Banned Books Month: Guest Post from Adam Selzer: Think of the Children!

Back in 8th grade, everyone in my class had to pick a controversial subject and give a presentation about it. Fresh from the heartache and humiliation of having to sell my copy of Nine Inch Nails’ Downward Spiral album at CD Exchange because my mother had noticed the dreaded “parental advisory” sticker, I chose censorship as my topic.  I set up a copy of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD on the marker board and paced up and down the room, having read all the articles I could find in the library on the subject but manifestly unprepared to make a speech about it. Falling back on rage over organization, I began by saying “Censorship………..is bad.”

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, August 2014.

I think I got a B in the end, having bullshat my way through a full eight minutes. I remember that the list of banned books I found said that MOCKINGBIRD had been challenged because it contained the word “rape,” which seemed utterly absurd at the time (this was decades before most people had heard of “trigger warnings,” if the term even existed yet).

Right now, there’s a lawsuit being brought against the very school district where I gave that speech by a student who says that the school’s dress code doesn’t allow him to express his religion, which is Satanism. I’m amused by this to no end, because it’s a scene right out of PLAY ME BACKWARDS, my new “Satanic” YA novel, in which a Des Moines-area slacker enlists the help of a guy who claims to be Satan to help him turn his life around. There’s even a showdown over whether should be able to have Satanic messages in a yearbook if you can have Christian ones.  Some people have warned me that I might find some trouble with the censors over this one.

I should be so lucky.  My own first book, HOW TO GET SUSPENDED AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, was challenged a couple of times that I heard about; the most notable was at the Nampa, Idaho public library, where a woman wanted it removed from the library altogether. It was a slow enough news week in Boise that it made all of the media outlets there – you can see a news clip at http://www.kboi2.com/news/local/65713872.html?tab=video ).  You can probably guess what happened on my end: it was the best publicity I ever got.  The book was nearly three years old and pretty much out of print by then, certainly long out of the handful of stores it had ever been in, but the sales spiked to what I’m sure was their strongest point in the life of the book. And that was just for a news story that barely got out of Idaho.

Flux, November 2011.

But all of the swearing, sex, faux-satanism, soul-selling, and drug references in PLAY ME BACKWARDS aren’t necessarily going to get it banned. I’ve spent years going against book banners (I tended to live in towns where it happened a lot), and there’s one common thread: the would-be banners never actually read the books they object to. The actual content is not important. The books in question are pretty much arbitrary; the idea is just to go after one and establish precedent that will give them further control over the content in town, and further push their vision of a world more like The Waltons than The Simpsons. In SPARKS, a book I did under the name SJ Adams, a girl stops pretending to be a straight methodist and starts being more open about being gay, and joins an openly-made-up religion. I sort of thought they’d come after me a bit on that one, but if anyone tried any funny business, word never got back to me.  Someone going for PLAY ME BACKWARDS is probably going to be luck of the draw. And I do mean “luck.” Publicizing a book when you’re not already famous or riding a big trend is hard.

So, uh, for those of you just trolling through blogs looking for your next target to censor: this book is evil. EVIL. People have sex in it. Some of them take drugs. There are lots of poop jokes. Lots of them. And swearing – boy, do these characters swear! They pick on a guy who comes into an ice cream parlor to spread religious tracts. They have a pro-Satanism rally at school, with pentagrams and t-shirts and everything. There are references to kids defacing the Bibles that religious people sometimes pass out just off campus (which sure happened at MY middle school, let me tell ya). Evil! Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?

And when the super-volcano blows and we’re all running for our lives from the maelstrom of ashes, I’m sure you can look back at all the effort you spent fighting against certain synonyms for “excrement” appearing in novels for young readers, and smile softly, as the ash burns through your cheeks, at a life well lived.

Adam Selzer.

Adam Selzer is an author and historian in Chicago. His new book, PLAY ME BACKWARDS, is a novel for young adults who worship the devil. No censor to his knowledge said a word about one of his earlier books, in which the characters steer a Wells Fargo Wagon full of unicorn turds through the streets of Des Moines towards the dance…. He’s @adamselzer on twitter, and on the web at adamselzer.com