else fine's Reviews > The Poison Eaters and Other Stories

I've had this lingering problem with Holly Black ever since I read this book. In one of her stories, featuring some assortment of edgy teen punk runaways, one punk runaway mocks one of her fellows for reading fantasy. Those books aren't about people like us, she sniffs. A small thing to bother me for so long, true, and I'm sure I'm both petty and shallow, but this is such bullshit, on so many levels, that my brain has never quite stopped picking at it, like at a particularly troublesome scab. Now she's got a new series out, and I'm frankly scared to read it. It's brought up my issues with "Poison Eaters" all over again.

Bullshit part the first: as a bookseller and as a former punk street kid, I think I'm qualified to state that runaway punk kids love fantasy. Why? Because "people like us" - i.e. the alienated, the dispossessed, the abandoned, the hungry, the haunted: these are EXACTLY the people that fantasy is for and about, just dressed up in metaphor. Fantasy is at its best when it uses its capacity for allegory to reflect the universal experience of being human, but even bad fantasy has an appealing sense of epic escapism which endears it to street kids and house kids alike.

Secondly, it's a revoltingly self-congratulatory statement, and one that's no longer even close to accurate. Writers have been using street kids in fantasy since the first punks shoved safety pins through their eyebrows. Simply throwing in some characters dressed up as punks doesn't actually make the story more edgy. You don't have to be an actual dispossessed princeling or renegade wizard or enterprising thief or whatever to identify with the characters in a fantasy story (though that visual is sort of ridiculous AND awesome)- and, conversely, using punk street kids doesn't necessarily make your story any more relevant to said kids.

And I'm not saying you have to have been a strung out street kid to write about strung out street kids. As I've noted before, Black has a nice touch with teenage dialogue - by and large, her kids sound like real kids. Just not here, when she stops to pat herself on the back about it. Or in the incredibly annoying (but thankfully brief) story about heroin addicted fairies.

In fact, it's her stories devoid of tough-talking, drug-addled urchins that really stand out in this collection. "Reversal of Fortune" is clever, poignant, and probably the first work of fantasy to involve competitive eating. The title story is creepy and beautiful and understated, perfectly compact. It actually makes the read more frustrating. IT COULD ALL HAVE BEEN GOOD.

And, hey, maybe Holly Black has some street cred I don't know about. Her webpage is coy, innocent-gothy, light on the biographical detail and heavy on the cute: a publisher's dream. Maybe in real life, behind the curtain of her internet persona, she's haunted by her homeless past. Maybe she's done her time on cardboard mats, jostling elbow to scabies-infested elbow in a squat, living on seven layer burritos or the free food from the Hari Krishnas, getting scabby from malnutrition and watching her friends die from senseless violence or overdoses. Maybe her friends hated fantasy and all read nothing but Hubert Selby Jr and William Burroughs - your higher class sort of junkie street kid, say. Even if this were all true, and I've unjustly maligned her, I'm still sick of these heroin-chic waifs clogging up the pages of the young adult section.

Because it's not just Holly Black. And it's nothing new: "Go Ask Alice" is STILL a bestseller in YA, despite the fact that it's utterly ludicrous and medically implausible. In fact, tragic tales of drugs and fatal diseases still make up the bulk of the YA publications aimed at girls. I'm not sure whether they're actually being edged out by tales of vampiric romance, or if the whole notion of getting sexually involved with predatory and inhuman creatures is simply another way of expressing the same fascination with doom and self-harm. And why pander to that just to make your story seem more hip?

All this from one little line. I should probably practice caring less.