Monstrous Identities: Critical Realism and Gothic Fantasy in Maurice Gee’s The Fire-Raiser

Abstract

Maurice Gee’s children’s novel The Fire-Raiser sits firmly in the social realist tradition, yet also includes some decidedly gothic elements. While children’s literature has displayed an increasing gothicism in recent years, texts such as Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters employ the gothic for the narrative and allegorical possibilities allowed by the supernatural. The Fire-Raiser in contrast has no supernatural elements. Gee’s novel shows how genre motifs can be employed by a realist text, since rather than mitigating the social critique characteristically implied by the critical realist stance, the use of gothic’s concern with the monstrous actually reinforces it. While certainly not a part of the “high” gothic tradition or a schlock-horror gothic fiction in the pulp tradition of Stephen King, The Fire-Raiser utilizes gothic motifs as a kind of window-dressing, investing social critique and didacticism with the titillating thrills of popular fantasy.