October has so much going on in it that it’s easy to lose track of Bullying Prevention Month, but I thought I’d take a minute to write about it here.

This month one of the Kindle books for $2.99 or less is Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories. Dear Bully is a collection of stories and essays by seventy children’s and young adult authors (mostly YA) in which they share their experiences with bullying– as victim, bystander, or bully. And their essays cover a myriad of bullying situations, some of which maybe you or I might not have considered, because they don’t exactly fit the stereotypical situation. There are stories of kids who were physically and verbally attacked by the school bully, or tormented by rumors and names spread by their classmates. There are stories of teens who were isolated and emotionally drained by boyfriends, manipulated by fair weather friends, joined in with the school bully either for praise or out of fear, were bystanders, acted thoughtlessly, abandoned or were abandoned by friends for no apparent reason, and bullied other kids. There are stories of heartbreak, failure, regret, of rising above, of finding true friends, of surviving and, eventually, thriving, of wanting to change the way we treat each other.

Many of the writers who participated in this project talked about how it shaped them into writers.  Among the essays are a few by writers identified with the horror genre that I found really interesting. The first, by R.L. Stine, author of the scary (and funny) Goosebumps books, talks about how he was chased and physically bullied by much older kids for a long time– and one day dragged by them to a supposedly haunted house and forced  to spend the night… and how he finally turned the tables on them. In his story he writes about how the sheer panic he felt in being chased by these bullies every day is something he has never forgotten and drives his writing of the Goosebumps books. In interviews, Stine has maintained that nothing scares him, so in addition to being a powerful piece of writing  it was fascinating to get this glimpse into his past.

Dan Waters, author of the Generation Dead books, wrote his story from the perspective of an author and adult who received a powerful impression of the awfulness of  teens bullying other teens and decided to address it in his writing (adding a few zombies into the mix) Some of this is information he’s shared before– we interviewed him several years ago and he talked about this a little– but it says a lot about the state of the world that bullying has reached such levels that even just a television special could inspire him to address it by writing  horror fiction.

There are other fantastic essays in Dear Bully, and even if you’re too late to get your own copy at Amazon, I hope you’ll look for it at the library.  Here’s a list of  YA fiction(some older titles, and some current) that address some of these themes. Some don’t necessarily fall into the category of horror, but all of them address bullying and intimidation and their consequences in some way:

YA Fiction with Bullying Themes

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck (reviewed here)

Burn for Burn by Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian (reviewed here)

Daughters of Eve by Lois Duncan

Shine by Lauren Myracle

ghostgirl by Tonya Hurley

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters (reviewed here)

Are You In The House Alone? by Richard Peck (reviewed here)

Hannah’s Story: Vampire Love Never Dies by Giulietta Maria Spudich (reviewed here)

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier