A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie by Matt Blackstone

At the outset, I was quite excited to read Matt Blackstone’s upcoming debut A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie. The opening reminded me of a male version of Kirsten Hubbard’s Like Mandarin. In early chapters, fourteen-year-old Rene meets Gio, a tall, slang-inventing, facial-hair sporting classmate and is instantly entranced by him. He assures us that he’s not gay, but that he merely wants to be Gio—but of course, this isn’t an easy prospect for Rene, an awkward kid who wears a superhero cape to school and suffers from OCD.

It’s here, in the beginning of his book that Blackstone shows his potential as a writer. Rene is sensitively written, with hints of darkness in his past. His mother tries to care for him, but it’s not easy to take care of such a high maintenance child in the wake of his father’s absence. And this parental abandonment has had a profound effect on Rene—not only does he have no idea how to navigate high school (again, he wears a cape to class)—but he also suffers from disturbing fits of rage.

Blackstone treats these incidences of violence with care, though, keeping very close to Rene’s internal narration. By doing so, he avoids moralizing to either his audience or his young protagonist. In this way, he’s successful at walking that delicate line of writing a young teenager. Here, he succeeds where many YA authors fail, and no wonder—fourteen is an incredibly difficult age to write well without either lapsing into a more adult diction or making your kid sound, well, like a small child.

Unfortunately, as the story proceeds, the pacing unravels. Gio and Rene go on a series of loose adventures, traveling from a nursing home to Rene’s home (where his father, Phil, has made his first surprise reappearance in six years) to Gio’s home and then ultimately New York City. Their journey feels idle and meandering—and this picaresque plot is interrupted by long, italicized flashbacks. Now, don’t get me wrong—the content of these flashbacks is both important and poignant, explaining how Rene’s family (and Rene himself) came to be so irrevocably broken. But it’s disruptive to the flow of the story and lends to the uneven, limping pace. This content would have been much more effectively communicated if it had been intermingled with the main text, or spaced more regularly throughout it.

But more troublingly, the characters beyond Rene, Gio, and their English teacher, Mr. Head (whose plotline is more-or-less summarily forgotten by the book’s end, save for a few lines at the conclusion) are little more than sketchy caricatures. The bully Rene faces, his father, and even his love interest are one-note and reductive. I found this particularly pressing in Blackstone’s approach to Ariel, the little red-head girl that Rene loves. She’s hardly mentioned twice through the book’s first two thirds, and then only as an “Angel”—a girl who would never do or say anything bad to anybody.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Blackstone here—maybe Ariel’s one-dimensional characterization is inevitable when viewed through the lens of a fourteen-year-old boy. Still, I couldn’t help but think that she’s the nice guy’s love interest equivalent to a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Other than the fact that she has annoying sisters (whose personalities are stronger than her own in the very brief time we see them), she seems to exist entirely as a blank canvas against which Rene can project his fantasies. Though there are some motions by the book’s perhaps-overly-neat conclusion toward a genuine friendship between Ariel and Rene, it ultimately feels more like a prelude to real friendship than anything that we see between the boys.

Part of me cynically couldn’t help but wonder if she existed largely to resolve any lingering questions about Rene’s sexuality. Despite Rene’s early protests that, yes, he’s straight and, yes, he has wet dreams about girls, without Ariel this would be a story wholly about the relationships between several men: Rene and Gio, Gio and Mr. Head, Rene and Mr. Head, Rene and his father. And honestly, it would have been a fairly satisfying book even then, despite failing the Bechdel test. I can’t help but wonder if a bit more sexual ambiguity underlying Rene and Gio’s friendship would have lent Rene’s story the depth and complexity that it ultimately lacked. However, I may be projecting my own sort of fantasies about YA buddy novels here, and maybe unrealistically. Relationships between teenage boys are not allowed to have the same sexual ambiguities that female friendships are in our society, and so my fantasies about encountering a male Like Mandarin are likely to remain exactly that.

