Let the Games Begin

This essay examines Suzanne Collins’s monstrous “mutts” in her phenomenally popular series The Hunger Games. Hiltz is especially interested in Collins’s characterization of human-animal hybrids, investigating the relationship between the political commentary at work in the novels and these “monsters,” from the half-wolf, half-humans that nearly overtake Katniss at the Cornucopia in the first novel to the lizard-humans whispering her name throughout the viaducts beneath the city in the last. Hiltz focuses on the mutts as abject creatures, demonstrating the ways in which these uncanny monsters, quite literally making the familiar strange, are at once metaphors for the political control exerted by the Capitol, the rebels’ resistance to the Capitol’s power, and the disruption of natural order. She also concentrates on Katniss and Peeta muttations, each of them reformed by warring entities in service of “the greater good.” Most importantly, Hiltz emphasizes that Collins’s mutts are designed to demonstrate the fine and wavering line between good and evil, calling into question the nature of monstrosity, especially as it relates to human behavior. Her location of monstrosity in the protagonists themselves especially offers a new way of thinking about teen dystopic novels that engage horror as a means of conveying identities assaulted by external forces.

Get It Together

This essay begins fittingly with the line “If there’s one thing you can depend upon during the zombie apocalypse, it’s that you won’t have to face it alone.” In this essay, Levey and Harper examine the importance of group dynamics in contemporary teen novels that concentrate on surviving zombie invasions. Focusing on two recently published horror novels popular among teens, Charlie Higson’s The Enemy and Michael Grant’s Gone, Levey and Harper examine the “considerations of group consciousness and democratic dynamics” in the texts, noting that such attention to the group is a departure from previous teen novels that had focused more on negotiations of individual identity (this also marks a difference from the novels McCort examines, suggesting the different approach toward identity taken by those writing for older adolescents). For Levey and Harper, the importance of these particular novels and their treatment of the individual in relation to the group is twofold: they ask the characters therein to work through personal issues that are detrimental to the survival of the group and they call for social re-evaluation. In the worlds of The Enemy and Gone, young adult readers experience a close encounter with monstrous humanity, one that allows them to vicariously experience how others deal with threats external to their circles, as well as the threats that lie within themselves and their own peer groups.

Where Are the Scary Books?

This essay closes the study of children’s horror from the perspective of a children’s librarian (albeit one who runs the website Monster Librarian). Kowalewski considers how “Librarians able to navigate the resources that fall into the category of scary books can be guides and partners for children interested in further exploration and extension of their knowledge.” Noting that it can be rather difficult to find an appropriate title for a child who comes in asking for a “scary book” because of the methods by which frightening fictions are shelved in the children’s collection, Kowalewski serves here as a guide, offering practical advice to librarians, educators, and parents who seek to point children in the right direction. Kowalewski argues that librarians’ awareness of such titles is a matter of civic importance, noting that “aliterate,” or disengaged readers, are less inclined to become involved citizens, educationally, politically, and professionally. As Kowalewski notes, titles in the gothic horror genre can serve as an enticement to young readers, luring them into the children’s library. Kowalewski’s essay serves as a thorough practical introduction to “scary books for kids,” an excellent conclusion to our volume that makes its end, in actuality, a beginning, an entry point for those interested in promoting the horror genre among young readers.

Punishing the Abject Child

Justine Gieni examines the language and illustrations of Heinrich Hoffman’s 1845 picturebook Struwwelpeter, a seminal text in the genre that, on the surface at least, makes explicit use of horrifying methods of childhood death and dismemberment as a means of cautioning young readers to behave according to the strictures of its era. In her essay, however, Gieni zeroes in on the transgressive nature of Hoffman’s tales, concentrating specifically on the role of body horror in the text. Entering the debate about the book’s appropriateness for child audiences, Gieni focuses especially on the violence committed against the child’s body in the book, arguing that, through the “powers of horror,” Hoffman satirizes the pedagogical didacticism of nineteenth-century German culture and empowers young readers, allowing them to experience the thrill of derisive laughter in the face of brutal authoritarianism. She also illuminatingly considers the publication, relevance, and reception of Struwwelpeter today, discussing how it has been rebranded as a text for “knowing” adult audiences with an emphasis more on its horror than its humor, as well as the implications of such a shift in the text’s purported readership and thematic intentions.

Introduction

The introduction begins the book’s discussion of why some children and young adults are drawn to horror. It attempts to define the term “horror,” especially in relation to children’s literature and culture, and seeks to consider the ways in which frightening elements emerge in children’s literature and culture. It also provides an overview of the essays included in the volume and how they are in conversation with one another.

