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Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture by Jessica McCort

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2017.0038

1080-6563

Sara Austin,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Reviewed by: Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture by Jessica McCort Sara Austin (bio) Jessica McCort. Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. Print. Jessica McCort's edited collection Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture investigates the use of horror tropes as a method of subversion of adult power within children's and young adult literature and culture. Her introduction "Why Horror (Or, the Importance of Being Frightened)" establishes the collection's framework as not about horror texts, per se, but rather about the influence of horror on texts for young readers. Mc-Cort offers the term "faux horror" to describe texts for the youngest readers that use these tropes not to frighten but rather to generate reader agency and excitement. Working against what Maria Tatar labels the "pedagogy of fear" utilized by early works for children such as Grimms' fairy tales, which used horror tropes to frighten children into socially acceptable behaviors, McCort seeks to celebrate works that undermine adult authority and social expectations of childhood innocence and obedience. The narrative focus of the chapters are roughly organized chronologically, beginning with Struwwelpeter (1845) and ending with The Hunger Games (2008) and contemporary reading recommendations for librarians and teachers. Although every chapter explores its chosen texts with rigor and creativity, the chapters that are the most surprising to scholars may be those whose subjects are the most familiar. The first four essays in McCourt's collection tackle core children's literature texts including Struwwelpeter, various works by Edward Gorey and Charles Dickens, Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and fairy-tale adaptations, while the next to last essay discusses Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. The collection's other chapters are certainly worth reading, but these five essays will likely carry the most weight in terms of both scholarly influence and classroom use. The first chapter, Justine Gieni's "Punishing the Abject Child: The Delight and Discipline of Body Horror in Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter," provides a detailed close reading of three of Hoffmann's tales, "Shock-headed Peter," "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," and "The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup," including an analysis of both story and illustrations. Gieni connects the use of horror tropes such as mutilation and child-death to child body-autonomy. Using close readings as well as historical details from the period, Gieni argues that Hoffman's work constructs a monument to violent pedagogies, which places the site of horror not within the abject child body, but rather in the mechanisms of adult power that would discipline such bodies through violence. Her work on onanism and the story of Suck-a-Thumb is particularly impressive, contextualizing the story within not only Freudian theory, which might label the child character as weak or neurotic, but also the medical discourses of the time that practiced mutilation [End Page 415] as a form of punishment and may have threatened castration to prevent the "unclean" habit of masturbation. Continuing the theme of violence toward child bodies as a staple of horror literature, A. Robin Hoffman's chapter "A Wonderful Horrid Thing: Edward Gorey, Charles Dickens, and Drawing the Horror Out of Childhood Death," focuses on the physicality of Gorey's work, drawing comparisons between Gorey's style and that of Charles Dickens, specifically citing Gorey as a "scrunched up" version of the Dickensian novel, which aestheticizes the death of pious children for entertainment purposes (82). Hoffman uses The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1968) and The Hapless Child (1961) as the center of her analysis of Gorey, making strong use of both texts to discuss Gorey's aesthetic of child death, and comparing it to the religious deaths used in sentimental fiction. Hoffman concludes that Gorey compresses sentimental elements and traditions into books made for little hands, while replacing Dickensian religious conviction with the "horror of wasted potential" (82). After these introductory chapters, the use of violence as horror trope in the focus texts turns from children as victims to children as perpetrators, as the critical focus of these essays shift from childhood generally to more specific...