A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie is a fun little novel and is conceptually strong, but ultimately suffers from a few rookie mistakes. Namely, the shallow characterization of the supporting cast and the structure get in the way of what would otherwise be a very briskly paced, endearing book. I think it would satisfy teenage boys who aren’t looking for any messy depth (and who want their books free from any pesky homo-erotic subtext), and I hope Blackstone matures in subsequent books to fulfill the potential of his concepts.

A copy of this volume was generously provided for review purposes by the publisher and the author.

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I was reading the fortieth-anniversary edition of John Donovan’s woefully little-known young adult classic I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip last night. If you’re not familiar with this title (and you might not be; it was out of print for twenty years!), it was the first “gay” young adult fiction ever published, way back in 1969.

But to call it merely the first gay YA novel would be to sell it short, because I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip is, in fact, a searing novel about grief and dogs and crazy moms and New York City, all told through the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy who is somewhat of a mini-Holden Caulfield, in terms of voice, if not wangst. One of the accompanying essays at the back of my e-book discussed the role Donovan’s novel–along with Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy and SE Hinton’s The Outsiders–played in the shift from saccharine children’s literature that seemed to exist in a sort of escapist fairyland to realistic books that more accurately depicted the lives of children and adolescents.

The essayish referred to this as the “New Realism” of YA, mirroring a similar contemporaneous movement in art, one that brought real life, and artistic expression, closer together.

In young adult literature, I suspect we still see the impact of this within the contemporary sphere. It’s not uncommon to find contemporary YA where real-life problems are woven seamlessly in the narrative. For example, Kirsten Hubbard’s Like Mandarin is the story of two girls with absent parents. But the absent parents aren’t the story here; instead, the story is the slow cobbling together of their friendship. Similarly, Kody Keplinger’s The DUFF uses the poverty and alcoholism of the main character’s father as a thematic back drop–but it’s not about that poverty and alcoholism. Instead, it’s about the main character’s romantic entanglements.

In other words, these aren’t issue books. They might include “issues,” but only insofar as those kinds of problems reflect the real lives of teens.

Maybe predictably, this sort of realism is really much more common in contemporary literature than it is in genre YA.

I was talking to Sean about this the other day–how rare it is to see issues of poverty or abuse or grief or, you know, psychological significance in fantasy and sci-fi novels for teens. And if you do, those problems are treated differently than they are in contemporary. Sometimes they’re contrivances that allow our hero to move about, unencumbered (the famous absent parent trope–this allows the protagonist to also someday discover that he’s the son of a king pair of famous wizards, but he doesn’t usually deal with the psychological impacts of growing up an orphan as real children do). Sometimes it’s just scene setting, used to tease out thematic threads like loneliness without having a larger impact on either our protagonist or the action (such as in Twilight and its followers, where the absence of real parental figures is treated as kind of cute. Oh, mom, and your inability to take care of yourself! Oh, dad, you would starve without me!). But just as often, these notes of realism are wholly missing, such as in the case of Ally Condie’s Matched, where the wholesome, uncomplicated nuclear upbringing of the main character felt as far from the lives of most teens I know as Jupiter.

(That’s not to say that two-parent families don’t exist; just that they’re not as ubiquitous as genre YA would have you believe, and that even when both parents are present, shit happens. Such is life!)

I suspect this happens because some writers assume that the purpose of genre work is to provide an escapist fantasy for young readers, a respite from the troubles of their lives. They’re taking their cues from writers like Tolkien, whose stories featured individuals who are heroes on a global scale, but wholes journeys have little personal relevance. But for me, the child of a single parent, whose father died when I was young and who grew up dealing with poverty, these kinds of narratives had stopped ringing true by the time that I was a jaded twelve year old. This is one of the reasons that Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time had such a deep impact on me. Though Meg Murry’s journey has universal repercussions, it’s also deeply personal. Her life and her family has been permanently changed by her father’s absence, and through rescuing him (and, realistically, discovering that restoring her family doesn’t solve all of her problems, anyway), she’s able to process that loss.

