Neil+Gaiman's+Graveyard+Book+and+Horror+Fiction+for+Young+Adults


 * __ A Brief Overview of Horror Fiction for Young Adults, or the Lack Thereof, Featuring Neil Gaiman and Others __**



Neil Gaiman//'s The Graveyard Book// has many conventions of horror; however, it ultimately uses these conventions for another purpose. I put forward that this is common among young adult literature. //The Graveyard Book// tells the story of a child raised by the undead. It acts as a parallel to Rudyard Kipling's //The Jungle Book//, with ghosts and vampires and the like taking the place of the undead. I would explain the basic ideology of the book, but Gaiman himself probably puts it best in this (very amusing) interview. [| http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/221843/march-16-2009/neil-gaiman]

Horror and Young Adult Literature are in many ways not compatible in their entirety. Horror relies on the concept of the "sublime", which involves invoking feelings of awe or terror by emphasizing the insignificance of man compared to the forces of nature or the supernatural. Young Adult literature, by contrast, tends to involve instilling a sense of significance on the young adult who is entering adulthood. Despite this, horror conventions are very common in YA Lit even if horror itself is not. Essentially, my argument is that in the Young Adult genre, horror is not played for the sake of horror, but rather used as either a form of dark fantasy, as seen in Gaiman's work, or as a means to instill a sort of comfortable fear, as seen in the use of Gothic horror staples such as Vampires and Werewolves in tween romance novels to add an extra level of "bad" to the "bad boy"