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Children’s Books and the Presence of Death

 

“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.

 

Image credit: Through the door to The Secret Garden. From The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Posted on March 28, 2015 by , 2 comments

Murder Most Foul: Violent Death in Children’s Literature

The Boston Globe just published an interview with Michelle Ann Abate, a professor at Ohio State University who has just published a book about the tradition of murder and violence in children’s literature (a really interesting take on the “scaring the children” theme). I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the interviewer edited the interview for publication, but for some reason both he and she come across as seeming surprised that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature, and she’s actually quoted as saying that “the story of violence and books for young readers hasn’t been told before”.

I have to say that I am surprised at the surprise that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature. It’s a frequent reason that books are banned (although racism, explicit sexual situations, and profanity currently top that). Going back in history, even after you progress past Grimm’s fairy tales, there’s no lack of violence and death. Andersen’s tales often end with death. “The Little Match Girl”, for instance, freezes to death on the street.

 

Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, is a classic children’s book, with lovely illustrations. Here’s one for a story about a girl with matches who burns to death!

 

 

And let’s not forget the Gashlycrumb Tinies.  Poor Kate! Childhood used to be a much different creature than it is today, a point that Abate does make, and attitudes toward parenting tended toward the didactic and scaring kids into behaving. It is interesting to note, though, that Hoffman wrote the book to entertain his young child, and in spite of the terrifying stories and illustrations, there are a lot of adults who remember it as being funny when they were kids.  There’s a darkness inside children that a lot of grownups don’t want to admit is there.

“K is for Kate who was struck with an axe”

Moving on to more recent times, we have the parents of the kids in  Julian Thompson’s The Grounding of Group 6, who send their kids to a school that guarantees they’ll be permanently lost in the woods; the viciousness of the children in William Sleator’s House of Stairs; the matter-of-fact euthanasia of children and the elderly in Lois Lowry’s The Giver;  the government approved murders of “extra” children in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden; the chilling account of the Holocaust in The Devil’s Arithmetic;  the supernatural terrors from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; the death of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Death, and especially murder, can be scary in books, but nowhere near as scary as daily life. Processing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a lot more difficult for my kids than processing The Tailypo. 

Many people– librarians, critics, parents, academics– have considered the story of violence in children’s books. Nearly every year there’s at least one article about how children’s literature has gotten too dark. I would say that it’s an aspect that people either choose to avoid (it’s not difficult to avoid children’s books containing murders) or take for granted. When something like The Hunger Games or Goosebumps becomes massively popular, violence in children’s books comes into the spotlight, but even when it’s not in the spotlight, there are people who notice it, study it, and write about it. I think as transmedia platforms become more popular we’ll see more of this come to light, as books and visual media connect in more ways than ever, and this is definitely a topic worth paying attention to… but if the study of violence in children’s literature hasn’t been noticed before, it’s only because people didn’t want to see what was really there.

Posted on August 28, 2013 by , Reply

Charlie Higson Guest Post: The Cosy Apocalypse

Charlie Higson is the author of the YA zombie novel The Enemy and its just-released prequel The Dead, which was released on June 14 in hardcover here in the United States (if you live in the UK, it’s been out there for many months already). Here at MonsterLibrarian.com we are lucky enough to be part of a blog tour for The Dead, and I’d like to share with you what Charlie Higson wrote for us in a guest post on the “cosy apocalypse” and YA fiction. The part I really enjoyed is this:

As the father of three boys I try to encourage my children’s wild urges (within reason of course), and help them find harmless outlets for their fascination with violence. Boys want to grab spears and paint their faces and run around shouting. We all stifle those urges as we grow older, we repress ourselves, so is it any wonder we fantasise about things blowing up and falling apart?

Why would anyone read horror fiction, dystopian fiction, fiction about the end of the world? These are questions I’m asked all the time (frequently by relatives), and it’s great to see a writer as talented as Charlie Higson put it right out there on the page.  And now I’ll stop writing, and you can read it all for yourself below. It is absolutely worth it to take the time.

Charlie Higson Guest Post: The ‘Cosy Apocalypse’

 

I’m always getting very erudite e-mails from kids in America talking about ‘dystopian fiction’. It used to make me think that, to be bandying around such highfaluting phrases, American kids must somehow be a lot more intellectual than British kids, but then I found out that ‘dystopian fiction’ is being taught in many US schools.

And there is no shortage of dystopian fiction on the bookshelves, from The Hunger Games, to Maze Runner, Gone, Matched… and of course my own Enemy series. The description ‘Dystopian Fiction’ makes it all sound terribly heavy and gloomy and pessimistic, and I prefer another phrase that has also been bandied around a great deal recently – ‘The Cosy Apocalypse’. Because, let’s face it, the appeal of dystopian fiction is not that we‘re all terrified of the Apocalypse, it’s not that we’re dreading the subsequent process of running around some barren wasteland filled with the remnants and relics of our society, picking up weapons and blasting away at each other. The appeal is that we would all secretly love it to happen. Come on, it’d be FUN!

