Teen Pulp Fiction

If you don't work at a library it's unlikely that you ever feel the need to take a detailed look at shelves and shelves of a particular literary genre. If, say, mysteries are your thing you might look over the selection at a bookstore, but you probably do an unconscious edit as you glance at the shelves, ignoring authors you don't like, covers you find unappealing, paperbacks vs. hardcovers, and so on. This past week I had to do a complete weeding of the teen section in one of Toronto's downtown libraries. It was an eyeopener.

The first thing you notice (and this also applies to teen sections in mega-bookstores like Chapters or Barnes & Noble) is that teen fiction might as well be labelled Teen Fiction For Girls. At least 70% of teen fiction titles are for girls only, with almost all of these books revolving around social and romantic problems in high school. The few titles that are aimed at teenage boys usually deal with serious issues such as drug abuse, broken families or crime. The rest are sports-themed or fall into the fantasy genre.

Looking through the teen section it comes as no surprise that teenage boys read so little. If I was a teenage boy browsing through this section I'd feel completely unwelcome: the message being sent by teen sections in libraries and bookstores is that only girls should be interested in reading. Adding to the problem is that so many of the titles aimed at boys are issue-oriented. These novels tackle social ills and evils in what seems like a transparent attempt to attract the attention of the people who order books for libraries, not the people who actually read them. So much of this literature seems written to "improve" the reader by discussing the issues that are "important" or "relevant" to him. The person who orders a gross of these books gets to feel virtuous, but their intended audience? Last time I checked, what teenage boys think is important are violent movies and video games; gross-out comedies; YouTube pranks, stunts and fails; naked and nearly naked women; and a bit of sports, especially the UFC. In other words, what this demographic wants is entertainment that comes with a near-toxic level of testosterone. Teen fiction rarely, if ever, delivers what boys want.

Teenage girls seem to get exactly what they want in teen fiction. As previously mentioned, teen fiction for girls is almost entirely about life in high school. Half these titles are blatant ripoffs of Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while the other half are about affluent or wealthy girls dealing with romance and peer pressure while larking about in designer clothes in various U.S. glamour spots. The Twilight clones give girls action, horror and romance, and the glitzy, trust fund baby literature provides an abundance of wish fulfillment. There are issue-oriented novels for girls but they're almost crowded out by the stuff that screams entertainment value.

These girls are rocking the trust fund baby zombie look.

The literary merit of teen fiction is another question altogether; what's important here is that teenage boys aren't being catered for, and because of that their interest in reading is either stopped in its tracks or never developed. There are two possible solutions. The first is to divide teen sections into boys and girls areas. For various reasons I can't see libraries doing this, but I don't see why bookstores couldn't give this a try. The other alternative is to stop pointing teenage boys towards books written with a teen audience in mind. Teenagers in general can't wait to become adults, but I think teenage boys are even more eager to get to adulthood than girls. So why not feed them adult literature? Why, for instance, shouldn't a 15-year-old boy be reading one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels? They're no more raunchy or violent than what he's seeing online, and they're far more likely to get him in love with reading than a sociologically accurate story about a boy coping with a parent's divorce/death/alcoholism/hoarding problem/debilitating karaoke addiction. There's a ton of adult literature out there that boys would lap up, but no one's directing them towards it.

Once upon a time the rambunctious tastes of teenage boys were very well served. That time was the 1920s and 30s, the heyday of the pulp novel magazine. There were dozens and dozens of magazines that covered every conceivable red-blooded genre and they were hugely successful, with some magazines selling a million copies per month. These magazines weren't specifically aimed at teenage boys, but boys made up a large percentage of the readership. And the pulps weren't a literary wasteland: writers as diverse as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Raymond Chandler and Arthur C. Clarke wrote for the pulps, and there are few post-WW II American writers who don't credit the pulps with getting them interested in reading and writing. My love of reading probably stems from an encounter with the pulps at a very early age. In the mid-1960s Bantam began reprinting the Doc Savage pulp novels with stunning covers done by James Bama. My dad started reading them as an exercise in nostalgia. I saw him reading one and demanded that he read it out loud. Doc Savage was a two-fisted superhero who traveled the world punishing evildoers with the help of his eccentric sidekicks. The body count was usually very high. I never read another Hardy Boys novel after my first Doc. And somewhere around the age of fourteen I discovered my father's stash of James Bond novels and I never read another Doc Savage; in fact, it was about that time I stopped reading anything that was "age appropriate." The covers shown below should explain why I gave up on Tom and Frank.
                                                  

There is no contemporary equivalent of pulp magazines, and that's probably not helping the cause of getting teenage boys to read. There's no way to getting the pulp magazine business going again, but it's certainly possible to encourage teenage boys to check out the adult fiction writers who have a pulpy flavour, whether it's the writing team of Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child or Elmore Leonard. And there are teen fiction writers who do manage to deliver the goods for teenage boys, one of the best being Melvin Burgess. His novel Bloodtide has tremendous literary quality as well as more ferocity than a rabid Tasmanian devil. My review of it is here.

Book Review: A Web of Air (2010) by Philip Reeve

The term "young adult fiction" sends shudders down the spines of a great many readers. Even young adults. For a lot of people it means Twilight and its dozens of pulpy clones. For teens it often means issue-driven novels about bullying, drug addiction, sexism, prejudice, and so on, all of them frightfully earnest and educational. Adults like to push books like these on kids with the introductory phrase, "Read this, it'll do you good." It's the literary equivalent of a multivitamin, and just as palatable.

