Posts on horror

Yesterday I fielded a phone call from a Concerned Mother. Concerned Mothers often concern me because even though they ostensibly want reassurance, they won’t always accept it. Which leaves me wondering why they asked my opinion in the first place.

This particular Concerned Mother was calling with good news: her sixth grade son, who’d never enjoyed reading, became utterly captivated by Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak vampire series and read all twelve. Now he wants to read Shan’s Demonata series. Mom has done her research and knows the series promises violence and gore. What she wants to know is should she be worried about her son’s new fixation on horror stories?

So I told her how when my brother was in middle school, he devoured nothing but Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robin Cook. In eighth grade, for language arts he wrote a novella called Scarlet Raid, a horror story about the return of Black Plague. And now, more than twenty years later, he is – to the best of my knowledge – a sane and law-abiding citizen whose literary taste runs toward Russell Banks and Paul Thereux.

In other words, her son – “a very nice, quiet kid” – is perfectly normal. “Just so long as he isn’t painting pentagrams on his bedroom floor,” I told her.

Fortunately, this Concerned Mother seemed very willing to accept my reassurance that horror is a popular genre with middle school boys. She even wrote down my suggestion of Anthony Horowitz’s Gatekeepers series as another possibility for her son.

The conversation prompted me to start revising our department’s list of recommended horror books. This is not a genre in which I read widely. I’m a chicken with a weak stomach for gore.

When I was twelve, I stayed at home while my parents drove my brother to college in another state for his freshman year. Already missing him, I raided his bedroom. I spent all day, alone in the house, reading his old copy of Cujo – not one of my brighter moments. That night I spent the night at a friend’s house and dreamed her cat had been bitten by evil vampire bats. I woke up clawing dream-Leo off my throat.

(I’ve read other Stephen King books since. My favorites are his non-gory paranormal books, particularly Carrie and The Green Mile – except for one chapter I always skip over.)

Anyway, I was surprised that in the past couple years I actually have read a number of scary books – scary for an eleven-year-old, anyway. Some of my favored series to suggest to middle school boys:

• Neal Shusterman’s Dark Fusion series
• Joseph Delaney’s Last Apprentice series
• Anthony Horowitz’s Gatekeepers series
• Paul Zindel’s various later books like The Doom Stone and Loch

We still carry R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, but my impression is that these are not nearly as popular as they once were. I also suspect that their residual popularity lies in a female readership, but I really have no scientific basis for that – it’s just a hunch I’ve formed based on the shimmery book covers. Anyone know? Anyone have other suggestions of horror for boys who aren’t quite ready for Stephen King?