Dark YA

Many adults share a concern that the current trend of intense dark YA novels—which sometimes deal with issues like self-harm and addiction and abuse and even death—could irrevocably damage the fragile minds of our youth.

What makes a book “dark” in the first place? Are dark books the ones that allegorically explore serious subject matter, like warfare (The Hunger Games) or the human capacity for destruction (Grasshopper Jungle)? Or are they the ones that reflect our actual world, including the capacity for human cruelty and kindness (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) or the messy stuff of human mortality (The Fault In Our Stars)?

Hey, aren’t these the same subjects young people are encouraged to engage in at school, by reading the newspaper, or classical texts like The Iliad (warfare) or Macbeth (the capacity for self-destruction) or To Kill A Mockingbird (kindness and cruelty) or A Farwell to Arms, all Emily Dickinson poetry (that messy morality business)?

Adolescence is a time when teens are statistically more likely to come into harm’s way and thus more likely to witness harm among their peers. Is it any wonder that they want books to help process what they’re experiencing around them, often for the first time?

We just need to remember that books don’t create behaviors. It is possible that they reinforce existing behaviors, but those behaviors are already present, not created by a novel. A novel won’t turn a bookish drama geek or popular star athlete into a promiscuous drug abuser any more than it will turn a promiscuous drug abuser into a bookish drama geek or popular star athlete, unless the seeds of those transformations were already planted.

What books can do, however, is reflect an experience and show a way out of difficult, isolating times. It’s why Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak has become so popular, giving young women a voice to speak about sexual abuse, or Sherman Alexie’s Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been a life raft for young people who can’t see their way out of existences straight-jacketed by addiction and deprivation. 

I suspect that most teens who read and love “dark” YA have little in common with the struggling characters they relate to. Teenagers say they are drawn to dark books because the appeal is seeing an ordinary teen forced into an extraordinary circumstance. 

Reading about everyday fictional teens rising to the occasion allows actual teens to imagine themselves doing the same. This is empowering, and hopeful. These “dark” books may seem to be about death, about illness, about pain, but really they are about life.And kids get that.