(Another classic genre YA which similarly deals with real-life themes in a respectful and realistic way is The Girl with the Silver Eyes, which I’d highly recommend.)

I do think that there are some authors who mix emotional realism and genre. Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver, for example, portrays absent (and clueless) parents realistically, and love interest Sam must deal with post-traumatic stress due to physical abuse he encountered as a child. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy similarly is just as much about dual protags Lyra and Will’s mutual search for some sort of family as it is about daemons and souls and inter-dimensional journeys.

(I suspect and hope there are more–feel free to make suggestions in the comments!)

But I’d still like to see a greater proliferation of emotional realism and resonance in genre books. These narratives aren’t going to become commonplace unless writers act with intention, striving to work the real lives of teenagers into their books. Escapist fantasy has had its day–but I think now it’s time for genre authors to offer up something a little meatier.

If you follow the YA blogosphere, you’re almost certainly aware of the recent controversy over the upcoming Wicked Pretty Things anthology. (And is it just me, or is the YA world moving from controversy to controversy at the moment?) For those who were fortunate enough to miss the whole thing, it all went down on author Jessica Verday’s blog after the anthology’s editor asked her to change her story from a gay romance to a more acceptably heterosexual one. Needless to say, the internets were not happy.

By sheer coincidence, something similar happened in the world of adult fantasy around the same time. Brandon Sanderson, who you may know as the guy who was chosen to write the last few Wheel of Time books, became embroiled in a massive Reddit debate over a post he wrote on Dumbledore and homosexuality. His blog is down as of this writing (never mind, it’s back up), but you can find the whole Reddit discussion here.

So. Two internet controversies surrounding homophobia in publishing, one involving an editor and one involving an author. I’d like to split those into separate topics. The former is about how we as budding writers respond to editors and other authoritative figures in the publishing industry, while the latter is about how readers respond to authors whose beliefs or opinions they strongly disagree with. I probably don’t need to point out that this is a touchy subject for a lot of people, but I think it’s worth discussing all the same. Your thoughts on either topic are appreciated, as always!

Homophobia and the Industry: Why does it matter?

First of all, let’s take care of a very common complaint: when I say ‘homophobia’, I do not mean a literal fear or phobia of gay people. Pointing out that you do not run screaming at the sight of two men or two women kissing is not a convenient way to sidestep responsibility. If it helps, replace every instance of the word ‘homophobia’ you come across with ‘prejudice’, because it’s what people usually mean anyway.

With that out of the way…why does it matter that Trisha Telep asked Jessica Verday to change her story?

I’ll explain with an anecdote. (Don’t worry, it’s short.) In 2009, an Irish popstar named Stephen Gately died suddenly. It was all over the news, as these things are wont to be. What I found interesting is that he had been working on a children’s book called The Tree of Seasons just before he died; predictably, it was rushed to publication and given a fairly large marketing push to capitalize on all the media buzz surrounding his death. (I realise that sounds cynical, but let’s be realistic here.)

I was in Hodges Figgis, the largest bookshop in Dublin, a few days after his book was released. It was face-out in the most visible shelves in the YA/children’s section of the story, with his name prominent printed across the top of the cover. I was browsing through the latest crop of Twilight knock-offs (this was before I stopped trying to like paranormal romance) when a woman nearby asked one of the staff members behind the counter if they could help her find ‘an appropriate book’ for her 12-year old daughter. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

Hodges Figgis Lady: Well, the children’s section is over there, and the books are sorted by age group, so…
Ignorant Woman: *looking sideways at The Tree of Seasons and grinning conspirationally.* I assume Stephen Gately’s book isn’t age appropriate!
Hodges Figgis Lady: Uh…well, it’s-
Ignorant Woman: *self-congratulatory laughter*

See, Stephen Gately was gay (twist ending), so of course his children’s book, which was bought by a mainstream publisher and sold in mainstream bookshops, must have been full of gay sex and orgies and God knows what else.

You know, because he was gay.

