Horror Is Good For Kids (Part Six)

Reason #6: HIDDEN INSIDE HORROR ARE THE FACTS OF LIFE

Growing up is scary and painful, and violent, and your body is doing weird things and you might, to your great horror, become something beastly and terrible on the other side. (The Wolfman taught us this). Being weird can be lonely and your parents never understand you and the world is sometimes incomprehensible. (Just as Frankenstein’s monster showed us). Sex and desire is creepy and intimate in dangerous and potentially threatening ways (so sayeth Dracula).

Whether it’s The Hunger Games as a clear cut metaphor for the Darwinian hellscape of highschool, or learning to turn and face a scary part of ourselves, or the dangers of the past via any of the zillions of ghost stories around, horror can serve as a thinly-veiled reflection of ourselves in a way almost impossible to imagine in other forms. Horror can do this because, like sci-fi and fantasy, it has inherent within it a cloak of genre tropes that beg to be stripped off. Its treasures are never buried so deep that you can’t find them with some mild digging. It’s a gift to us made better by having to root around for it, and like all deep knowledge, we must earn its boons rather than receive them, guppy-mouthed, like babies on a bottle.

Fear is not the best thing in the world, of course, but it’s not going anywhere and we are likely forced to meet it in some capacity, great or small, each and every day. There’s no way around it. Denying this fact only provides more fertile ground for fear to take root. Worse yet, denying it robs us of our agency to meet and overcome it. The more we ignore scary things, the bigger and scarier those things become. One of the great truths from Herbert’s perpetually important Dune series is the Bene Gesserit’s Litany Against Fear:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it is gone past I will turn to see its path.
Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Greg Ruth has been working in comics since 1993 and has published work for The New York Times, DC Comics, Paradox Press, Fantagraphics Books, Caliber Comics, Dark Horse Comics and The Matrix. He has shown his paintings in New York, Houston, and Baltimore, and he also exhibited a series of murals at New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 2002.

RJ Fanucchi’s Website

Illustration by Nial Parkinson

Horror Is Good For Kids (Part Five)

Reason #5: SHARING SCARY STORIES BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER

How many times have I seen a group of kids discover to their excessive delight that they have all read and loved the same Goosebumps book? A LOT. The first thing they do is compare and rank the scariest parts and laugh at how they jumped out of their bed when the cat came for a pat on the head, or stayed up all night staring at the half open closet. Like vets having shared a battle, they are brought together in something far more essential and primordial than a mere soccer game or a surprise math test. And looking back myself, I cannot recall having more fun in a movie theater or at home with illicit late night cable tv, than when I was watching a scary movie with my friends. The shared experience, the screams and adrenaline-induced laughter that always follow are some of the best and least fraught times in childhood. And going through it together means we aren’t alone anymore. Not really.

Greg Ruth, author of this article, has been working in comics since 1993 and has published work for The New York Times, DC Comics, Paradox Press, Fantagraphics Books, Caliber Comics, Dark Horse Comics and The Matrix. He has shown his paintings in New York, Houston, and Baltimore, and he also exhibited a series of murals at New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 2002.

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Horror Is Good For Kids (Part Four)

Continuing my crusade to get more horror into children’s literature I’m posting part four of a relevant article on Tor’s publishing website.

Reason #4: HORROR CONFIRMS SECRET TRUTHS

“You know when grown-ups tell you everything’s going to be fine and there’s nothing to be worried about, but you know they’re lying? ” says the Doctor of a young, mortified Amy Pond. “Uh-huh ,” she replies, rolling her ten-year-old eyes dramatically. The Doctor leans in, a wink in his eye and intimates… “Everything’s going to be fine.” And then they turn to face the monster living in her wall with a screwdriver in one hand and a half eaten apple in the other.

