“The first thing you do is kill off the parents”. It’s a standard beginning to many stories for and about children. Parents want to protect their children, and for the main character to start on his or her journey, and overcome obstacles independently, the parents have to go.
Sometimes the parents are just absent, out of selflessness, or self-centeredness, or fear. Percy Jackson’s mother sends him away to prevent monsters from finding him; Ella, from Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted, is left behind while her merchant father travels; Medusa, in the Goddess Girls books, is totally neglected by her parents because, unlike her sisters, she is mortal. And sometimes their absence helps to drive the story: in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg and Charles Wallace travel through space and time to rescue their father; and without the sacrifice Harry Potter’s parents make to save him, he wouldn’t be The Boy Who Lived. It’s hard to tell a story about growing up without exploring both love and loss.
Adults worry a lot about fantasy violence– battles against mythical monsters or in unbelievable worlds. But the key word there is “unbelievable”. R.L. Stine has said that when he writes for children he makes sure that there is no way they will carry over their fears into believing that what has happened in the books could take place in real life. When a gifted writer immerses us in intense emotions, it’s much more powerful, and sometimes scarier than anything supernatural.
Children’s literature is filled with death and violence– it’s inescapable. As adults who love children and want to protect them, and who want to share our love of reading, that can be really hard for us to handle. But I think it’s really important that we trust kids to tell us what they can handle. It’s really wrenching to read some of these books with my kids right now. It’s honestly the books that aren’t marketed as horror, or even scary, that make a real emotional impact. The Monster Kid won’t stay in the room if there’s any kind of realistic death that takes place in a book, although the mayhem in the Percy Jackson books doesn’t bother him, and he’s a fan of Goosebumps. His sister sobbed through parts of Ella Enchanted after Ella’s mother died, but insisted I keep going. Tiffany Aching’s long meditations on her grandmother’s death, in The Wee Free Men, didn’t touch her as deeply. Upon learning that the parents of the main character die at the beginning of The Secret Garden, though, she decided to pass. We’ll get there someday, when she’s ready.
As uncomfortable as it can be to share some stories, it’s a great disservice to developing the reading life of a child to completely avoid the darkness. The kids already know it’s there.
Awake at Midnight
July 3, 2016 at 11:49 am
Stine’s comment was interesting. At a young age I could watch movie clips when I saw Tom Savini present at a comic book convention, watch zombies eat the innards of innocents without cringing. Yet I can’t watch a live knee surgery without feeling squeamish. It’s all about the perception of real and fantasy. But don’t we always tout that kids horror is about preparing kids psyches for life’s emotional challenges? Giving them role models for framing and coping with life’s dark places?
One reason the Harry Potter books are so much more poignant to me than the movies, (as well done as they were,) is that in the novels, Harry deeply and acutely feels the death of every single one of his companions, and that allows the reader to understand the rage within him at the final confrontation with the dark army of He Who Cannot be Named. Yes, Fred dies in the movie, but they gloss over the amount of utter loss in the final novels on the big screen.
There are mid-grade books about the Holocaust. How do you even approach a darkness that big? Yet Yolen and Lowry give kids the stepping stone they need, an emotional framework for when they are old enough to fully comprehend. We hate what Old Yeller and Sounder do to our emotions, and yet they are classics because they help us experience the shadow that sooner or later we all have to face.
I agree that it is a disservice to the reader to gloss over the pain, darkness and shadows. It’s fun to watch Wile E. Coyote come back with a new weapon of roadrunner destruction from Acme and have our action hero fight through a bullet wound to the shoulder. We know Slappy the ventriloquist dummy isn’t really in the closet. But watching a character we relate to closely face a challenge, find confidence inside and learn how to cope with a real challenge, threat or sadness is invaluable.
Kirsten
July 6, 2016 at 2:08 pm
I don’t know that children’s horror is necessarily about preparing children psychologically for life’s emotional challenges– children’s literature in general does serve a didactic purpose, but “children’s horror” is a marketing category developed in the 1980s that mainly centers on series books like Stine’s. Children’s horror usually gives children a safe space to experience thrills and scares, while remaining in control– the kids know it’s not real, and they can close the book. Children’s literature is not necessarily a safe space, but it does give kids some control when things get intense and emotional. I would say that for both me and my daughter it is much easier for us to read something than to watch it.
I agree with you that the way death and grief are handled in the Harry Potter books is very genuine. So many people got frustrated with Harry in The Order of the Phoenix because he wasn’t the same nice kid, but what would you expect from a kid who saw a classmate killed in front of him? The fact that Harry is as well-adjusted as he is, is a minor miracle.
Jane Yolen and Lois Lowry are artful writers; most books for middle graders that touch on the Holocaust focus on tangential events, like in When The Soldiers Were Gone or Snow Treasure. There are many, many books that touch on the disturbing situations going on in much of the world today; there are many war zones, and it takes a skillful writer to handle those topics. I don’t suggest that we just leave kids to it with some of these books– it’s often a good thing to be reading with them and talking through the hard parts– but it is a trap to think that we can keep them in a state of innocence.