Weeding through the muck in Teen Fiction

Weeding through the muck in Teen Fiction

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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. The Catcher in the Rye. Bridge to Terabithia. Such were the scandalous teen fiction titles in the late 20th century. Though I read all of them as an adolescent in the 1980s, it wasn’t without firm counsel and concerned follow-up from adults. Later, when I took a college-level children’s literature course, the darkest book we read was I Am the Cheese, which deals with a teenage boy’s psychiatric visits, amnesia and abusive past.

Obviously, these books can have some tough themes in them. Teens would grapple with issues such as anger, angst, sexual maturity, depression, obsession and death within their pages. By today’s standards, though, these stories seem like kid’s stuff.

In the 21st century, the macabre seems to rule much young adult fiction. It’s as if authors have taken these issues (and many more) and put them on narrative steroids.

Today’s titles include the futuristic, apocalyptic Hunger Games series (in which starving teens must kill one another in order to obtain food), Wintergirls (about the physical and psychological horrors of eating disorders), and Right Behind You (in which a boy sets a 7-year-old neighbor on fire and spends years in a facility for the criminally insane). Graphic, sometimes otherworldly descriptions of pain, torture, hallucinations and delusions, cutting, sex and sexual abuse are now routine reading. And when I read passages of such stories or hear friends who teach high school comment on them, I’m always a little taken aback by how morbid young adult fiction is today. I’m not the only one.

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