Books to Die For

Daniel Kraus' SCOWLER

Young adult horror has come a long way since it first emerged and gained popularity in the 1980s and '90s. Many of today's teen genre novels are just as dark, challenging, and profoundly disturbing as their adult-oriented brethren. Case in point, this week's Book to Die For, Daniel Kraus' SCOWLER.

From our feature on SCOWLER in Rue Morgue #131:

Some books haunt long after their covers are closed and they are returned to the shelf. Some stories burrow in deep, crawling under the flesh, leaving readers quivering, traumatized and afraid to sleep with the lights off. Such is the power of the written word. It's so powerful, in fact, that sometimes it even affects the writers of the stories themselves, as is the case with SCOWLER, Daniel Kraus' tale of familial abuse, poverty, redemption and the incredible strength (and fragility) of the human psyche.

"[SCOWLER] troubled me more than anything I had ever written," says Kraus, who has been writing novel-length stories since grade school. "I got nervous writing certain scenes in the same was Stephen King says he feared writing the bathtub scene in The Shining. I abandoned the book twice and had no intention of completing it - it was just too much for me, it was making me physically ill."

Despite its young adult label, SCOWLER trades in the grim and graphic; it's dark, poetic and challenging, and free of the saccharine romance and supernatural beasties that have overrun contemporary teen genre fiction. Instead, it wields the heavy hand of choking dread and human-on-human horror.

Hope is hard to find in the dusty, fallow fields of the dying farmstead that nineteen-year-old Ry Burke shares with his mom and kid sister. But hope's been missing in Ry's life for a long time, since well before the violent confrontation nine years earlier that got his abusive father sent away to prison, and had him bouncing from therapist to therapist, explaining just why he thinks his toys - including a toothy doll named Scowler - came to life to save him.

SCOWLER unravels chronologically over the span of 46 hours in August 1981, with occasional flashbacks to the terror and humiliation that patriarch Marvin inflicted on his family (including an absolutely devastating scene in which ten-year-old Ry must cut his mother's naked body free from the bed Marvin has sewn her to). Over this two-day period, mysterious meteors fall on the Burke's impoverished community - one freeing Marvin from prison and another landing smack dab on his farm. Little do the Burkes know that this celestial event has set Marvin on a collision with them, as he seeks revenge for their betrayal and later aims to secure the space rock for himself. 

As his father and the ever-present thread of violence returns to Ry's world, so do his "imaginary" childhood heroes, forcing the young man to figure out who he is, and what, if any part of himself, he shares with the monstrous Marvin. And whether he can ultimately do whatever needs to be doen to save his family, no matter how heinous that thing may be. 

"It's a story about rebirth," confirms Kraus. "At the beginning of the book, you know that Marvin has basically cut the family off at the roots and they're dying on the vine - it's evident in their surroundings as well as their attitudes. So the book is about which kind of rebirth is going to occur."

If this sounds like your preferred brand of darkness, SCOWLER is widely available in both a paperback edition and as an eBook. Happy haunting reading!