Well, there is Kin Platt, whose DUMMY annoyed the hell out of
me when I was ten, but who wrote some other novels that
may've been better. Obvious crossover folk, such as Marijane
Meeker ("Vin Packer" and "M. E. Kerr"), who may only have
slightly touched on noir with the YA likes of DINKY HOCKER
SHOOTS SMACK! and DELIVER ME FROM EVIE, while Frank Bonham's
DURANGO STREET might be a bit more imbued with a
(less-downbeat-than-Gold Medal) hb flavor; these may be
pitched a bit older than true "kiddie" lit. Certainly such
favorites of mine as MY BROTHER STEVIE by Eleanor Clymer (for
near-beginning readers) and THE LONER by Ester Wier (which
ran up, but should've won, the Newbery for its year: '64 for
'63 publication--the rather similar, not quite as good, but
more urban and less contemporary western IT'S LIKE THIS, CAT
won) are imbued with as much hb anomie as one might want to
dump on a kid. In fact, the trend in the '70s and '80s seemed
to be to strive for the downbeat, even to a ridiculous
extent, as with DUMMY; no doubt in response to the
overemphasis on Happy Endings in the past (though even such a
theoretically HE item as JOHNNY TREMAINE is full of darkness,
and its titular hero has come to his revolutionary
participation only after the permanent crippling of his right
hand, among other misfortune). TM
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Hoffman, MD [mailto:
hoffmand@cc.northcoast.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002
12:48 AM To: Rara Subject: RARA-AVIS: Noir kiddie lit
The recent thread on cross-genre noir/hb (science fiction and
fantasy) got me to thinkin... What would the cross-genre
examples be for other genres?
How about children's literature? I could only think of one
example, and that one is obscure: Julia Cunningham's _Dorp
Dead_ (yes, that's how it's spelled), about an orphan who
comes under the sway of a rather sinister guardian. There
must be other examples (more 'popular' ones than _Dorp
Dead_), but I'm at a loss.
Of course, most fairy tales in general (and the brothers
Grimm in particular) are very dark, as are most of Roald
Dahl's books. For example, consider _The Witches_, which was
made into a very good movie with Anjelica Huston as the Grand
High Witch. At the story's end, the boy (who remains a
mouse--no reprieve, as in the movie) and his grandmother make
plans for the genocide of witches everywhere (this was
dropped for the movie). In _James and the Giant Peach_,
James' evil aunts are crushed to death by the peach (again,
this gets watered down in the movie)... but the story becomes
too lighthearted after that.
Oh! I thought of another good one: _There's a Hair in my
Dirt_, by Gary Larson. (The cartoonist.) If you can find a
copy of this gem, buy it!
Doug Hoffman
(always looking for suitable reading material for my very
dark 6-year-old)
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ . -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 26 Mar 2002 EST