Joseph Bruchac’s “Dark” Novels: Confronting the Terror of Adolescence

Adolescence is a strange time: adolescents’ bodies are changing in ways over which they often have no control; their hormones often direct their actions without their understanding why; the relatively safe, comfortable world they have known thus far suddenly seems to be full of temptations and dangers they are both frightened by and drawn to. Abenaki Joseph Bruchac, a children’s author best known for historical fiction novels such as Hidden Roots, The Winter People and the recent March Toward Thunder, provides an outlet for the conflicting, alluring emotions of adolescents in his novels The Dark Pond (2004) and Whisper in the Dark (2005), novels that wed frightening situations within the novels with the terrifying angst of adolescence. Yet Bruchac also acts as a trickster in writing these novels that seem, on the surface, to have more in common with Edgar Allan Poe than with Sherman Alexie, with Anne Rice than with Louise Erdrich, with Stephen King than with Thomas King. Adding to the genre of horror fiction so popular with adolescents, he creates stories for an audience that is more likely to seek entertainment than edification within the text, the kind of audience who reads purely for pleasure without consideration of other “lessons” to be found in literature, such as learning about other historical periods or people from cultures that differ from their own. The Dark Pond and Whisper in the Dark on one level do seek to entertain, to thrill and frighten young readers as they share in the experiences of Armie and Maddy, but the novels also introduce young readers to characters and cultures with which they may be unfamiliar. In so doing, they make a connection between the horror story and adolescence, despite one’s cultural background.

In these two novels, Bruchac incorporates notions of the uncanny: he deconstructs the familiar genre of the horror story to make it unfamiliar by incorporating American Indian mythology, and he deconstructs the less familiar American Indian coming-of-age story to make it the more familiar narrative of an outsider to the group, one who also is enthralled with the fearful. In these “dark” novels (so-called because of the titles as well as the content), Bruchac uses the popular genre of horror fiction to explore themes of adolescence as well as significant American Indian themes. Through the familiar genre of the horror story, he subtly introduces adolescent readers to American Indian literature, culture, and history, taking them from the known (horror story) to the unknown (American Indian story), benefiting both in the process. Bruchac’s novels thus work as a means to “reinvent” American Indians and to subvert the stereotypes, using his storytelling Abenaki roots to provide an outlet and insight into the adolescent mind.¹

The Adolescent as Uncanny

As Nicholas Royle explains in The Uncanny, we associate the uncanny with things that are ghostly, strange, mysterious, weird, and supernatural, but the uncanny is more complex than that. For most people, the notion of the uncanny begins with Freud’s famous essay in which he explains, “The subject of the ‘uncanny’…is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general” (217). Postmodern discussions of the uncanny often associate it with notions of deconstruction since one can readily see how the uncanny deconstructs, making signifiers and signifieds difficult to pin down, which is, in part, what keeps the reader uncertain and uneasy, all the while marking a return of the familiar in the love/hate relationship we find in being frightened, thrust out of our comfort zones and into the midst of the unfamiliar.

That the protagonists of Bruchac’s novels are adolescents seems particularly apropos of the uncanny, for what can be described as familiar yet unfamiliar better than adolescence? It is a time when one’s body, something one has “lived” intimately with for at least a decade, becomes something foreign, when the adolescent himself or herself may be...