Teen Screams

by June Pulliam

07/31/2006

Noyes, Deborah, ed. Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales. Cambridge: Candlewick Press, 2006. 241 p.

This offering by young adult publisher Candlewick Press contains tales by authors who for the most part are well known, either as writers of fiction for this particular readership or of horror and dark fantasy in general. As with any collection, some of the stories are stronger than others, with a few being so weak as to be unreadable, such as Garth Nix’s “Endings” and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “The Dead and the Moonstruck.”

One of the biggest failings I see is in a piece where the writer becomes didactic, something too often characteristic of fiction published for young adults out of the mistaken idea that someone needs to teach the young people a lesson. This demonstrates so little faith in the intelligence of the audience, and this is the unfortunate case with Gregory Maguire’s story “The Prank.” Maguire is best known for his series of Wicked books, a retelling of the Oz story from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view. In “The Prank,” Melanie, who has been convicted of a hate crime, is sentenced to stay the weekend with her dotty old Aunt Beryl, who is supposed to be a positive influence on her. At the beginning of the story, Melanie is unrepentant, insisting that her beating up a girl she though was a lesbian was only a prank. Of course, Melanie comes to understand the horror of what she has done when she discovers that her Aunt Beryl was young, and stupid, once too, and did something she deeply regretted as well.

Other authors don’t apply this ham-fisted didacticism; instead they write stories that are just plain eerie, or better still, ones that are conversant in the genres of horror and gothic and are able to manipulate them to comic effect. Vivian Van Velde’s “Morgan Roehmar’s Boys” is of the eerie variety, as is Ceila Rees’ “Writing on the Wall” (both Van Velde and Rees are well-known authors of young adult fiction).

Rees writes a more traditional ghost story. A well-to-do man from the city purchases a run down country house to renovate, and is not put off by the strange artifacts he finds there, such as a witch bottle over the threshold, or the mummified remains of a cat in the chimney, not uncommon items in English houses of a certain age. One could imagine a British version of Bob Villa waxing poetic about the finds in between discussing the intricacies of colonial door lintels or horsehair plaster. But of course, what is a fascinating archeological find in our time is a sign of grave danger in another, and would have caused some of our ancestors to pack up and leave what they would have understood to have been a cursed place. So it is not surprising when the new residents see a strange figure walking at night in one of the towers, or when someone’s personality suddenly changes radically.

“Morgan Roehmar’s Boys” is also a ghost story, but with a more modern setting. The author questions the conventions of the genre through her representation of the ghost, seemingly asking, “must a spirit always appear as he did in death?” Van Velde’s story is set on a farm where two decades previous, the victims of a serial killer loosely modeled on John Wayne Gacy are found. Today, the farm generates income every fall with a haunted hay ride on the infamous site. However, the owners, not wishing to capitalize on the horror of the place, refuse to permit the attractions to in any way resemble the infamous crimes of Morgan Roehmar. The hay ride features haunted tableaus similar to those found in haunted house attractions, and one evening, a worker fears that her imagination is running away with her when she sees a shadowy figure outside of her tableau in the barn.

Neil Gaiman’s “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire” and Barry Yougrau’s “Have No Fear, Crumpot Is Here” are both humorous interpretations of the gothic. Yougrau’s tale features a teenaged Walter Mitty character, also named Walter, who has greatly displeased his parents through his continued irresponsibility. His punishment is to stay with family friends for a few weeks and serve as their unpaid babysitter, lest his parents punish him further by compelling him to follow them to Italy for the summer and visit dusty old museums and churches instead of remaining behind with his best friend and playing video games. And our hero is no intellectual giant either. The title derives from his attempt at humor—Walter has created an ineffectual comic book hero, Crumpot, who uses this tagline when he arrives to save the day on many occasions such as “Crumpot and the Mutant Sprocket Vipers” or “Crumpot and the Shadowy Tomb of Responsibility.” But alas, Walter can never get past the title of Crumpot’s adventures. Rather, he uses his underdeveloped character to represent what he sees as his own dull life. But then Walter, similar to Crumpot, does have a real adventure, when he realizes that what parents often think about their own offspring in their less generous moments—that they’re bloodsucking little brats—might be true. And it is with this realization that Walter comes to understand that sometimes real life can be as absurd, and therefore frightening, as fantasy.

Gaiman’s story “Forbidden Brides…” is in many ways typical of his fiction, which appeals to both adolescents and adults.  It is a metatextual tale of a gothic author who doesn’t want to be compelled to write about reality; he wishes to write fantasy, and the story is subsequently made up of his abortive attempts to compose a narrative that he will find interesting, and of his own reflections on what he is doing. But the author lives in a universe radically different from our own, and so his idea of fantasy is our idea of the prosaic. More than any of the other stories in this collection, “Forbidden Brides…” demonstrates a faith in the intelligence and literacy of its readership in that the author is not afraid to construct his story with allusions to a couple hundred of years of gothic fiction, spanning all the way back to The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Overall,  though, the strong tales in this collection make it something that horror aficionados of all ages will find worth reading.