“In the Darkest Zones”

This essay focuses specifically on the recent fairy-tale novels Coraline and A Tale Dark and Grimm as examples of gruesome, morally impactful modern fairy tales. Jessica R. McCort situates these particular books in relation to twentieth-century women authors’ dark fairy-tale revisions that emphasize identity development and the current cultural moment, a time in which mainstream American culture is obsessed with the darker side of fairy tales and the resurgence and rehabilitation of the fairy tale. Both Coraline and A Tale Dark and Grimm, filled with violence, gore, and horror, hearken back to the literary fairy tales that precede them and concentrate on the idea that children must learn to conquer their demons in order to achieve self-awareness. As McCort argues, these novels illustrate that children can gain, through textual encounters with the horrific, an enhanced sense of self and the power of bravery. In the end, this essay argues that these books are excellent examples of the social importance of maintaining terror as part of the texture of modern fairy tales for young readers, especially those in which the pursuit of personal identity is at the apple’s core.

“A Wonderful Horrid Thing”

A. Robin Hoffman considers the sinister books designed by Edward Gorey (many of which she claims were intended for a young audience) in relation to influences such as Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter and Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop andBleak House. Hoffman argues that Gorey, by appropriating and reconceptualizing these texts’ modes of representation, manages to provide an “anaesthetizing historical distance” between his modern readers and the representations of childhood death popular among Victorian audiences. Through a careful examination of his books’ production methods, concentrating on their calculated appeal toward younger audiences, as well as his insistence on presenting childhood death as a subject of dark comedy, Hoffman asserts that what Gorey produces is at once an homage to Dickens’s work and a perversion of Dickens’s sentimentalized stories, mainly because of Gorey’s more unequivocal representations of violence and his eradication of Christian symbolism that offered the promise of moral redemption in favor of a critique of mid-twentieth-century American representations of childhood. In the end, Hoffman recognizes Gorey’s disruptive potential as he offers up, for both child and adult readers, a novel representation of childhood death, one that disempowers the mythologizing of textual children’s demises as a means of conveying a particular social, philosophical, or political agenda. She also suggests that Gorey’s portrayals of childhood death in his books serve as both a precursor to and an influence on the modern turn toward the comic gothic in many children’s and young adult horror texts. In doing so, she provides us with a useful model for thinking about the methods of portraying and thinking about death and violence against children within the space of horror novels, films, or television shows targeted toward young audiences.

Teen Terrors

Shifting the focus from zombie epidemics in books to vampire invasions on the small screen, Subramanian and Lagerwey contemplate the “raced and gendered contradictions of postfeminist girl culture” by concentrating on the character development of two of the show’s main characters, Bonnie Bennett and Caroline Forbes. In doing so, Subramanian and Lagerwey consider how The Vampire Diaries employs monstrosity to consider and represent what coming of age means for girls of different racial identities, especially in melodramatic television series targeted toward teen audiences that have been produced in the postfeminist era. Through this, Subramanian and Lagerwey offer new insight into postfeminist horror designed for young viewers, especially the young females who find themselves fans of such shows and films.

Didactic Monstrosity and Postmodern Revisionism in Contemporary Children’s Films

Peter C. Kunze investigates films for children that engage elements of horror, concentrating on the intersection between postmodernism and children’s cinema. Closely examining two films in which the monstrous is a key aspect of the films’ aesthetic, Shrek and Monsters, Inc., Kunze examines the postmodern aspects of these films, considering their revisionary stance, their use of double address, and their allusive nature. As the essay progresses, he hones in on the narrative construction of the monster in these films and the processes by which they revise monstrosity. Kunze demonstrates, overall, that these films illustrate for the child viewer “the benefits of confronting the Other not to destroy it, but to appreciate it and work towards mutual understanding” and offers a useful methodology for thinking about the monster in children’s books and films targeted toward the young that have been produced during the new millennium.

From Aggressive Wolf to Heteronormative Zombie

Rebecca A. Brown examines the evolution of monstrous picturebooks, comparing the 1960s favorites Where the Wild Things Are and There’s a Nightmare in My Closet to contemporary picturebooks that make vampires, Frankensteinian monsters, and zombies the protagonists and considering them in relation to boys’ cultures dominant at the time of their publication. Brown concentrates especially on the role of the monstrous picturebook in young American boys’ negotiations of identity formation, as well as their domestication of otherness. Brown argues that while Sendak’s and Mayer’s books served to socialize children to the normative behaviors of 1960s American culture and ultimately demonstrate children’s ability to defeat or domesticate the monstrous, today’s monstrous picturebooks ask young boys to identify with the monster – to find traits within themselves that they share with the monsters in the books’ pages and to empathize with them. Brown ultimately shows, however, that despite their differences, both forms fixate on, challenge, and, in some cases, queer the boy’s social and gendered identity development within their specific historical contexts. The claims made in her essay can be used to examine the performance of gender in other picturebooks and horror texts for children and young adults that utilize horror elements to focus explicitly on the masculine experience of American culture and identity formation.