In doing this, Moffat touches brilliantly upon another essential truth of horror—that it shows us guardians and guides that will be more honest with us than even our own parents. Within the darkness and shadows is our guide, who can lead us out and back into the light, but you can only find him there in the darkness, when you need him most. Kids are aware of so much more that’s happening in their house than we as parents even want to imagine. But because we don’t share all the details of our anxious whispers, stressful phone calls, or hushed arguments, (and rightfully so), they are left to fill in the facts themselves, and what one imagines tends to be far more terrible than what is real. They know you’re fighting about something, but not what. They can tell what hastened whispers in the hall mean outside their door… or they think they do. And what they don’t know for a fact, they fill in with fictions. Storytellers dabbling in horror provide them with an honest broker who doesn’t shy away from the fact of werewolves or face-eating aliens that want to put their insect babies in our stomachs. They look you straight into their eyes and whisper delightfully “Everything’s going to be fine.” The mere fact of telling these tales proves a willingness to join in with kids in their nightmares, bring them to life, and then subvert and vanquish them. Children love you for this, because you are sharing a secret with them they don’t yet realize everyone else also knows: this is fun.

The end result, for me, at least was a great sense of trust in scary movies I never got from my parents, who tried to comfort me by telling me ghosts weren’t real. Horror told me they were, but it also taught me how to face them. We deny to our kids the full measure of what we experience and suffer as adults, but they aren’t idiots and know something’s going on, and what we’re really doing by accident is robbing them of the trust that they can survive, and that we understand this and can help them to do so. Where we as adults cannot tell them a half-truth, horror can tell them the whole, and there is a great mercy in that.

Greg Ruth, author of this article, has been working in comics since 1993 and has published work for The New York Times, DC Comics, Paradox Press, Fantagraphics Books, Caliber Comics, Dark Horse Comics and The Matrix. He has shown his paintings in New York, Houston, and Baltimore, and he also exhibited a series of murals at New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 2002.

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Horror Is Good For Kids (Part Three)

With my failure to break into the picture book market with horror themed tales comes the need to defend my choice to do so. I believe some level of imaginary darkness is beneficial to teach coping skills kids need to survive in the often chaotic world surrounding us. That is why I’ve latched onto this article posted on the Tor Publishing website.

Greg Ruth has been working in comics since 1993 and has published work for The New York Times, DC Comics, Paradox Press, Fantagraphics Books, Caliber Comics, Dark Horse Comics and The Matrix. He has shown his paintings in New York, Houston, and Baltimore, and he also exhibited a series of murals at New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 2002.

His article features six poignant reasons why children can benefit from horror stories. I’m going to posts them as six separate posts due to the length of the article (I prefer shorter posts, 500 words or less).

Reason #3: HORROR IS ANCIENT AND REAL AND CAN TEACH US MUCH

In the old days, fairy tales and stories for kids were designed to teach them to avoid places of danger, strangers, and weird old ladies living in candy-covered houses. They were cautionary tales for generations of kids who faced death, real and tangible, almost each and every day. There was a real and preventive purpose to these stories: stay alive and watch out for the myriad of real world threats that haunt your every step. These stories, of course, were terrifying, but these were also children that grew up in a time where, of every six kids born, two or three would survive to adulthood. Go and read some of the original Oz books by Baum and tell me they are not freakishly weird and threatening. The Brothers Grimm sought to warn kids in the most horrifying way they could. So much so that these types of tales have all but vanished from children’s lit, because these days they are deemed too frightening and dark for them. But they also are now more anecdotal than they were then; they mean less because the world around them grew and changed and they remained as they had always been. They became less relevant, however fantastic and crazy-pants they are.

Horror also touches something deep within us, right down into our fight-or-flight responses. We have developed, as a species, from an evolutionary necessity to be afraid of threats so we might flee them and survive to make more babies that can grow up to be suitably afraid of threats, that can also grow up and repeat the cycle. We exist today because of these smart apes and they deserve our thanks for learning that lesson. As a result, like almost all pop culture, horror lit can reflect in a unique way the extremely scary difficulties of being a child in a certain time. It touches on something we all feel and are familiar with, and as such can reveal a deeper understanding of ourselves as we go through the arc of being scared, then relieved, and then scared again. The thrill is an ancient one, and when we feel it, we’re connecting with something old and powerful within us. Whether it’s a roller-coaster, a steep water slide, or watching Harry Potter choke down a golden snitch as he falls thirty stories from his witch’s broom. There is a universality in vicarious thrill-seeking and danger-hunting. It is us touching they who began the cycle forty thousand years past.

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Horror Is Good For Kids (Part Two)

Greg Ruth has been working in comics since 1993 and has published work for The New York Times, DC Comics, Paradox Press, Fantagraphics Books, Caliber Comics, Dark Horse Comics and The Matrix. He has shown his paintings in New York, Houston, and Baltimore, and he also exhibited a series of murals at New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 2002.

His article features six poignant reasons why children can benefit from horror stories. I’m going to posts them as six separate posts due to the length of the article (I prefer shorter posts, 500 words or less).

Reason #2: POWER TO THE POWERLESS

The basic thing horror does for all of us is also its most ancient talent, the favorite system of crowd control invented by the ancient Greeks: catharsis. Who doesn’t walk out of a movie that just scared the pants off of them mercifully comforted by the mundane walk to through the parking lot and the world outside? For kids this is even more acute. If we take it further and make children both the object of terror in these stories as well as agents for surviving the monsters…well, now you’re onto something magical. Plainly put, horror provides a playground in which kids can dance with their fears in a safe way that can teach them how to survive monsters and be powerful, too. Horror for kids lets them not only read or see these terrible beasts, but also see themselves in the stories’ protagonists. The hero’s victory is their victory. The beast is whomever they find beastly in their own lives. A kid finishing a scary book, or movie can walk away having met the monster and survived, ready and better armed against the next villain that will be coming…

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Horror Is Good For Kids (Part 1)

I’m returning to one of my most common themes because I found an article on Tor’s publishing website that encapsulates all I’ve ever wanted to say on why kids need a little darkness in their life. Clarification: darkness of the fictional variety, not real life experiences.

Greg Ruth has been working in comics since 1993 and has published work for The New York Times, DC Comics, Paradox Press, Fantagraphics Books, Caliber Comics, Dark Horse Comics and The Matrix. He has shown his paintings in New York, Houston, and Baltimore, and he also exhibited a series of murals at New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 2002.

His article features six poignant reasons why children can benefit from horror stories. I’m going to posts them as six separate posts due to the length of the article (I prefer shorter posts, 500 words or less).

Reason #1: CHILDHOOD IS SCARY

Maurice Sendak, whom I love as a contributor to the lore of children’s literature as well as a dangerous and wily critic of the medium (especially his grouchy latter years), once countered a happy interviewer by demanding she understand that childhood was not a skip-hop through a candy-cane field of butterflies and sharing and sunshine, that is was in fact a terrifying ordeal he felt compelled to help kids survive. Kids live in a world of insane giants already. Nothing is the right size. The doorknobs are too high, the chairs too big… They have little agency of their own, and are barely given the power to even choose their own clothes. (Though no real “power ” can ever be given, anyway… maybe “privilege” is the right term.) Aside from the legitimate fears of every generation, kids today are enjoying seeing these madhouse giants lose their jobs, blow themselves up using the same planes they ride to visit grandma, and catastrophically ruin their own ecosystem, ushering in a new era of unknown tectonic change and loss their grandkids will get to enjoy in full. The insane giants did to the world what they did to comics: they didn’t grow a future, but instead ate it for dinner.

It’s a spooky time to be a kid, even without Sandy Hook making even the once-fortified classroom a potential doomsday ride. Look, the kids are already scared, so let’s give them some tools to cope with it beyond telling them not to worry about it all… when they really have every right to be scared poopless. Scary stories tell kids there’s always something worse, and in effect come across as more honest because they exist in a realm already familiar to them. Scary tales don’t warp kids; they give them a place to blow off steam while they are being warped by everything else.

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Another Reason Picture Books Are So Damn Hard

Frankly, the picture book market is a bitch to break into for a multitude of reasons. I came across  a thought I’d never considered before by the author of Move To The Write blog. She says:

If you look on your own bookshelf, or that of your picture-book-reading-aged kids, how many books do you see that you yourself read as a youngster? Your favourites, the classics? Is Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon there? Did you know that Goodnight Moon was first published in 1947? How about Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham? That one released in 1960. Eric Carlyle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar first came out in 1969, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was released in 1963 as was Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. Some of these books, friends, are close to 70 years old. My point? Picture books have major staying power, which means there is far less of a demand for new releases than in any other genre.

