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yhlee and I visited the YA section of Vroman's Bookshop in a quest for the ultimately awesomely angsty YA novel. She proposed that single-syllable, single-word titles often predict great and melodramatic angst. For example, the oevre of Ellen Hopkins-- in verse-- Crank (meth addiction), Burned (child abuse), and Impulse (suicide). (I see that her upcoming book, Identical, is about "a father's twisted obsession for one of his twin daughters," no I am not kidding.) By other authors, Safe (mother is murdered, daughter is raped), Tweak (drug addiction), Cut (cutting), and Sold (child prostitution). The lone exceptions were Hoop, about basketball, and Prom, about the prom.
But then I found Jay's Book, by the same woman who wrote Go Ask Alice, purportedly the diary of a teenager who gets slipped LSD at a party, then becomes an addict and dies, and another one which was purportedly the diary of a teenager who gets AIDS from being raped. The latter has an appendix claiming that condoms are unreliable and "renegade sperm" can charge your vagina and get you pregnant even if there was no penetration.
Jay's Book is purportedly the diary of a boy who commits suicide after getting involved in the occult. The introduction warns, The voice of every kid hooked on drugs, alcohol, or the occult joins the sad chorus, "Not me! I didn't think it could happen to me. I WAS SURE I COULD HANDLE IT.
The back cover promised animal sacrifice and Ouijia Boards, and the contents did not disappoint. It was awesome. It had orgies, psychic powers, rape, channelling, tarot cards, LSD, homophobia, cutting (I think that was when I fell to the floor), wangas (occult objects from "Haiti, land of voodoo"), racism, chanting, and pot.
Other highlights included Bootan worship (I think that was Satan spelled with a B. And an O.) and the sacrifice in a graveyard of a "teeny mewing kitten" after a Bootanic wedding ceremony.
And then the real fun begins! Jay and his cult fiend Satanic druggie friends begin writing in white on black paper. They find a bull and electrocute it with a stun gun. Each organ was immediately sealed in a fruit jar. (Paging Drs. Muraki and Jezebel Disraeli.) They drink the blood and puke.
Then Satan comes after them, and two of them die in Mysterious Car Crashes, and Jay shoots himself in the head. The afterword says, apparently not sarcastically, We feel that Jay lived a pretty full life in his short 16 1/2 years. I'll say!
In conclusion, I leave you with this immortal line of Jay's, and no, it does not make any more sense in context:
The saber-toothed crotch crickets are leaving their abode.
I feel those words of wisdom embody a sentiment we all could live by.
Yoon reports my reaction to this gem of insanity. When she says I fell to the floor, she is not exaggerating for comic effect.
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Renegade sperm
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The saber-toothed crotch crickets are leaving their abode.
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Or is that part of the characterizing of Jay? Or the author not thinking things through.
Um, I don't think I am going to try reading this book to find out which. But if it gets made into anime, I'll have to drag friends over to watch it, and perhaps make a drinking game out of it.
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The saber-toothed crotch crickets are leaving their abode.
Eeek.
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>> I don't remember crotch crickets. <<:
XD
And I really don't see how you could have forgotten them, if they'd been there ... .
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(PS: Whenever anyone says "agony" that song becomes impossibly earwormed.)
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I think there's a definite overlap between Teen Angst Fic and field heavyweights like Paul Zindel, Judy Blume, M.E. Kerr, &c (well, I guess the Traveling Pants and Gossip Girl and sort of dark paranormal fantasy/romance authors are the heavyweights now), but those authors were all too talented and quirky to fit in the box for long.
Also, the woman who wrote that stupid Lizard Motel book is more ignorant than dirt. If she thinks emo porn about young orphaned kids started in the seventies she never read Oliver Twist (or indeed, apparently, much of anything else). What about all those cautionary tales about Young Girls who Went to the Bad? What about ballads, for Chrissakes? What about all those awesome pulp novels about Young Girls who nearly became (GASP) lesbians (didn't M.E. Kerr write a couple of those)? (And for Godsakes Hemingway was writing, say, the Nick Adams stories in, what, the twenties? And what about all of Fitzgerald's famous flapper heroines? They weren't in their THIRTIES.)
