by: Alison Flood
An 18-year-old girl who dies in a car crash, only to relive her final day again and again; a 15-year-old who's aging backwards in another dimension after dying in the real world; a dying teenage girl attempting to experience all life has to offer in the months before her death at 16. Undead vampire teenager Edward Cullen – he of the ivory turtleneck sweaters and sparkly skin – might be propelling Stephenie Meyer to the top of the teen reading charts, but a different furrow – in which the teen hero or heroine is actually dead, or dying – is being quietly ploughed by a growing host of young adult writers.
Since Susie Salmon, the murdered teenager of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones, exploded onto the page in 2002 – "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973" – we've been treated to an abundance of skilfully drawn dead (or dying) teenage protagonists. Jenny Downham wowed critics and readers alike in 2007 with Before I Die, in which 16-year-old Tessa is trying to lose her virginity before she dies of leukaemia. Jay Asher had a word-of-mouth hit the same year with Thirteen Reasons Why, which saw 13 people sent a cassette tape by dead schoolgirl Hannah Baker, detailing the reasons why she committed suicide. Gabrielle Zevin impressed two years earlier with Elsewhere, in which hit-and-run victim Liz Hall, 15, wakes up on a ship to Elsewhere, where inhabitants age in reverse until they return to Earth as babies.
And with The Lovely Bones back in the books charts thanks to the release this month of Peter Jackson's film, the trend looks set to continue. Lauren Oliver makes her authorial debut next week with Before I Fall, a pitch-perfect Groundhog Day/Lovely Bones hybrid in which 18-year-old Sam Kingston dies in a car crash, only to relive her last day again and again. "The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see any shadows where there shouldn't be any," writes Oliver. "You don't remember to tell your parents that you love them or – in my case – remember to say goodbye to them at all. If you're like me, you wake up seven minutes and 47 seconds before your best friend is supposed to be picking you up. You're too busy worrying about how many roses you're going to get on Cupid Day to do anything more than throw on your clothes, brush your teeth, and pray to God you left your make-up in the bottom of your messenger bag so you can do it in the car. If you're like me, your last day starts like this."
Oliver, 26, a former editorial assistant at Penguin in New York, says she was inspired not by The Lovely Bones, but by "a zeitgeist movement towards darker material". "I was affected by it," she says. "I'm including all the paranormal stuff, and the vampire books. We've come to think of them as a romance but it's a very dark picture of romance, when someone wants to kiss and kill you. There seemed to be pink covers everywhere, and teen stuff was flip and frivolous: a celebration of consumption. But the pendulum had been swinging back from chick lit for a while. Books are a reflection of culture [and] with the financial crash happening, people are feeling darker."
Having her protagonist Sam narrate from beyond the grave was, says Oliver, "there from the beginning". "This character with trouble seeing her life - it seemed to me from the start that one of the only ways for her to see clearly was by seeing her death as intimately linked with other people's lives."
Gayle Forman, who follows the thoughts of 17-year-old Mia as she lies in a coma after a car accident in her novel If I Stay, published last year, links the trend to Downham's Before I Die - "I still haven't been able to bring myself to read [it]; I'm such a wuss" – and to Zevin's Elsewhere. But her own book, she says, stemmed from a very personal experience. "Years ago friends of mine were killed in an accident much like the one that kills Mia's family and one member of that family, a little boy, held on a little longer, and I always wondered: did he know? Did he choose to go with the rest of his family? So it was from years of obsessing over that question that Mia, a totally fictional character, popped into my head and took me on a journey to answer it," she says. "As I was writing the book, it did occur to me that there were similarities to The Lovely Bones (a book I love) in that the narrators were both out of body, but other than that, I see them as quite different: one narrator is dead and in heaven and omniscient; the other is out of body and aware only of what's going on around her, and still has some agency over her life."
Like Forman, Asher says his story stemmed from his own experiences – he hadn't even read The Lovely Bones when he began writing it. "For me, I had a close relative attempt suicide when she was the same age as the girl in my book. So the issue of suicide had been important to me for several years," says Asher. "It was a very happy time in my life when I came up with the idea for my book. I simply stumbled upon a new way to discuss some very common teen issues. In fact, when death is presented in teen novels, it's often as a way to discuss issues and questions many people have at that age."
The popularity of these books, believes Forman, isn't necessarily because teenagers are drawn to the morbid – more that they are attracted to dramatic stories with stark moral choices. "When you're at this age, you tend to be experiencing so much for the first time – first love, first time away from home, first heartbreak – so life is imbued with extra intensity," she says. "I think teens are drawn to books that reflect that drama, or which evoke feelings that match the emotional rollercoasters they're riding in their own lives. So, while I don't think a story necessarily has to be all sturm und drang, it needs to stir something up."
Cate Tiernan isn't so sure: she does perceive a certain yearning towards the macabre among teen readers. "Traditionally, teenagers tend to be fascinated by morbid topics," she says. "The Lovely Bones probably spurred an interest in a dead teenager narrating a compelling story – you know it will be dramatic, because she's already dead. The storyline and impetus are in-built." Her new book, Immortal Beloved, out in September in the US and next January in the UK, follows the life of immortal teenager Nastasya who, says Tiernan, "can look forward neither to the dread nor the release of death: she's forced to continue living in the world day after day, forever".
Teenagers, Tiernan points out, are going through an enormous growth period – the greatest they've experienced since they left infancy for toddlerhood. "I see 'morbid' topics as a way to safely explore extreme, even threatening emotions, to vicariously experience hard, even shocking events from the safety of one's own room," she says. "I remember being intrigued by death, as a teenager. Some of my friends died in high school, either by suicide or from stupidity, and while it was horribly final, it was also surreal. There was definitely a feeling of 'it couldn't happen to me.' Even dangerous situations didn't seem that bad. I look back on dumb stuff I did and wince."
The dead-narrator trope also works because it gives the protagonist almost superhuman powers, Tiernan believes. "The worst thing that can happen to someone is to die – that's what your parents are desperately trying to protect you from all the time. If you're already dead (or dying), the worst has happened. You have nothing worse to fear. It frees you up, in a way," she muses. "If you're dead, you're untouchable. You can't be harmed. And you can step back and observe the world around you (as teens often do), without having to interact with it; without having much responsibility to change anything, without having to make hard choices or take a stand. Nor do you have the typical responsibilities that are the bane of every kid's existence: homework, chores, siblings, parental expectations."
At Hodder & Stoughton, editor Kate Howard is capitalising on the trend. She's publishing Oliver and Tiernan's novels over the next 12 months, as well as bestselling US novelist Ann Brashares's My Name is Memory, in which hero Daniel can recall his past lives, and recognise the souls of people he's previously known, in June. Howard believes that teenagers' fascination with the genre stems from their desire to push the boundaries. "Teenagers are at the stage in life where they feel invincible," she says. "Death seems so far away for them that it is something they can comfortably explore through books. Books offer teenagers a safe way of exploring the world, and many of the questions they have about life in general are confronted and dealt with in books such as these."
Lisa Schroeder, whose 2008 novel I Heart You, You Haunt Me sees a teenage girl's dead boyfriend come back to haunt her, agrees. "I think teens read about the dark stuff because they often feel like their lives are pretty dark. I get notes every week through my website from teens who tell me they are having a hard time," she says. "They tell me they can relate to Ava, the main character in my book. Most haven't experienced the death of a loved one recently, but the more general feelings of pain and isolation, they know well. I think there is something very cathartic in reading about another person's troubles."
From: The Guardian
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