents Goosebumps” (Gazette 4 March 1997); “Horror on the Shelves? Take Goosebumps out of School Libraries? Most Fourth and Fifth Graders Say the Books Aren’t Scary, Let Alone Harmful” (The Plain Dealer 30 March 1997). More recently, The Hunger Games has come under fire for its “unsuited to age group” content, largely due to the books’ use of horrific child-on-child violence and their “religious viewpoint”; in 2013, The Hunger Games ranked fifth among the books reported to the Office for Intellectual Freedom as a result of acts of censorship (“Top Ten Challenged Books List By Year: 2001–2013”).

As these listings make clear, the debate over horror fiction for the young, especially in relation to genre serials or texts that explicitly engage gothic/horror themes, rages on; parents, educators, and librarians today continue to express reservations about being the ones to put scary books into the hands of young readers. In her entry on “Horror Fiction” in Children’s Books and Their Creators, Stephanie Loer notes that many, even if they are opposed to withholding books from young readers, still tend to come to the conclusion that such books are acceptable only as a gateway to better literature. In turn, she describes the reception of children’s and young adult horror fiction in much the same fashion as people tend to describe gateway drugs, echoing the critical pigeonholing of horror as a substandard genre: “these books are not good literature, but they are not harmful. Enticing, recreational reading, they can be a hook to get reluctant readers into libraries where they will find books of more substance” (324). For others, however, reading books of the Goosebumps ilk just for the sake of reading is simply not good enough. They argue, instead, that readers should be exposed to “quality” literature, claiming that horror books for children, especially Stine’s, are inferior and second rate—campy, pulpy, or trite.⁷ In short, some deem it inappropriate to present such books to children because the benefits do not outweigh the perceived costs. The costs are not just rooted in the stylistic quality of the books, either. The content of the books is often a major factor in adults’ resistance to promoting them to child readers. As the authors of Frightening Fiction describe, “Concern about the effects of reading ‘horror’ stems from the fact that, as a genre, it tends to be associated with kinds of knowledge and forms of experience regarded by many as unsuitable for children, notably those involving the occult or provoking high levels of fear or anxiety” (2). From this point of view, the subject matter of horror in general, whether in a Stine Goosebumps serial or in Suzanne Collins’s critically acclaimed Hunger Games trilogy, is outside the confines of what children should have access to; restricting such access is viewed as a protective gesture.⁸ Not surprisingly, many of the books of the gothic or horror in nature that appear on the frequently challenged lists are cited for the following offen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Punishing the Abject Child
• “A Wonderful Horrid Thing”
• From Aggressive Wolf to Heteronormative Zombie
• “In the Darkest Zones”
• Didactic Monstrosity and Postmodern Revisionism in Contemporary Children’s Films
• Get It Together
• Teen Terrors
• Let the Games Begin
• Where Are the Scary Books?
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index