This was Trisha Telep’s initial explanation for why she asked Jessica Verday to change her story:

Oh dear. Might as well give you my two cents. Not that it really matters but… Don’t take it out on the publishers, the decision was mine totally. These teen anthologies I do are light on the sex and light on the language. I assumed they’d be light on alternative sexuality, as well. Turns out I was wrong! Just after I had the kerfuffle with jessica, I was told that the publishers would have loved the story to appear in the book! Oh dear. My rashness will be the death of me. It’s a great story. Hope jessica publishes it online. (By the way: if you want to see a you tube video of me wrestling a gay man in Glasgow, and losing, please let me know).

A lot of people latched on to the fact that she used the phrase ‘alternative sexuality’, which is only one step up from the dreaded ‘alternative lifestyle’. (The bizarre ‘wrestling a gay man in Glasgow’ comment also got a lot of attention.) I have a bigger problem with the fact that she apparently equates an almost-chaste gay romance story with one featuring a lot of swearing and sex. The idea that homosexuality is an ‘explicit’ topic in itself, regardless of how much sexual content might be involved, is very common and very damaging. It plays into the common stereotype of gay people being sex-obsessed and permiscuous, an image that mainstream media is disturbingly willing to accept without question.

We need more YA with gay characters. Gay teenagers need to see themselves represented properly in literature written for their age group; they need to see that, contrary to what a lot of people in their lives might be telling them, they are not morally degenerate or sinful or a deviation from the norm.

Agents and editors are constantly telling us that they’re ‘looking for’ manuscript that buck the heteronormative trend, yet gay teenagers are still severely underepresented on mainstream YA shelves. (Note that I’m talking about mainstream YA here, not the ‘issues novel’ ghetto where most of these novels go to die.) I know for a fact that these books are being written by unpublished writers – just look at the likes of Absolute Write for evidence of that – so why aren’t they making it to the shelves?

To be honest, I suspect it’s because a lot of them never get further than their author’s hard drives. If you publish a YA book with gay characters, you are probably going to get some flak for it. People will inevitably wonder if it means that you’re gay. (And if you are gay, publishing will carry with it the added stress of implicitly coming out to your family and friends…along with your entire audience. Fun times.) And, just maybe, an editor will ask you to change the story you’ve been working on for months or years so that it will be more ‘acceptable’ to some publishing house. What do you do in a situation like that – hold on to your integrity and remain unpublished, or sell out and get that contract you’ve been dreaming of for the last ten years?

Maybe you’d be better off just writing a ‘straight’ book like everybody else.

Homophobia and your favourite authors: why does it matter?

Have you ever finished a book and immediately Googled the author? I did it after finishing Ender’s Game, which I loved, and was extremely dissappointed when I uncovered this. It turns out Orson Scott Card has some…strong views on homosexuality, let’s say. I shrugged it off (yes, really) and went on reading the Ender books, convinced that an author’s personal views shouldn’t affect how a person approaches their writing.

I’ve changed my mind since then. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit more self-aware now, but I can’t look at an Orson Scott Card book without immediately thinking of the incredible bigotry he’s displayed in the past. I can’t help but remind myself that he’s been an active participant in one of the largest anti-gay organisations in America.

It doesn’t particularly matter that most of his books don’t address homosexuality at all (I’ve heard that at least one does, although at this point I don’t care enough to see what it’s like). I would rather give my money to an author who doesn’t advocate overthrowing the government as a favourable alternative to letting me get married someday.

Brandon Sanderson, like Orson Scott Card, is a well-known genre writer, a member of the LDS Church, and somebody who believes that gay relationships are inherently wrong. He says as much in the Reddit thread I linked to above:

If it helps, I’m trying very hard not to be hateful. It’s not an easy topic to deal with, however.

I believe that engaging in homosexual acts is sinful. So there is that, which may pretty much mean the issue is dead in the water, without any handshakes to be had. But, of course, it’s also sinful to be prideful, respond to someone in anger, and be greedy–all things I’m pretty much guilt of myself. So it’s not my job to point at you and say “SINNER!” Jesus is pretty clear on that fact. But if someone asks me if something is/isn’t a sin, I have to answer to the best of my knowledge.