It’s like all those American survivalists hiding out in the wilderness, armed to the teeth and priming their mantraps. They claim they’re merely getting ready in case the worst happens and society falls apart. But we all know that every night they pray that it will happen. They would like nothing better. They want society to fall apart, so that they can go out and shoot people just like in the wild west, or Mad Max, or all those violent computer games. The Worst? No, it’d be THE BEST!

We love the idea of the apocalypse. People wondered recently why so many idiots followed that crackpot American preacher who predicted the end of the world. It’s simple. They really, really wanted it to happen. Apocalypse stories are at the heart of every major religion. The Greeks had a series of golden ages that all ended badly, Vikings had Ragnarok, the Bible is full of them, from the flood, to the plagues to Revelations. Our endless appetite for movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow show that we like nothing more than a good old-fashioned apocalypse.

There is a strong self-destructive (or even just destructive streak) in human beings. The more we are forced into cities and complex societies, rubbing up against each other, having to obey a complex set of written and unwritten rules and laws, having to pay our taxes, and keep up with the latest trends, and get our kids through school and negotiate dinner parties, moody partners, tricky relatives and troublesome neighbours, the more we have to worry about the environment, the global financial crisis, how computers and technology are taking over our lives… the more we want to throw all our clothes off and run down the street dressed only in a leather loin cloth, screaming. We just want things to be SIMPLER. If only a nice cosy apocalypse would come along and sort everything out, wipe the slate clean, we could start again.

I saw a fantastic production of Lord Of The Flies in London last week at the beautiful open-air theatre in Regents Park. With its tall trees and dense shrubbery surrounding the stage area it was a magical and very apt setting for the play, enhanced by a set that included half a wrecked aeroplane. It was interesting to watch William Golding’s story unfold. His original version of the book started with a nuclear explosion and was about the end of the world, and the message that we are teetering on the brink of disaster comes across very strongly. We human beings are messing everything up. The theme of the book/play is the split between sensible Ralph and Piggy and their friends trying to impose some sense of law and order, and Jack and his choirboys descending into savagery. I know whose side we’re supposed to be on, nice Ralph and gentle Piggy, but I must say Jack’s lot looked like they were having a lot more fun. I think William Golding hated children. He was fairly uninterested in his own and as a teacher in a boy’s school he was much more interested in being a writer than teaching his pupils, who I reckon intimidated him. He was freaked out by the boys’ wild urges. As the father of three boys I try to encourage my children’s wild urges (within reason of course), and help them find harmless outlets for their fascination with violence. Boys want to grab spears and paint their faces and run around shouting. We all stifle those urges as we grow older, we repress ourselves, so is it any wonder we fantasise about things blowing up and falling apart?

That is the appeal of dystopian fiction. A simpler life in a nice blasted wasteland somewhere. In all these cosy apocalypse stories 99% of the world’s population is wiped out, thus giving a lot more room and freedom to the 1% who survive, and in our fantasies we are part of that 1%, not part of the 99% who have been turned into compost. We will make it through and find ourselves a bazooka and we will be all right. That’s the cosy part. We won’t all die, and those of us who survive can rebuild a better world.

My Enemy series started with a fantasy that I had when I was a kid – wouldn’t it be fantastic if all the adults in the world simply disappeared? I wrote a couple of stories along those lines when I was younger and even wrote a long experimental (unreadable) science fiction book in which characters end up living in the Natural History Museum in London (just as they do in my new series). It’s always been a fantasy of mine to be allowed to go into all those places that are closed off to us and play. To go into the museums and dress up in the clothes, and use the weapons, and drive the vehicles. To live in Buckingham Palace, or the Tower of London. I figured it was a good background for a kids’ series. All I had to do was work out how to get rid of the pesky adult in such a way that I would leave the structures intact (a quandary that weapons designers have been working on for some time now!) A disease that only affects people over a certain age was the obvious solution.

My series is only superficially grim and pessimistic; at its heart it is a fantasy, a glorious optimistic piece of escapism (in which, admittedly, a lot of nice kids do get killed and eaten). I think kids like to read about coping in a world without adults (which is surely the appeal of boarding school books like Harry Potter). My books have been compared to Lord of the Flies but I think in the end my message is very different. Unlike Golding, I happen to like kids. I like teenagers. I like their wildness and sense of life and I feel that deep down most of them are fundamentally decent. I believe that, left to cope for themselves (and we’ve seen this happen with street kids in the Third World) children are actually pretty good at looking after themselves and don’t revert to mindless savagery. That’s what I want to get across in my books. I want to empower kids.

That was the starting point for the series, but I then decided I wanted to liven things up a little. So I didn’t kill off all the adults. I kept some as basic cannibal zombies. I seem to have caught a wave of the undead, and added my germs to the zombie plague that is taking over Western culture and the minds of our young people. In my next blog I will look at the appeal of zombies and try and figure out why they are everywhere at the moment.

Posted on June 25, 2011 by , 1 comment