The Horror!

[rockinlibrarian]

Dorktower, ostensibly the Gamer webcomic, has been doing a bunch of Irrational Fears of New Parents comics lately (drawn, as it is, by the father of a small child). Judging by the comments, this phenomenon is apparently a pandemic. It's amazing how, once you're a parent, any Bad Thing that has ever happened to any child anywhere suddenly applies to YOUR CHILD. Even incidental plot points in books and movies start haunting you. The other night Jason snuggled up to me, noticed that I was all stiff and sniffly, and asked what was wrong. I replied, "I can't stop thinking about SIBLINGS KILLING EACH OTHER!"

I didn't realize how odd I had gotten-- how I had, in fact, developed a Strange Complex-- until I read this review of the book The Everafter a few months ago. I had seen the book and said, "Ug, death and seriousness, yay, yay, watch me read something else." Then I read this review and thought, "Wait, mystery? Ghosts? Science-fantasy? DEATH AND SERIOUSNESS? I would have ADORED this book when I was thirteen!"

My early-seeded love of mysteries led to a love of suspense and from there on to horror. The more danger, the better. I could be outright morbid about it: my favorite Christie ever, to this day, was and is And Then There Were None (that's the one where EVERYONE DIES SYSTEMATICALLY ONE BY ONE, you know). Throw in the Eerie and the Spooky-- let me devour Lois Duncan and gasp over Christopher Pike! Does the blurb mention ghosts? Murder? Black magic? I'm all over it.

What made this all the more remarkable is that I was the kid who was paralytically afraid of Sesame Street as a preschooler.

If I was a research psychologist or a sociologist or something I might want to look into that. I might come up with some theory of how scary stories let me conquer and defeat the darkness that I could sense lurking there in the world outside my safe sheltered home. But never mind that now. Right now I'm just as curious how I got AWAY from it.

Is it the stress of Real Life, making the secondary stress of Imaginary People a needless additional burden? Is knowing there are very small people whose lives really ARE in your hands each day too much of a strain on the nerves?

...and as a side note, are horror stories as popular with kids who DO live unusually stressful lives as with those who don't?

I suspect that grownups who try to shelter kids from Scary Things are really trying to shelter themselves! They, like me, have that Protective Mommy Gut Reaction to the Scary, but unlike me, they try to pawn their own fears off on their kids. Suddenly it's all "TOO SCARY: NOT APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN." Now, you can dig into this pretty far and discuss how grownups who have forgotten that kids have stronger nerves than them also often forget the Huge Difference between being five years old and being ten, and that someone who is sixteen may still be YOUR child but, face it, isn't quite A child anymore. The whole age-stupidity is one of my peeves about clueless grownups and children's media. But let's stick to the main thought. Maybe it's all because these grownups have forgotten their younger days, PERIOD. They've forgotten what it's like to be a kid, to go into a scary story knowing that, for all the murder and mayhem, it will ultimately be GOOD that triumphs. Grownups have maybe lost their faith in that last bit. Maybe that's the whole problem.

Comments

[lady1297.livejournal.com]

Cool thoughts. I hate scary stories. Always have. I think it's because I don't want the added stressor of someone elses problems? I tend to read books that have easy to solve problems, love triumphing in the end. Like right now I'm particularly drawn to Christian literature, namely books about the Amish. I crave the simplicity in life. I noticed that a few weeks ago when I came across my copy of Alice in Wonderland. I've never read it. Hubby and I were discussing the creapy movie version now out with Johnny Depp as the mad hatter. And we wondered if the original book was really creepy like that, or if it was just the screenwriter. I thought, Oh I'll just read my copy. I pulled it out. Looked at it and thought (literally), "Ugh. To many issues with Alice and being late and lost...too much like my life right now" And I promptly put it down. I now have a hankering to read Anne of Green Gables for the childishness and simplicity of Anne's life....

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

Dude, don't do it, Anne's life was way less simple and childish than you remember! I'm kidding, do it anyway. Though should I point out that she lived the first eleven years of her life relatively unloved and overworked in foster homes? And that in the course of the book she falls off a roof, nearly drowns, gets her best friend drunk, and has to save a sick dying child? Well, that last one is positive, I guess. ;)

But I should point out that the recent Alice movie was misnamed, because it didn't even attempt to follow the book plot-- it was really more like a spinoff story.

[punterschlagen.livejournal.com]

Good post . . .

I have a hard time reading some YA and kids books these days because I can't stop thinking about what a bad job the adults in the stories are doing at protecting the kids. I really like ASOUE, but it irks me that all the adult characters are evil, apathetic, or well-meaning-but-completely powerless (why I like HP better, because there is at least SOME adults with power on the kids' side). And I GET that that is the point of the books, that the kids have to make it on their own, but it bothers me because I feel like it's also saying that NO adult can be counted on or trusted.

Forgive my ramble... being a mommy sure has changed my perspective on kid lit.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

In library school I wrote a report on Roald Dahl-- I think it was on a particular book, but anyway, in GENERAL, I made the observation that in his books, even though they are FULL of grotesquely terrible grownups, he always or nearly always gives the main child character ONE sympathetic and supportive grownup (Miss Honey, Grandpa Joe, etc). This grownup has their own flaws and troubles and all, so the kid still has to do the main saving of the day on their own, but they DO have that support system. I always wondered if that was a conscious or unconscious move on Dahl's part.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, the Baudelaires did always had one sympathetic grownup per book, too, but they were generally more powerless than Dahls'.

[sal_amanda]

I think we've discussed this before, but yeah, I used to love horror and can't do it since having a kid. I can't stand to see the horrible things that people are capable of doing to each other. I can still handle things in the fantasy realm, like vampires and such because it's all unrealistic entertainment. But things where normal people kill other people... Nope, can't do it.

Now, I'd like to hear more about this fear of Sesame Street. I'm intrigued.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

We did discuss it, when I was listing topics I wanted to write about and this was one of them! I know what you mean, I'm much better about fantasy violence than realistic violence. In fact I was just reading a-- this is hard to explain without giving away Major Spoilers which is something you're Absolutely Not Supposed To Do with this particular book-- anyway it was a book with a plot that could go either way, it could have a supernatural OR a realistic explanation, and it occurred to me reading that the realistic explanation was TOTALLY MORE HORRIFYING to me than the supernatural one!

Um, dear. I can't really EXPLAIN being terrified of Sesame Street as a child. Generally, I was terrified of EVERYTHING as a child and that was just one of the otherwise innocuous things that terrified me-- I suspect I had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder actually. Basically at some point, when I was about three, I developed empathy, and was terribly worried that all those Muppets were getting HURT from all their zany slapstick routines. Do you remember that guy on the old Sesame Streets who used to randomly slap letters and numbers on people's shirts and giggle maniacally about it? He was my Monster Under The Bed as a child. I would lay in bed facing one way and just picture him popping up on the other side of the bed giggling at me behind my back. Once my bed was against the wall so you could only get in one way, I always faced Out. This was comforting.

Yeah, you have to wonder how I even managed to get into scary stories. It may be telling that I nonetheless never got into scary MOVIES.