Note, also, that I (and many I know) have a different way of looking at that word “sin.” Much like the words “sexist” or “racist” it has come to be loaded with a whole ton of meaning that almost makes it impossible to use in conversation. When I say sin, I mean one thing only: It impedes spiritual growth. And it’s not my job to do an assessment of your personal spiritual growth or goals.

As for the gay marriage issue, I have altered my stance as I posted elsewhere in the thread. One large part of the church’s worry about gay marriage (perhaps even the primary part of it) is a worry that without action, the state will be able to declare whom the church can or cannot marry, as marriage is the central religious ordinance in the church. This is as scary to us as the lack of gay marriage is to you, and I do wonder if maybe our knee-jerk reaction was hasty.” (Source)

‘Dead in the water’ is probably a good way of putting it; if you tell me that ‘engaging in homosexual acts’ is wrong (I’m going to assume that precludes the kind of intimate relationships that straight people are allowed to have), we’re done. I can get on board with somebody who’s a bit politically hesitant about gay marriage, mostly because there’s an awful lot of misinformation on the subject. I can accept that some people are just uncomfortable with the whole area of same-sex relationships. But if you tell me that you think a gay person should never have a loving, intimate and sexual relationship…well, don’t expect me to just overlook that. I can’t.

And to be frank, it’s insane that people would expect it. I said to fellow Interrobang Phoebe that reading Sanderson’s rhetoric – supposedly inoffensive, hesitant, all in the spirit of ‘finding common ground’ – is akin to being beaten over the head with a wooden stick by somebody who insists they’re only holding a piece of styrofoam. I cannot think of any other area where it is considered acceptable to expect that people will be polite and understanding towards you after you’ve expressed this kind of prejudice against them. Need I remind anybody that most states in America have passed constitutional amendaments for the express purpose of preventing gay marriage? Or that gay couples still cannot legally adopt in the majority of the USA and Europe? People like Brandon Sanderson, comfortably within the bounds of the majority, can afford to treat this as nothing more than a polite difference of opinion. Not everybody is so priveleged.

So – will I buy a Brandon Sanderson book in the future? I honestly don’t know. It helps that I’m not particularly fond of his writing to begin with (and I can’t stand the Wheel of Time series), but if he wrote something that piqued my interest in the future? I might think about it. He’s no Orson Scott Card, that’s for sure – I get the impression from his comments on the Reddit thread that he realises that his religion is wrong on this one, but can’t admit as much to himself without the whole thing unraveling on him. (I shouldn’t need to point out that I don’t see this as much of an excuse.) But to me, it matters what an author believes. We elevate writers to positions of cultural authority by supporting their work, and I believe that this does give them a kind of power in any society that values artistic ability. Why give that power to somebody who might turn it against you?

You might have noticed that we Interrobangs are an opinionated crowd.

It’s true! We have Feelings about Things, and we’re not afraid to share them.

And sometimes–gasp!–we don’t even agree.

Take Sean’s post on Saturday. In it, he posited that Young Adult covers are widely embarrassing, and contribute to an “image problem.” He writes of an imaginary adult reader:

Keep in mind, you don’t know much about YA. (And before you demand that our hypothetical reader become better acquainted with a publishing category before dismissing it, ask yourself how much you really know about epic fantasy or chic-lit or whatever genres you’ve decided you don’t care for.) You don’t know about authors like Justine Larbalestier or Meg Rosoff; there’s a good chance you won’t even realise that contemporary YA still exists, so rapidly has it vanished under a rising tide of badly-written pap.

I certainly wouldn’t blame you for thinking that YA begins and ends with this season’s ‘big name’ paranormal/dystopian romance. Which is exactly why YA has an image problem.

When Sean’s post popped up in my Google Reader, I initially found myself nodding along. Yes, the images he shared were very photoshopped! No, those boys don’t look like teenagers at all! These covers could make teenagers feel bad about themselves. That’s a problem!

