Issue 3: Horrors!
Hey there!
Spooky season is here and we couldn’t be happier. 2020 hasn’t been a good year, and it’s a relief to spot 2021 just around the corner. October is worth celebrating on its own, though, since it means we can justify eating too much candy while curled up with creepy reads like the ones covered here.
This time around, Alex dives into Tigers, Not Daughters, a recent YA ghost story that plumbs the depths of high school trauma, and Claudia discusses Cuckoo Song and the darkness of adolescent identity.
Alex on Tigers, Not Daughters
The scariest scene in this book has nothing to do with its ghost. Instead, about two-thirds of the way through Tigers, Not Daughters sits a chapter seething with secondhand embarrassment and queasy shame. For all the novel’s creepy magical realism—ghostly Ana Torres manifests as an apparition tapping at her dad’s bedroom window, bursts of wicked laughter, ballpoint scrawl across the walls—shame is the mundane core of its horror. And that horror is best captured in “The Day Iridian Torres Walked Away from the Tenth Grade,” which strips characters down to their truest, ugliest selves and will make you want to crawl under your bed and die.
Naturally, it plays out over a couple minutes in a high school lunchroom.
For context: The four Torres sisters, fierce, lonely, and trapped by their needy father, are inseparable until the oldest, Ana, dies trying to escape on her own. Her spirit returns, haunting the house while the surviving sisters pull apart, each wrestling with her own guilt. They’re watched over (or spied on) by a group of neighborhood boys who together make up one of the book’s handful of POVs.
Middle sister Iridian blows off schoolwork, obsessively filling up composition notebooks. The boys guess she’s listing the classmates who deserve “to suffer the way she clearly suffered,” but when another girl grabs Iridian’s latest notebook and treats the entire lunchroom to a dramatic recitation, they discover it’s much worse: her romance-novelist ambitions and lack of romantic experience laid bare in earnest detail. “I want it to be real,” Iridian writes. How can her sex scene feel real when she’s never been kissed herself? Maybe Iridian will convince one of the boys across the street to help her out. “Just once. For research.”
Like I said—you’ll want to crawl under your bed and die. The scene works so horribly well not just thanks to Iridian’s unfiltered honesty, but also because of the boys’ reaction to it. “We could’ve saved [her],” they insist, though in the moment they laugh along with everybody else. For years they’ve imagined rescuing the Torres sisters from their shabby house and shiftless dad, their solitude and their sadness. It’s only when Iridian actually needs rescuing that the boys realize they’re voyeurs, taking in her pain while never truly connecting with her. Their own cowardliness horrifies them.
Their horror mirrors a darker, deeper regret of Iridian’s. Before Ana died, she and Iridian fought, going at each other in the short-and-ugly way that’s probably familiar to you if you’re also one of a few sisters, and Iridian let loose with an accusation Ana refused to forgive. Their argument, springing out of the possibility that the sisters wouldn’t be able to run away together, horrified Iridian for the same reason that the boys’ laughter horrifies them. Underneath their dreams and ambitions, they’re all selfish, pathetic, and scared. The boys assume that given a desperate enough situation they’ll turn heroic, but ordinary, crappy lunchroom desperation feels impossible to overcome. And as Iridian already knows, discovering the deeply held secrets of someone you care about often just breaks you down to the worst version of yourself.
Iridian devours Anne Rice books, frets over the realism of her own love scenes, and once called her sister a dumb whore. The boys, some of the only people who really pay attention to Iridian, once laughed her out of the lunchroom. The gap between who these characters want to be and who they actually are is painfully wide, with Tigers, Not Daughters finding its best horror in the shame boiling up from that gap, in the knowledge that our truest selves will always to some extent be the worst versions of ourselves.
The lunchroom scene is pivotal for its revelation that knowing yourself and being known means being revealed as a vulnerable, selfish person. Ana’s ghost isn’t looking for the revenge Iridian assumes she is, since her sister’s shame is revenge enough. It’s what haunts, what lingers and maybe always will linger. It’s why I can’t forget “The Day Iridian Torres Walked Away from the Tenth Grade,” as much as I’d love to. Really, the whole scene isn’t about the embarrassment of having a private diary, sex scenes and all, broadcasted to the people who’re in it. It’s about realizing that you’re so, so much less than what you hoped you could be. It’s about facing the truth.
