Banned Books Month: Guest Post from Len Vlahos: Two Stories, One Censor, and Hypocrisy

The proprietors of this wonderful site have been kind enough to ask me to guest blog about censorship. As I have yet to directly encounter a challenge to my book THE SCAR BOYS (though I did have one high school principal take exception to an event in which I was involved), I’m going to do what I do best, I’m going to tell you a couple of stories.

Story the First:

This story is about a mild mannered orphan who lives with his aunt, uncle, and cousin. He’s a nothing in their house, a nobody. The boy keeps to himself and tries to stay out of trouble until one day something magical happens. Literally.

The boy is visited by a kind of giant who says, “hey kid, did you know you have magical powers?”

Scholastic, Reprint Edition, August 2013.

“Who, me?” the kid says. “You must have the wrong guy. I’m a nothing, a nobody.” “Not anymore. You’re invited to a school for wizards and witches. It freaking rocks.”

The boy says sayonara to the aunt, uncle, and cousin, and hops a train to the new school. But it isn’t all peaches and cream. Over and over again, the boy comes face to face with a great and powerful conjurer of the darkest sort. The conjurer is an authoritarian dill-hole who will stop at nothing to realize his maniacal quest for power, which for some reason includes a desperate need to kill the boy.

But the boy perseveres. He learns about friendship, honor, bravery, and love. Yes, the boy is a wizard, and yes, the boy practices magic. But he uses his magic for good. He finds inner strength, an inner angel if you will, and in the end (spoiler alert), he is literally prepared to sacrifice his own life to save the ones he loves.

The good guys are so easy to distinguish from the bad guys in this story that it’s almost embarrassing. But the book is so long on charm, and has so much heart, that you’d have to be half dead not to fall in love with it.

This first story is clearly labeled fiction, because you know, it’s not true.

Story the Second:

This is a story about a wild and crazy town where all the people—and I mean all the people—are nuts. Well, maybe nuts isn’t the right word. Let’s just say they’ve lost their way. These people put instant gratification on a kind of pedestal. They’ll do anything and everything they can for a good time. It’s kind of like Rocky Horror, or maybe the 1980s.

There is this one dude in town who doesn’t buy in. He’s a decent guy and he’s a family man. He’s the kind of guy you’d want handling your money. Anyway, two

magical warriors come to destroy the town, and they decide to crash at the house of the decent guy.

The instant gratification crowd, we’ll call them the instagrafs for short, are not happy about this. Their town is like Vegas, or maybe like Times Square before Disney and Foot Locker moved in, and they like it. They don’t need any carpetbaggers ruining the good thing they have going.

So an angry mob of the instagrafers goes to the nice guy’s house and they do this kind of we’ll-huff-and-we’ll-puff-and-we’ll-blow-your-house-down thing, commanding the nice guy to send the magical warriors out.

“Hey,” the nice guy says to the mob, “what kind of host would I be if I just turned these guys over to you? No one would ever come to visit me again. I mean, would any of you?”

“Whatever, dude,” they say, “just give us the magical warriors. We want to have some fun with them, if you know what we mean.”

“I have a better idea,” the nice guy says. “Check out my two daughters, they’re like totally hot, and get this, their both virgins. Take them and do with them as you please. Just leave my houseguests alone, okay?”

Before the nice guy can complete the transaction, before he can turn his own daughters over to the ravenous, depraved mob—his own daughters for crying out loud!—the magical warriors pull him back into the house.

For some reason, instead of being skeeved that the guy was willing to give his daughters to an angry mob, the warriors are kind of flattered. “Okay nice guy,” they tell him, “we’re going to lay waste to this city tomorrow. I mean, we are going to burn the ever-loving crap out of it. Take your wife and daughters, and high tail it out of here. Go to the mountains. You’re not going to want to see this.”

So the next morning the nice guy gets his wife and daughters together and heeds the advice he’s been given. Some juju that’s too weird to try to explain happens to his wife and he has to leave her behind, so he and the daughters go to the mountains alone. As they flee, the city and everyone in it is completely destroyed. Men, women, and children are burned alive. (Imagine having acid poured on you while hot rocks are dropped on your head. That crap just doesn’t happen, not even in Vegas.)

Finally, the nice guy and his two hot daughters make it to a secluded cave. The guy is distraught and worn out (he’s kind of old to begin with), so he crashes, hard. The older daughter is like, “hey, you know what? Everyone and everything we know has been wiped out. We need to keep our family name going, so let’s have sex with dad.”

(Wait, what? Sex with their dad??? Yes, that’s really what happens in this story. )

“Cool,” says the younger daughter, “but let’s get Dad drunk first, okay?” So they do. And they do.

Nine months later each daughter gives birth to a child—miraculously the children suffer no genetic maladies—and two great nations of the ancient world are founded.

There is actually a debate as to whether this story is fiction or not. (I don’t partake in this debate, because, you know, it’s fiction.)

So those are my two stories. What do you think?

Egmont USA, January 2014.

The first, Harry Potter of course, was one of the most banned books from the decade of the 2000s. The second is a pretty faithful retelling of Genesis 19 from the Bible (the story of Lot and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah). This very same Bible is the book many people use as justification for banning books like Harry Potter. “Don’t teach my kid about witches! Jesus would object. Teach her about cruelty, revenge and incest instead, okay?” (One nutbag pastor in New Mexico went so far as to hold a good old fashioned Harry Potter book burning, you know, just like the Nazi’s used to do.)

So which story would you rather have your kids read? The one where the good and wholesome orphan defeats the bad wizard, or the one that ends with daughters raping their own father?

Well, here’s the thing about censorship and reading choices:

I don’t give a good goddam which book you want to read, or which one want you want your kids to read. That’s your business. If you want to read the Bible with them, good for you. If you want to read Harry Potter with them, good for you. Just read to them, and talk about what you read, okay?

But don’t ever tell me which one of these books I, or my kids, get to read, and definitely don’t tell my school library which books they’re allowed to shelve. Understand? Because if you do, and especially if you use the Bible—a book so replete with sex and violence that it will curdle your blood—as a justification for censorship, you’re nothing but a low-down, no good hypocrite.

Amen and over and out.

Len Vlahos.

Len Vlahos is the Executive Director of BISG, and the former COO of the American Booksellers Association, where he worked for the past 20 years. At the ABA, he had overall responsibility for ABA’s Winter Institute. So he knows booksellers and booksellers know him. Len has also worked in indie, chain, and university bookstores, was an on-air personality for a commercial radio station in Atlantic City, and worked for a time for Internet marketing guru Seth Godin. He was in a punk rock band in the mid-1980s. The Woofing Cookies toured and their music was played on dozens of college radio stations coast to coast. Find Len on Twitter: @LenVlahos.