Then I reached his gallery of “good” covers–the type he’d like to see in YA. And . . . uh . . .

. . .

. . . really, dude?

Covers serve several purposes. Their primary purpose is to catch the eye of a potential reader. Covers that are bright, flashy, opalescent, and nicely composed all do that. Enticing a reader to pick up a book is the first step to getting someone to buy it.

Frankly, bland, abstract covers–text superimposed on waterlilies (snooze!)–don’t do that too well. So I’m not entirely sure the covers linked above would do much for sales.

There’s a reason these covers work for adult literary fiction, though, and that’s because they convey a certain gravity and seriousness. “Read me,” this book declares, “while drinking tea at your favorite coffee shop. I’ll help you quietly contemplate your life.” Part of this is gravity by association; we know that we’re in for a serious, literary read because this is what serious, literary books always look like.

And that brings me to the second purpose of a cover, which is to make an implicit promise to the reader about the content within.

A reader of paranormal romance should be able to guess the genre from a book’s jacket. Ditto, science fiction, and fantasy, and contemporary, and romance.

For example, this cover is effective at communicating its contents (magical angst, and even more magical horses):

Alas, poor Vanyel! I knew him, Tylendel.

And it’s a safe bet that this book contains some spacey shit!:

These are the voyages of the Starship Hardsciencefiction

Why is it a good idea for a cover to help a book reach an audience already amenable to its contents? Because readers are often fiercely loyal of the stuff they love, and they seek out books that will clearly contain the stuff they love. Hook a reader and they’ll stay with you for many, many books. I speak from experience here–I own more Anne McCaffrey novels than I do books by any other person, all because I saw this book cover when I was thirteen, and was excited by the really, really realistic dragon:

I even have a Pernese dragon tattoo. No joke!

I’m not citing these covers because I think they’re particularly aesthetically pleasing; they’re definitely dated and they all have their flaws. But I hope they illustrate why there’s really nothing wrong about the following covers:

A paranormal romance . . .

A historical fantasy set in ancient China . . .

Tallyho, Steampunk!

I think it’s important to note that people who are passionate about these kinds of books don’t find them embarrassing. I was never embarrassed to read a book with a dragon on it, or with a space ship on it. And most teen readers aren’t embarrassed to read books representative of their tastes, either.

There has been a trend, though, to obscure a book’s true contents. I assume that this is for the benefit of “reaching a wider audience” because it almost always means “removing the embarrassing stuff that literary or adult readers worry will make others look down on them.”

As you can imagine, I find this practice incredibly lame.

Why? Because three years ago, I decided that I wanted to get back into YA. And I wanted to read some great young adult science fiction, because that’s what I’ve always loved. It was not hard to easily find sci-fi when I was a teen. But the only sci-fi books I found (after a preposterous amount of searching) looked like this:

What’s worse, Academy 7 gave no indication it was sci-fi from any of the text on the inside or outside cover. Nada!

And this misrepresentation doesn’t only happen with science fiction. I recently read two absolutely devastating contemporary novels about the implosions of young lives. One looked like this:

The other, like this:

In both cases, people responded in surprise to my reviews. “I thought this book was a lighthearted girly novel! I think I’ll look this up!” Meanwhile, in the case of both Academy 7 and Singing the Dogstar Blues, reviews abound where the reader experienced some sense of dismay in realizing that they’d been tricked into reading a sci-fi novel. As much as I love sci-fi, I can’t blame them. Readers know when they’re being lied to! And being tricked is never fun!

I don’t think the current state of covers in YA is flawless. I think too many covers perpetuate the same body shaming in young girls through the promotion of unrealistic beauty that most teen magazines do. Sure, they’re overphotoshopped. And sometimes the cover model is too old, or ridiculously thin, or wearing a stupid prom dress, or (ugh) the wrong race. I’d love to see covers that reflect teenagers as teenagers really are.

But do I think YA covers are embarrassing?

No freakin’ way.