A steady stream of curst and outcast female protagonists in my middle grade speculative fiction reading gave rise to this post, Outcast and Cursed. Now, I’m seeing another trend, analogous but not quite so prominent: male lead characters who are fixated on horror, monsters, the supernatural, and the occult. These boys are also outcasts, known for their weird, freaky, loser status.
In Nightbooks by J.A. White, Alex Mosher decides to destroy all of his notebooks full of creepy, scary stories so that he can become like everyone else. Unfortunately, he’s intercepted by a witch on his way to the incinerator, and the stories become the only thing that might keep him alive.
The Haunted Serpent by Dora M. Mitchell presents Spaulding Meriwether, a formerly homeschooled sixth grader who doesn’t fit in at his new public school because he’s consumed with graveyards and ghosts and monsters.
Grump, in the book of the same name by Liesl Shurtliff, is obsessed with monsters, too, but in his case, the monsters are humans who live above ground, and Grump is a dwarf. Grump is fascinated by the stories people tell about the world above the dwarf caverns, and he’s shamefully afraid of going down into the depths of the underground mines. Grump is, of course, outcast and friendless among the dwarves—until he finds a few friends who will accept him as he is.
Tito Bonito (The Boy, the Bird, and the Coffin Maker by Matilda Woods) is half-orphaned and outcast, imprisoned by fear of his abusive father. His only friend is Alberto, the coffin-maker. So, this novel also is a story about death and shadows and fear and graveyards. The magical realism of the story serves as a ray of hope in this otherwise dark tale.
In The Darkdeep by Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs, one of the main characters, Nico, is an outcast because his father has taken an unpopular stand in the small town where Nico lives. Nico is bullied, and he becomes consumed with the Darkdeep, a haunted pool of nightmares, that he and his friends (he does have a couple of friends) find and begin to explore. Definitely supernatural and monstrous, but not occultic.
Have you read any middle grade books in this sub-genre lately?