Where's the YA Horror at?

So there’s a lot of vampire/werewolf type YA novels floating around out there right now. There’s also a lot of other stories that have monsters and other beasties lurking in their pages, but I’ve noticed a rather big gap in the YA field: horror.

I broached this subject on a writing forum some time ago and got a lot of responses. People said things like “Well I thought the Creature X in book Y was pretty scary!” Well good for you, but way to miss the point. Just because a book has a scary beast in it, or a scary scene doesn’t mean it’s horror.

The Midnighters series by Scott Westerfeld is a good example. It might sound scary at first: a small group of teens have the ability to enter a hidden 25^th hour of the day populated by shadowy, shape-shifting creepy crawlies that eat people. But it isn’t horror. It’s action/sci-fi/fantasy or some weird crossbreed. But not horror.

Here’s a simple break down of what I think makes a good horror story:

· Ordinary, every day people as the protagonists. If they have super powers or are ex-Navy SEALs, it’s not scary. This needs to be somebody that could be ME.

· A monster of some kind. The monster could be a crazed killer in the woods, a literal monster, or something else. Just so long as it has a sense of other-ness to it that is frightening and alien. It could also be a disease or something abstract.

· The ultimate goal of the protagonists is survival, plain and simple. The focus of the book is not on romance, or saving the world, and getting the Macguffin or plot coupon. The goal is to not die horribly or get your soul eaten. That’s the pulsing, meaty center of horror, that primal, instinctive, pitiful cry of “God I don’t want to die.” Good horror latches onto that, sucks you in and makes you face mortality in the form of the characters facing theirs. See how easy it is to die? See how fragile you are? Look at how quickly things can go from a pleasant trip in the countryside to being hunted like dumb beasts by some unspeakable shapeless thing hungry for your guts.

· And finally, the scariest thing of all that should be present everywhere, a sense of the unknown. This could be manifested in the monster, the setting, other characters, whatever. Being left in the dark, not knowing, is scary as hell.

I’m not saying a horror story can’t contain other elements, or must contain all of these, but my favorite horror stories always have. I’m going to use a bunch of adult books now as example, because I honestly can’t think of any YA ones.

In Stephen King’s The Mist, the main character is a somewhat dorky graphic artist who lives by a lake with his wife and kid. They’re stuck with a bunch of other very normal people in a grocery store, with all kinds of otherworldly, flesh eating monsters waiting to chew them to pieces outside. The scare-factor came from the characters all being normal folks, people I could know, people that I could see parts of myself in, people I could relate to. The monsters were creepy in their own right, but what added to the fear was that nobody really knew what was going on. Nothing was ever fully explained. We got hints, vague ideas, but nothing solid. And the goal wasn’t to save the world, the goal was that the dad wanted to save himself and his kid, and maybe a few others. Escape, survive. Nothing else.

Let’s look at another master of horror: Clive Barker and his amazing novella, The Hellbound Heart. Barker goes for the deep, psychological, visceral terror, where a man’s fondest desire becomes his ultimate hell. The characters are all normal again, no super soldiers or psychic powers going on here, just weak, flesh-and-blood mortals. They’re pursued by the Cenobites, other dimensional “angels” with a penchant for brutal self-mutilation, and a hobby of blurring the line between pleasure and suffering. The main character, a nice young girl, gets caught up in all this bloody nonsense and is in serious danger of being condemned for eternity to unthinkable torment, and her only goal is to escape that. It’s a very grim, dark book as one might expect. Barker is big into the whole idea of horror at one’s body, what it can become, what pain it can cause, and that’s a very primal thing that he taps into early on.

H.P. Lovecraft got a fear of the unknown down to a science, but his fault is that he would leave too much unknown. In his book Danse Macabre (which I will liberally paraphrase here), Stephen King talks about revealing the monster behind the door. Before the door is opened, the audience is terrified, but when it’s flung open, they’re relieved. “Oh thank goodness, it’s only a 10 foot bug. It could’ve been a 50 foot bug,” or something. And if you put a 50 foot bug behind the door, well it could’ve been a 100 foot bug, and so on. It could always be worse. However, if you never reveal what’s behind the door, the audience feels cheated, and this is what Lovecraft would sometimes do. His monsters were so horrible they couldn’t be described, so he wouldn’t describe them. What Stephen King suggests in his book, and what I agree with, is to open the door a crack. Let the audience see the shadow of the monster, a quick glimpse of the beast, and let their imagination fill in the dark gaps.

Horror is a tricky business. It’s easy to make a story with guts everywhere, but that is almost never scary. It’s cheap and it’s boring. Psychological horror is tougher, but if all the horror is mental, it lacks that visceral, simple terror that the threat of bodily harm can instill. I’m honestly not surprised there isn’t much, if any, real, good YA horror available. Deciding where to draw the line with a younger audience isn’t easy, and no such line really exists in adult fiction.

Well, I’ve said enough on this for now. It’s a subject close to me, and I’ve got a nice little horror story I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year that I may revisit. But if that never sees the light of day, I sincerely hope that some talented author will fill the missing horror piece in the YA world.