Carnage: An Open Book

By Paul Gray

When the era of network TV violence advisories dawns in September, some such scene will play itself out in millions of U.S. households. Warned that an upcoming program contains material unsuitable for young people, parents order their children away from the set and then brace themselves for whines and grumbling. Oddly, the exiles disappear without complaint and go off to their rooms . . . to read books. Sis, 13, picks up her copy of R.L. Stine's The Babysitter III: "His expression was blank, as blank as death. And with a quick, simple motion, he grabbed the baby's head with one hand, twisted it, and pulled it off." Across the hall, Junior, 11, turns the pages of Christopher Pike's Monster: "Mary pointed her shotgun at Kathy's face and pulled the trigger. The blast caught Kathy in the forehead and took off the top of her skull, plastering a good portion of her brains over the railings of the nearby staircase."

Downstairs, Mom and Dad are snoring in front of a flickering car chase.

Books like The Babysitter III or Monster -- and there are suddenly a remarkable number of books very much like them -- do not reach such underage readers by subterfuge or stealth. Adolescents now constitute a booming niche market for the peddling of published gore and violence. "Teens' interests go in cycles," says Patricia MacDonald, editorial director of Archway Paperbacks, an imprint of Pocket Books and a major player in the teen-horror field. "In the '70s it was problem novels, the disease of the week. Then it was romance novels, soap operas like Sweet Valley High and Sweet Dreams. In the '90s it's the thrillers." Hardly a blip on publishers' sales charts a few years ago, such thrillers claimed three of the top four spots on the Publishers Weekly poll of the best-selling children's paperbacks in 1992.

Like all genre fiction -- gothics, romances, police procedurals -- teen tinglers follow a fairly consistent set of formulas. The heroes or heroines are invariably adolescents whose lives fall mysteriously into jeopardy; adults are either the source of the menace or remote, almost inanimate objects. The dialogue comes laced with teenspeak -- gnarly, totally awesome -- and the plot steamrolls over lesser details like setting and characterization. Chapters are short and end in suspense, luring readers with short attention spans to forge onward. The level of violence ranges from the implied to the horrific, and the bloodier bits are sometimes mitigated by context: it was all a dream, the demonic villain got what was coming to him, etc. Explicit sex is largely forbidden.

Still, these hair-raising books are being tailored for and energetically hawked to children. Is that frightening? The two most successful writers of teen thrillers, understandably, think not. Says Christopher Pike, 37, who stumbled into his calling in 1985 and now has 8 million copies of his books in print: "They want to be scared or they would not pick up the book and read it. The kids have fair warning and know it's all good fun."

R.L. Stine, 49, who turns out a thriller a month and has 7.5 million copies of his 27-part Fear Street series in print, agrees that such books mean no harm. "Part of the appeal is that they're safe scares. You're home in your room and reading. The books are not half as scary as the real world." At the same time, Stine also implies that the real world needs embellishment; his challenge, he says, is "to find new cheap thrills" for his young readers. "I mean disgusting, gross things to put in the book that they'll like: the cat is boiled in the spaghetti, a girl pours honey over a boy and sets ants on him. They like the gross stuff." Surely his young readers have some taboos? Furry animals? "The pets are dead meat," Stine replies. "If the kid has a pet, he's going to find it dead on the floor."

Such calculated shock tactics seem qualitatively different from the methods of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island or even the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Classical children's literature is full of overt and implicit terrors because some gifted authors could remember and portray a child's view, those feelings of awe, uncertainty and fear inspired by the world outside. Fright requires no invention; conquering it through language does.

Some educators believe teenagers' reading these lurid thrillers, as opposed to playing Nintendo or watching Beavis and Butt-head on MTV, is a good thing. Viviane Lampach, a librarian at a Bronx high school in New York City, notes that her young patrons check out new paperback novels in this genre and never return them: "You hope to wean them from horror to something deeper and more meaningful." Roderick McGillis, a professor of English at the University of Calgary and author of a book on children's literature, takes a darker view: "What disturbs me is that we're developing in our culture, in our cities, a kind of siege mentality. A lot of these books reinforce this, make it sort of normal to think that the world is a place in which violence can erupt at any moment."

Maybe the youngsters will move upward in their tastes, through Stephen King and V.C. Andrews to Hemingway, Joyce and Shakespeare. Or maybe they will boil the cat in the spaghetti.

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York