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They made us read Go Ask Alice for school, and we had to watch the movie as well. Yes, there's a movie.
I was such an angsty book nerd though, that when Go Ask Alice was assigned in class, I had already read it.
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And oh God you would love a series of evangelical books which were sold in the supermarket when I was a kid -- they had v lurid covers and the titles were, yes, one word, usually the name of a girl -- and sort of weird nicks, too, like Didi or Franqui or Jiji or something -- I can't explain it. ANYHOW, there was much lurid detailing of slide into drugs blahblah and then the teenaged narrator would meet a bright-eyed teenager who had Turned Their Life Around and they would guide the narrator to a kindly older man (no no this is not going that place) and then there would be, like, two quickie pages of proselytizing about how great Jesus was and FIN. They were AWESOME. I devoured them like candy to the great disapproval of my parents. Sadly I do not remember who wrote them or what the titles were now -- I did see one on sale in the "bad books" section of Twice Sold Tales about eight months ago, but SADLY did not buy it. Clearly I was insane.
Snopes on Go Ask Alice (http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/askalice.asp)
Actual SLC kid book was based on (http://www.slweekly.com/index.cfm?do=article.details&id=1CA81E52-2BF4-55D0-F1F453565FA53A27)
The only thing better is apparently the kid's brother wrote a book about him and then a rock opera was based on it. A revisionist Satanism-debunking modern rock opera!
(Man, after all this you should so do a Flowers in the Attic post. Or, well, somebody should)
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Also: For her part, Sparks thinks the family is in denial about their wayward boy.
It takes balls the size of basketballs for that. Damn.
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...yeah, I know.
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My junior high school library had....damn, what did it have? It was v slim pickins, as best I can recall....they had Giants in the Earth, for some reason. And Childhood's End. And the R.R. Knudson "Zan" books. And....I usually ignored it in favour of the Santa Fe Public Library.
I forget how many V.C. Andrews books I actually read -- I think I made it all the way through Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, maybe Garden of Shadows.... //checks Yup, the bibliography dates match up. SOMEHOW I never got into any of the endless Cinnamon/Rain/Honey/Thunder/Peaches/Double Fudge/Unchained Melody series.
Oh God and My Sweet Audrina, ohhh man. -- No wait, I'm mixing that up with Audrey Rose. //facepalm
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They were all kind of the same book, really.
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I managed not to read any Bond til about my late twenties, and then I picked up a handful of really cheap paperback editions at a favourite used bookstore for something like a buck apiece out of sheer curiosity. And I read about three of them before I just went "Uh, no." (Same thing wrt Mickey Spillane -- altho people told me I'd like him because I like Chandler and Hammett and Cain and &c &c.) I _was_ surprised to find Bond seemed a lot more dour and less wisecracking and more, uh, sadomasochistic than he was in the movies.
My father's brothers and cousins used to read endless Louis L'Amour Westerns, altho I think that genre is largely dead now (unless you count Larry McMurtry, and it's not quite the same thing). Those were all pretty much the same book, too.
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There's a guy at the Onion AV Club who's been reading through them and it's the first time I've thought about picking one up since high school.
My grandfather read so much Louis L'Amour. I liked Zane Grey better, though it was long enough ago I'm not sure exactly why. And yeah, McMurtry isn't quite the same!
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The scary part is that when I was done reading them, I would pass them off to my mom. She loved them, too.
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Saber-toothed crotch crickets.
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The author is clearly speaking about drug use from experience. No unmedicated mind could come up with something quite so ridiculous.
What else has this publisher come out with? I sense a gold mine of unintentional humor.
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...
What.
*dying of laughter*
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Presumably brought to us by the folks who gave us all the "D&D is Satanism!" stuff ... I remember having to be extremely cautious about discussing my hobbies when I was in college.
(And anyone knows anything knows that you aren't going to raise much power by sacrificing tiny, mewing kittens .... )
XD