Inbali Iserles writes in The Independent: Vampires and their demonic counterparts accounted for a quarter of the top-20 fiction sales for children, and 18 out of 20 for young adults in January 2011, according to The Bookseller.She quotes Mary Hoffman, the author of the bestselling Stravaganza series: "[The new horror is] the worst kind of Mills & Boon stuff. Especially when it takes the form of disguised propaganda against pre-marital sex." (Stephenie Meyer, the author of Twilight, is a famously abstemious Mormon.) "Males as dangerous, females as victims or prey: what kind of message is that for young women?"
When I was fourteen, I remember being sleepless for weeks after reading Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (I simply couldn't get into Edgar Alan Poe at that age). Though both were not exactly YA fiction, I was way past the 'furry animals' stage. We had children's fiction then, and adult's fiction. Very few books came into the YA category. So, those of us who read graduated to adult fiction relatively early.
Iserles continues: 'The worldwide popularity of the Twilight series undoubtedly inspired ghoulish copycats to climb out of their coffins and on to the shelves. But is there more to it than that? If books offer a mirror to our world, what does the current popularity of horror and dystopia tell us?'
She quotes Hoffman again: "We are living in a particularly depressing world at present – recession, wars, terrorism, climate change – and teenagers have always been sensitive to the mess the previous generation has made."
Huh? When did ghost stories ever die? Have Iserles and Hoffman never been camping? Teenagers have always liked to scare themselves silly.
The Independent
