As I keep featuring the Summer Scares program and committee, today I have invited Kelly Jensen, an editor at Book Riot and our YA specialist on the Summer Scares committee on why she loves horror, but also why it is so appealing to teens in general too.
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YA Horror: A Mirror of Adolescence
By
Kelly Jensen
I don’t remember the first time I picked up a horror book, nor do I remember the first horror movie I saw. What I do remember, though, is finding Stephen King when I was in middle school and falling fast and hard for his work through my teen years.
On hot summer days, my grandfather would take me to the library in the town next to ours. They had a far better collection than the local library. I’d come home with stacks of books, which I’d read during those long afternoons. My mother worked second and third shift. She was single, and we lived with my grandparents, both of whom were also working.
The recent announcement of another King adaptation, this time for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, took me right back to that time of my life. I read -- and loved -- that book, reading it every day on my bed, on my mother’s bed, on the couch, and most vividly in my memory, on the stationary bike in my grandfather’s bedroom.
The love of horror followed me through college, though that came more in the visual format, as opposed to the literary. Stephen King fell off my radar a bit, but I wasn’t afraid to enjoy a good scary film or two.
But entering my adulthood, post-library school, I rekindled my love and passion for horror because of YA books. And I think that’s, in part, because YA horror reminds me so much of those memories of discovering King.
Although not all of Stephen King’s stories feature young characters, many do. Certainly, the ones I read did. The most fascinating aspects of even books like It weren’t the adults, even for me as an adult. It was the kids’ stories that kept me paging through the tome and deeply hooked on the new adaptation. I won’t likely skip the second chapter of the film, but I already know it won’t capture my attention the same way.
The thing about being young is that being young is a time of utter uncertainty. You don’t know what your place is in the world. You don’t know what your body is doing as it grows and expands, shifts and changes. You’re not given the same latitudes to experiment or faulter the ways that adults are -- hell, you can’t even eat ice cream for dinner if that’s what you want to do. The world’s got its cards stacked against you, if only because you don’t know well enough to challenge them.
YA horror is the story of being young and uncertain. Vulnerable and afraid. Whether the monster at the end of the book is a zombie or a ghost, a chainsaw-wielding murderer or a spell-casting witch doesn’t matter. Those are props in the bigger realities of what it’s like to grow up, to figure out who you are, what it is you want to be, and how you’re supposed to do those very things.
Young adult horror brings me back to the scariest parts of my own youth: long stretches of loneliness, a deadbeat and absent father, the unbelievably responsibility thrust upon me to know what it was I wanted to do with my entire life by the time I was 18. I keep reading YA horror not because I find that return to the worst days of my life enjoyable, rather I keep returning to them for perspective -- and more, I continue to read and talk about YA horror because those books are comforting. It’s not a teen alone against a clown or a blood-thirsty werewolf though that brings ease. It’s the fact that those things are predictable, understandable. They’re bumps along the road of coming-of-age in a way that allows for escaping from whatever current reality is before me.
A monster chasing teens on the moon? Sign me up. I know that at the end of the book, the teens will win or the monster will. That even when given the ultimate bad guy in the form of a serial killer, there’s something redeeming enough in that character to encourage me along for 200, 300, 500 pages, to see where it all goes.
No matter what the conclusion, it’s a ride. A journey full of ups and downs. Twists and turns. Maybe even blood and bones. And that ride is the same ride we take during our young years. It’s intense. It’s lonely. It’s sometimes a straight-up shit show. But we get through the book, just like we get through adolescence. Through our messy, complex young years.
And at the end of it, we have a host of spooky, spidery stories to tell.
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