A Web of Air is the second prequel to the Mortal Engines Quartet (consisting of Moral Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain), and you won't like it at all if you insist on your young adult novels containing vampires battling puberty or teens dealing with thorny issues ripped from last week's episode of Oprah. Author Reeve somehow manages to make a wildly entertaining novel without angst or the undead by relying on those old standbys imagination, humour, and a lean, fast, exciting plot. The world of the Mortal Engines Quartet is set in the far future after the obligatory global apocalypse. Civilization is back, roughly speaking, to the Victorian age, although there are a host of mad differences, not the least of which is that cities are now giant (seriously humungous) tracked vehicles that patrol the Earth literally devouring other, smaller, cities. It's called Municipal Darwinism. The prequels began with Fever Crumb and they're meant to describe how Earth's cities went from stationary to mobile.

Web again follows the character of Fever Crumb, a teenage girl from London who's also a member of that city's Engineer class, a monkish group devoted to engineering and science. Fever has fled London with a band of traveling actors and they fetch up at a city by the sea where, I'm guessing, Portugal used to be. The city is Mayda (located inside a volcanic/impact crater) and one of its residents is Arlo Thursday, a young man who is rediscovering the principles of manned flight. Fever assists him in building a crude plane, but there are those who feel planes would pose a grave threat to cities, and they'll do anything to stop Arlo and Fever.

So there you have it: the building blocks for a ripping yarn. But that's only half the fun. Reeve is a superbly imaginative writer, and his talent shouldn't be hidden in the young adult ghetto. His ability to create new worlds and societies (always the litmus test for a top-notch fantasy writer) is outstanding. J.K. Rowling could take lessons from him. In fact, in Fever Crumb Reeve drops in a Harry Potter joke that's as funny as it is cleverly set-up. Humour is another quality that separates Reeve from the pack. When you hear the term post-apocalyptic your first thought isn't, ooh, that'll be a laugh riot. Reeve's storytelling can be very dark and very bloody, but he realizes that these moments work better when there are brief, but alternating, moments of levity.

Web is Reeve at his imaginative best. The acting company Fever travels with (echoes of Nicholas Nickleby) is neatly described, and the city of Mayda is a brilliant creation with its stately homes and pleasure palaces mounted on funiculars traveling up and down the inside of the crater walls. Add in a cult that worships an aquarium ornament from our own time and some talking seagulls, and you have one more in a series of novels that will undoubtedly become a modern classic.

Book Review: Rivers of London (2011) by Ben Aaronovitch

Right now the book world is awash in fantasy literature. This is largely thanks to the twin aftershocks of Harry Potter and the Twilight books. Anything, it seems, with a fantasy or horror element, and any mash-up entangling the two with other genres, gets a warm greeting from the publishing industry. This has produced a lot of dreck, usually involving Buffy clones finding romance as they splatter the undead.

Rivers of London avoids zombies and romance, and is mostly successful, largely thanks to some solid comic writing and a clever mash-up of a police procedural and the world of magic. Our hero is Peter Grant, a young police constable who looks to be headed for a dull, behind-the-scenes job in the Met. All that changes when he's assigned to guard a crime scene involving a headless corpse and then ends up taking a witness statement from a ghost. From there it's a short step to becoming an apprentice wizard under the tutelage of Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is, yes, a fully-fledged wizard. Nightingale's remit, which is known only to a few of his superiors, is to investigate supernatural crimes and keep the peace on the otherworldly side of London.

The headless corpse is the first in a series of gruesome deaths perpetrated by a vengeful ghost who is using the bodies of Londoners to reenact a bizarre and bloody Punch and Judy show. On top of trying to collar the murderous ghost, Grant and Nightingale have to keep the peace between the gods of London's rivers. London apparently has many rivers, mostly hidden, but each has it's god, and Mother Thames and Father Thames rule over them all.

Aaronovitch has a slick, chirpy writing style that owes a lot to Terry Pratchett, and he's smart enough to have Grant make a couple of references to Harry Potter just so we know that Grant realizes he's dropped into an absurd and improbable world. Aaronovitch also does a good job of explaining, or creating a theory of, how magic works. This is always a bit of a problem in books about magic; the authors either ignore the how and why, or they come up with a dopey, New Age-y explanation. Aaronovitch takes a more technical approach, and it works rather well. Even better is his decision to make the cop elements as real as possible. Take away the magical element and this would be a solid police procedural mystery; Grant talks like a cop, he follows Met protocol, he relies as much on police equipment as he does on magic, and he really seems to enjoy being a policeman.

Where Aaronovitch runs into trouble is with the plot. The final section of the book is a bit of a mess. The first problem is that the author begins to tie himself into thick, confusing knots explaining the magical and supernatural logic behind what's happening. Another bad decision is to have a climactic scene set in a packed Royal Opera House in which the killer ghost reveals himself and a massive riot breaks out. The problem is that this isn't the finale of the book. The riot ends, the reader's excitement evaporates, and the real end comes a short time later. The opera house scene is very Pratchettesque, but Sir Terry would have ended the novel right there.

Notice something? I haven't mentioned the river gods when discussing the killer ghost plot. That's because Aaronovitch fails to make the two plots intertwine in any meaningful way. That would be fine if the river gods' story was a sub-plot, but it isn't. A big chunk of the novel is devoted to dealing with the various gods and, while all of it is interesting and clever, it really doesn't have a damn thing to do with the main plot. The river gods need their own novel, not a superfluous role in a ghostly murder mystery.

There's a sequel to Rivers of London called Moon Over Soho (werewolves, I expect), and yet another is in the pipeline. I'll definitely read the next one and hope that the author has let an editor get a look at it first.