New Directions in Children's Gothic: Debatable Lands ed. by Anna Jackson (review)

In the editor's introduction to New Directions in Children's Gothic: Debatable Lands, Anna Jackson states that she views the book as the next step in following The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders (2008). She begins,

The children's Gothic no longer seems marginal … today [it] is a contested space, with horror and epic elements within a carnivalesque space of playfulness and experimentation; a space where allegorical and displaced versions of cultural debates and concerns can be played out. These essays look at what is happening in the children's Gothic now, in the new millennium.

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Jackson, like all the essayists in her collection, accepts the current critical outlook that the Gothic is a mode and thus can encompass a wide variety of text types and moods. The key difference between this volume and the earlier one is that here the focus is on Gothic's purpose, use, and ideology. The earlier collection was more invested in demonstrating its existence in children's materials: "to understand its history, to thematize its expressions, and to theorize its presence and importance in children's literature" (Jackson, Coats, and McGillis 1). The key similarity is that both volumes envision the Gothic as a space ("Borders," "Lands") that needs to be explored and mapped by careful readers and critics of children's books.

The introduction goes on to enumerate some commonalities among twenty-first-century children's Gothic and the essays that follow. First, there's the concept that childhood ain't what it used to be, or rather that the changing nature of childhood and access to twenty-first-century media has led to "an eroded space for the construction of childhood" (3). Consequently, there's been a change in the nature of what is considered appropriate for children. The child reader is no longer guaranteed shelter from the pessimistic or even nihilistic. There is a "collapsing [border] between adult and children's entertainment" (5). Closely related is the idea of monsters as heroes and the monster hunters as antagonists and villains. This reversal emphasizes the connection between liminal or persecuted figures and the readers' status: "The questioning, assertive, change-embracing protagonists of these narratives are clearly agents for good within the fictional worlds they inhabit …, in opposition to the conservative forces of evil" (7). The final characteristic under discussion is the "ironic self-referential awareness of both gothic and pop-culture conventions" that pervades contemporary Gothic (9). This is part of the playfulness of the genre and also what allows authors to pick and choose among conventions, incorporate a variety of folklore, and blend with other genres and yet still be identified as Gothic. On the whole, the introduction comes across as informed and informative. Jackson cites contemporary Gothic critics, monster studies, and an article about the carnivalesque to illustrate her own ideas, place them in a larger context, and demonstrate the value of examining children's Gothic.

The first essay is a strong one (and probably my favorite of the collection for both originality of thought and subject matter): "'Do Panic. They're Coming': Remaking the Weird in Contemporary Children's Fiction." While author Chloe Buckley defines and differentiates children's Weird fiction from traditional Lovecraftian Weird fiction, she also takes some pains to demonstrate how they align. She argues that the youthful Weird genre "combines bleak terror with metafictional playfulness, transforming the cultural work Weird can do and using it, in turn, to reshape narratives of maturation" (17). The subject of the second essay, "Cuckoo Songs: The Changeling as Hero" is self-evident. In it, Geoffrey Miles discusses several novels in which "the antiquated tropes of traditional fairy lore rub up against the mundane facts of modern life; the changeling story acquires a social as well as an individual significance" (48). In chapter 3, "'These are troubling, confusing times': Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak as Post–9/11 Gothic," Phillip Serrato makes the case that Shan's series offers...