Claudia on Cuckoo Song
One of my favorite horror tropes is adolescence as horror. It focuses on the disturbing parts of growing up—the outsized emotions, leaking fluids, and mysterious changes. It connects teenagehood with monstrosity, growth with body horror, and passion with violence. Think of Carrie and her disastrous prom, or the teens of Stranger Things hurtling towards adulthood while battling supernatural monsters. I love them all.
The first hundred pages of Frances Hardinge’s YA dark fantasy Cuckoo Song play into this subgenre perfectly, with protagonist Triss waking after a mysterious accident to find herself eerily changed. She has a ravenous hunger—for food and more unpalatable objects—and her younger sister is terrified of her. She weeps strings of cobwebs and, most insidiously, finds herself dissatisfied: with her parents and their stifling expectations, and with the secrets surrounding her accident. “[Y]ou woke up one day and found out that you couldn’t be the person you remembered being, the little girl everybody expected you to be,” another character tells Triss at one point.
The reveal comes slowly, with Triss realizing that her condition is more than amnesia at the same time readers begin to understand that the changes she’s experiencing are more than a metaphor. Triss, it turns out, is not Triss at all. In fact, she’s not even human. She is a changeling, created from the wood of a centuries-old forest, animated by diary pages and a sinister spell. She’s been swapped for the real Triss, who has been captured by the Architect, a fae creature who heads Besiders, a disenfranchised and dying supernatural underground. At this point, the novel reels off track from the typical tropes of adolescent horror and delves into an examination of prejudice and uncertainty livened by moments of love and connection.
When Not-Triss, as she begins to think of herself, and her family discover that she is a changeling, she must contend not only against her own fears, but also, in another nod to adolescent horror, against the denial of her autonomy and emotions. In one of Cuckoo Song’s most chilling scenes, Not-Triss’s father tries to throw her in a fire, hoping that this will force the Besiders to return his daughter. While she screams and begs him not to kill her, Mr. Grace, a tailor with a painful history with the creatures, urges her father on. “It doesn’t feel pain the way we do; it doesn’t feel fear,” he insists. “However much it screams, none of it is real.”
His disconnect shows how empathy can’t change a person convinced of another’s inhumanity. In Cuckoo Song, empathy is a two-edged sword, bringing understanding and openness that can brace or cripple. Just as Not-Triss encounters humans who are determined to hurt her, she also meets people who are willing to protect and love her. With the help of her sister, she escapes from their father and Mr. Grace, and finds refuge with a black-sheep family member who becomes a surrogate mother of sorts.
While their support allows Not-Triss to begin forming her own identity and to devise a plan to rescue the real Triss, it also leaves her caught between two worlds, dealing with intense guilt towards her family and reluctant sympathy for both Mr. Grace and the trapped Besiders. The novel’s horror springs from this disconnect, showing how loneliness and uncertainty will always follow her. Adolescent horror ends with the social order restored: the monster is vanquished; the survivors move on into adulthood. In contrast, this novel ends with a question mark. Not-Triss doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to enjoy her victory over the Architect. She doesn’t know whether she’ll fade away or be allowed to grow older with the friends she’s made.
It’s grim stuff, but not entirely hopeless. A thread of joy runs through the novel that is impossible to ignore, and it’s this thread that keeps me returning to it. Not-Triss is able to see clearly the uncertainties in her life, but she doesn’t let them paralyze her. She’s determined to live fully and experience every moment she does have. Uncertainty is the dark well the book draws its horror from, but Cuckoo Song also creates a way out.
That’s all from us! We can’t believe Hey, Kid! is already on its third issue, and we’re so excited to see what the future brings. Check back next month when we tackle two pieces of underappreciated children’s entertainment. In the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter for occasional thoughts and updates at @heykidwriting.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia