For Kids Gore Still Number One

I wish I was talking about politics, but we’re not that lucky. When it comes boys and books, it seems that horror and gore are still the way to get them reading. According to this article in the Guardian, children are still lapping up all the zombie guts authors can dish out.

With R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series still selling 4 million copies in the US every month, kids are carrying on the tradition of thumbing their noses to literary snobbish adults everywhere and devouring horror books like famished vampires at a blood donor clinic.

The latest Stephen King for kiddies is Darren Shan and his Saga of Darren Shan series (yes – the hero is the author – a step further than the Leomony Snickett, author as confidante angle.) I haven’t read any of the books and in my typically bad judgement, I passed them off and a soon-to-be flop when I first saw them appear a few years ago (I did the same with Harry Potter and Lemony Snickett). But as Kate Kellaway from the Guardian puts it, I was wrong to turn my back on Shan:

“I have tried to ignore Shan, but it has not been easy. And just recently, it has become impossible. He is at the top of the children’s paperback bestseller list with The Sons of Destiny, the 12th and final book in The Saga of Darren Shan; Warner Brothers has bought film rights for the first two books for a seven-figure sum and the series has sold more than a million copies.”

With this mega-level success comes mega-level scorn. But while many parents ban horror books and other forms of “vomitrious” reading material (comic books, Pokemon cards, etc) others see them as a way to get reluctant readers hooked on books. Researchers are looking the into the new literacy skills boys learn when they engage in these “low-literate” reading materials. Some say that even video games have literary merit.

Since the days of Enid Blyton and the Famous Five, kids have known what they want to read and parents have resisted (Blyton was banned in many libraries for being “poorly written”.) So, it continues today. As with adults, if you put a warning label on a pop culture product, its sales will increase.

Books like these can be used as springboards to other materials and that’s the role adults should be playing, instead of banning the materials and shoving tattered copies of Treasure Island into their hands (nothing against Treasure Island – I loved that book, when I read it at age 21 – today many kids find the plot slow and the language too challenging.)

Kids (especially boys) love the gore of Shan, just as adults love the gore of Stephen King. It’s getting kids reading and that’s a good thing. Soon it’ll be getting them into the movie theatres and the merits of that is the subject of another post entirely.