Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

By sheer coincidence, I received my review copy of Michelle Ann Abate’s fascinating scholarly monograph, Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature during Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of free speech and intellectual freedom sponsored by such organizations as the American Library Association. During the course of this week, my email inbox and social media sites were flooded with articles and infographics that catalogued censored books, documented the various (and often irrational) motives behind these books’ blacklisting, and proposed action for the defense of a free press. Perhaps the most heavily circulated of these articles—and certainly the most moving—was Sherman Alexie’s provocatively titled essay, “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood.” In this piece, originally published in The Wall Street Journal in 2011, the author reflects on young readers’ responses to his award-winning (and oft-censored) novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. “Almost every day,” Alexie states, “my mailbox is filled with handwritten letters from students—teens and preteens—who have read my YA book and loved it. I have yet to receive a letter from a child somehow debilitated by the domestic violence, drug abuse, racism, poverty, sexuality, and murder contained in my book. To the contrary, kids as young as ten have sent me autobiographical letters written in crayon, complete with drawings inspired by my book, that are just as dark, terrifying, and redemptive as anything I’ve ever read.” Juvenile readers, Alexie concludes, are not only capable of engaging thoughtfully with representations of violence and sexuality but they also often need them. After all, he maintains, young people often turn to literature in order to make sense of both the “everyday and epic dangers” with which they continually struggle.

Alexie’s arguments achieve particularly brilliant expression in Abate’s monograph, which insists that children’s literature has historically recognized, and sought to address, the reality of homicide in many young peoples’ immediate lives. Rejecting the traditional scholarly contention, most famously articulated in Jacqueline Rose’s landmark text, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (1984),¹ that children’s books attempt to preserve the fantasy of the child’s innocence by denying the unsettling details of their lived experience, Abate argues that “some of the most well-known and beloved works for young readers in the United States contain instances of killing” (6). Throughout the course of her study, she demonstrates how various forms of children’s literature—ranging from fairy tales to adventure books to detective narratives to YA novels—not only offer blunt and uncompromising representations of murder but also do so with the good faith that juvenile audiences possess the critical capacities (and, indeed, the maturity) to grapple with depictions of extreme violence. To support this thesis, Abate maintains that children are no strangers to homicide: as she notes, young people historically have been invisible—but nevertheless direct and conscious—witnesses to executions, lynchings, deadly domestic disputes, gang warfare, internecine violence, and other mortal events. Moreover, she accounts for the ways in which young people have been rendered indirect witnesses to murder through such culturally mediated forms as captivity narratives, sermons, newspaper and magazine accounts, film, television, and video games. Thus, the author argues, works of children’s literature have acknowledged young peoples’ exposure to homicide and in turn have offered representations of mortal violence that best express their ideological concerns.

According to Abate, US Americans have been particularly obsessed with murder; indeed, on the very first page of her book she cites Patricia Donovan’s claim that “bloody murder has been a quintessentially American preoccupation since John Newcomen sailed on the Mayflower and was whacked by a fellow colonist” (1). Thus, an important part of Abate’s project involves tracing a genealogy of this grisly national obsession and demonstrating how its various expressions, ranging from execution sermons to parapsychological detection to...