Plus the fact that every beginning children’s author thinks the way to break into children’s lit is through picture books. I mean how hard can it be to pound out a 1,000 word story? One publisher said that 85% of her children’s submissions are picture books. Therein lies the incredible feat of having your amazing picture book stand out in a genre that has less demand due to the staying power of the classics and that is over saturated with newbies trying to break into a falsely perceived easy market.

So after playing around in the picture book arena for a while I’m on the verge of admitting defeat which comes as a great surprise. I’ve always believed in persistence and it’s worked for me in other genres but the picture book market is one tough nut to crack. who am I kidding? I love banging my head against the wall. Never give up.

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Picture Book Strike Out?

I’m not a prolific writer. Between slow developing ideas and procrastination my writing output could hardly be called stellar.

What I can say is that recently most everything I’ve written has made it into print. I’m 2 for 2 with short stories and 1 for 1 with novels. Like I said, little output but a perfect 3-0.

However, my record isn’t as perfect as I’ve made it seem. Yes, I’ve had success in short story writing. Yes, my first and only novel, up to this point, is in the process of being published. Now lets throw picture books into the mix. That genre throws some pretty mean curve balls which I swing and miss at every time.

Handsome Heinz And The Balloon Heads: 0-1.

Brains Are Not For Eating: 0-2.

So far two strikes against me in the picture book market. But have I relegated myself to bench warmer status in that tough genre? Not yet. If I swing and miss with my next picture book project that will be three strikes and I’m out. I’m counting on Nobody Loves A Vampire But Everyone Loves A Teddy Bear to get me on base in the competitive picture book market.

If this one is not met favorably maybe it will be time to put away the bat and admit that writing good picture books is more difficult than it seems.

Please excuse all the baseball analogies but it is the boys of summer’s time of year and every time I hear the umpire shout “Three strikes, you’re out!” I can’t help wondering if I will soon be the one walking to the dugout, head bowed in shame.

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Picture Book Market Not Ready For Zombies

Warm and fuzzy isn’t me. I write dark and maybe I’m fighting an impossible battle, but I believe there’s an audience for darker picture books. I’ve come out swinging again with my latest project; a zombie picture book. I thought I had found a way to appropriately introduce our favorite brain eating creatures to the young readers market.

However, my first few marketing attempts have been shot down. I did get some positive feedback from the senior editor at one of the top publishers for children’s books. “What fun to return to your trademark dark sense of humor—I love the edgy quality of your writing and it’s what drew me to your work initially.  I was amused by the way Peter is simultaneously aware of his problematic zombie state, but also so nonchalant when he decides to try and eat other kids’ brains.” Editor

But then came the words no writer wants to hear. “You are absolutely right that there’s a dearth of zombie-themed books for picture book-aged readers, and I suspect the reason may be that zombies, even in a comical context, are just too scary for young children….I’d be too worried about frightening them with the idea of another child eating their brains—and can only imagine the reaction of today’s hyper-conscious parents, who are so cautious about exposing their children to anything scary or nightmare-inducing.” Editor

The last sentence encapsulates all that  I’ve been rallying against in my last few posts. Today’s hyper-conscious parents, today’s hyper-sensitive society. It’s taken all the fun out of publishing. I have an inkling this editor would have embraced the zombie picture book if she wasn’t worried about offending parents.

I guess I should write about poppies and furry rabbits if I really want to see my stories in print. No thank you. I’ll stick to boys losing their heads and kids eating brains. After all, at the end of the day I have to be able to live with myself: my true dark self.

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My Short Impression Of The Babadook

I’ve been posting recently on my blog in defense of dark writing in children’s literature. Make no mistake, though, if The Babadook was a real picture book there is no chance in Hell I’d let my child read it. That is one evil picture book.

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