Hey there, citizen. A little while ago I wrote an essay on Children’s Literature, and the way it seems to be getting worse and worse as time goes on. Not necessarily in a “skill level” sense—there are certainly a lot of well-written books out there nowadays—but definitely in a moral sense, and, unless I’m completely whacked-out, in a subtler artistic sense as well. Today I’ve begun to post that essay, in parts, in the hopes that it will touch a cord with some of you parents and writers out there. Warning: the essay contains excerpts from several graphic, disturbing scenes from contemporary YA novels.
Why am I doing this, exactly? I’m doing it because I love stories, but when I go to the library, instead of meaningful stories, all I see on the shelves (and read in the books, whenever I dare to pick on up and read it) is more gore, more sex, more evil, more darkness, and less and less imagination. Not imagination in the sense of “what I can think up,” ‘cuz believe me, writers are thinking up a whole ‘lotta new stuff these days. It’s just not anything worth reading. The kind of Imagination I’m looking for, that I found in The Hobbit and Narnia when I was younger and in Out of the Silent Planet and David Copperfield when I was older, is not bound to that darkness. These next few posts are merely some organized points on the ethical problem of dark (even gruesome) children’s literature, along with some ideas on how we might go about solving it.
The Ethics of Darkness
PART ONE: THE PROBLEM
It is a hard time to be a kid. It has never been easy, of course, but today seems even darker than the past, and kids are dealing with darker and darker issues at younger and younger ages. They are murdered, abused, neglected, and socially battered down every day. Modern young adult and children’s literature has recognized this, and adapted accordingly. Instead of books about The Boxcar Children and books where children find their way into Narnia, we have books dealing with rape and murder, self-mutilation and substance abuse, dystopia and PTSD. The Hunger Games. Paper Towns. The Marbury Lens. Some of these books are frankly disturbing, and rightly so, for they are addressing very real, very disturbing issues that real children and young adults face. Literature, the authors of these books propose, should reflect reality in order to help younger readers cope with their own problems. After all, they are going to experience darkness anyway, are they not? "There's nothing in my book that even compares to what kids can find on the Internet," says Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His book deals with issues such as alcoholism, racism, and poverty. This and other similar books have drawn a massive amount of praise from critics.
And yet, not everyone agrees that the dark trend in modern literature is a good trend. Some parents complain that their children are being damaged by these books rather than being helped. Some authors, likewise, argue that exposing young people to more violence and darkness does nothing to advance the quality of literature, but rather constricts it. The best literature, they argue, raises our minds to something higher than the grotesque parts of our real lives. “…stories can reflect the things that are right and reassuring about life,” writes Christopher Bunn, author of The Hawk and His Boy, a fantasy-adventure book for young adults. “Stories can underscore human attributes that give one a little hope about life in general, amidst the insanity and squalor of that same life. Hope or warning.”
Nearly everyone involved in literature agrees that reading is important for the development of young people, yet, when it comes to the task of writing books for children, almost no one seems able to agree what kind of books these should be. Meanwhile, the world gets darker around us, and young people are left in just as scary a place as they always were. We cannot shield our young readers from the darkness in the real world, but no one is entirely sure how to use literature to help them deal with it. The debates rage hot on all sides, but no real solution seems to be presented. Should dark themes and situations be allowed? How much? How intense? Perhaps the reason so many fights erupt on this issue is because we are tackling the wrong problem. Perhaps we should stop asking “how much darkness should we allow in young adult and children’s literature?” and start asking “what is the healthiest way for literature to prepare young people for the darkness of real life?”
The tendencies of today’s younger-audience literature are obviously darker than in the past. Instead of adults reading 1984, our world witnesses young children reading The Hunger Games and any number of similar novels. The authors and readers of such works have a valid point: you cannot stop any child from being exposed to evil. One day, somehow, the child will be shown the darkness of real life, and there is nothing to do about it. Why not prepare them by exposing them to evil in literature that is often entertaining and well-written, as well as dark? “Literature is a luxury;” the famed writer G.K. Chesterton once said, “fiction is a necessity.” Contributor and editor for Speakeasyonline magazine, Christopher John Farley, writes:
When a visitor found out that I allowed my son to read the Scott Pilgrim series, which deals in a frank, funny way with issues of dating, identity and homosexuality, she told me I should get rid of the books. But I loved the series, and so did my son. A great book is a perfect starting point for talking with kids about the real world around them. One of my neighbor’s teen kids had been drifting as a reader until she picked up a copy of the violent young adult series “The Hunger Games.” She quickly completed the entire series, and was eager to discuss how excited she was by the books.
Sheltering children does not seem to be the answer: on that point most people would agree. It is certainly a valid wish to have engaging literature for young people to read, in which they are shown the world in all its darkness, in all its sadness and pain. But we must give them hope, some sort of light or happiness. We must improve their lives, or we are not helping them at all. There, too, most people would probably agree. Hopefully, no one wants to harm young people through literature, and if they do, is it not the duty of decent people, decent parents and writers, to stop them? We want young people to be made stronger, more likely to succeed. It is true that books like Absolutely True Diary and Wintergirlsdeal with real-life issues, and we assume they are written with an ultimately benevolent purpose in mind. Book and movie reviewer Bob Hoose, writing on his exploration of the overall trend of darkness in children’s literature, attests that they are often well written, too: “No slapdash jobs here… the authors I encountered created worlds and characters that were incredibly compelling.”            The only problem, the only aspect of this new, growing trend of dark literature that bothers me is that the strategy is not working. Rather than seeing young adult literature produce a generation of able and ready, healthy young adults, we have just as much (if not more) depression, suicide, sexual activity, substance abuse, and many other ugly factors among children and teens. Of course it could be objected that literature is not the sole cause, and that is true. But literature does not seem to be helping the situation, and it is probably a larger factor than most people suspect.

Next week, we’ll delve further into the shadows. We need to figure out why this isn’t working, and we need to learn how to gather the proper priorities. We will ask the hard questions and take a closer look at the way darkness and evil itself has been portrayed in literature over time, in an effort to better understand the problems of the present.