Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture ed. by Jessica R. McCort

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture ed. by Jessica R. McCort Chris McGee Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture, edited by Jessica R. McCort. University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Some of my best memories of childhood were moments when I was scared. As a kid my favorite show was Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, then later The Munsters and The Addams Family, and my favorite book was a beat-up copy of Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark that my parents kept in a drawer. I never quite fell for Goosebumps as much as I did for Stephen King novels, but I devoured all the John Bellairs novels I could grab [End Page 210] at the library. My mother loved monster movies, and I always looked forward to Halloween in anticipation of the cartoons and movies that would come on in October. By the time I was ten, my favorite movie of all time was John Carpenter's Halloween, and from that point on I never came across a horror movie I wasn't willing to give a chance. So the core idea at the heart of Jessica R. McCort's edited collection, Reading in the Dark, that "young readers and viewers, like many adults, find delight and pleasure in that which makes them frightened" (10), rings especially true for me. Whatever else the authors in the collection may suggest when it comes to horror literature—or for that matter movies and television programs—the idea of pleasure, the pleasure of being scared or terrified, is a common theme here. Few other popular genres for young people, whether fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, or mysteries, seem at first glance to be so unsuited for child readers. As McCort suggests in her opening introduction, this feeling of inappropriateness arises from a belief that horror brings with it knowledge and experiences beyond the capacity of children to handle, not to mention a worry that "such books are acceptable only as a gateway to better literature" (8). This latter idea is the subject of the concluding essay of the collection, Kirsten Kowalewski's "Where Are the Scary Books?: The Place of Scary Books for Children in School and Children's Libraries." Kowalewski traces a long-standing conflict among librarians as to the value of fiction series for children that are far from what we would call literary, along with questions of how even to classify scary stories at all, resulting in horror fiction becoming "nearly invisible as a recognized category in the children's collection" (219). Reading in the Dark is therefore something of a book-length defense of a seemingly disreputable genre. As you might expect, a common refrain throughout the collection returns to the value of facing one's fears, something scary books are especially good at offering readers. Sometimes this happens simply by laughing at these fears. Justine Gieni argues that Heinrich Hoffmann's infamous Struwwelpeter allows "child readers to face their fears through laughter at the over-the-top depictions of illness, morbidity, and monstrosity" (39). A. Robin Hoffman similarly proposes that Edward Gorey's books "render childhood death an object of dark comedy" (69). Other times, facing one's fears leads to defeating the monsters outright. McCort, in her own contribution on Coraline, reads the book as a personal journey of development, wherein the reader learns "that one can only grow up by facing one's fears, being brave when one doesn't want to be brave at all" (131). Or, to go [End Page 211] back to the introduction, horror stories "can function to help young readers and viewers cope with frightening things in reality, translating those things into a fantasy world where fear is rendered manageable" (14). This seems to be a widely shared sentiment among all of the authors, the idea that horror stories are valuable stories because they translate the unmanageable into something manageable for the reader. Interestingly, the book also explores those ways in which horror stories also make things more complicated. A number of the contributors employ Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject in order to describe monsters...