INTRODUCTION

            Hello and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this video is all about places. I am presenting a shorter and more formal version of this project later this week at the Children’s Literature Association conference. The theme for this year is neighborhoods, since the conference is being held in Pittsburgh, the home of Mr. Rogers. In order to make that theme also work for this channel, my mind turned to monster or at least monster-adjacent metaphors. What would make a neighborhood monstrous? So that’s how I came up with the idea of writing about the fantastical urban settings of gritty young adult speculative fiction. How do fantasy and sci-fi authors construct a “bad neighborhood” in stories for young people – and what does that reveal about the social geographies of youth?

In the conclusion to their book Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (2016), Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn argue that “the best children’s fantasy is, over all, far from escapist.” Instead, the fantastical settings “may actually make it easier for children to deal with serious issues by presenting them once removed from reality, as they may otherwise be too threatening to confront” (225). YA speculative fiction that depicts young people living in environments with high levels of poverty, crime, conflict, and danger would, on the surface, appear to be well positioned to do the sort of work that Levy and Mendlesohn describe. Within the confines of a speculative setting, young readers can contend with geographical injustices that exist in their own world. Yet how do young adult authors establish these bad neighborhoods “once removed from reality”? I’ve wrestled with this aspect of fantasy – what I call “fantastical distance” – quite a bit over the course of my scholarly career. I think that it absolutely can function the way that Levy and Mendlesohn describe. By virtue of that removal from reality, that strangeness, fantasy can call attention to things that we typically take for granted and don’t question. I also know from my dissertation book club experience that fantasy can ease the difficulty of thinking and talking about tough issues, especially for young people, because of that sort of cushion of difference. However, I also think that sometimes fantastical distance can impose a barrier to understanding or even making connections to how certain issues play out in real life. We’ve probably all seen examples of like “fantasy racism,” for example, where the allegory of some hated magical creature just woefully misrepresents how actual systems of oppression work. So I wanted to explore how this spectrum of fantastical distance works when it comes to speculative urban environments in books for adolescents.

Before we get into that, though, you may have noticed that I just mentioned my experience with a teen monster book club, and if you are now thinking, huh, I’d like to get in on that, you have a chance to do so! Enrollment for Youth Monsterology, my program of book clubs and educational mentorship for teens aged 14 through 18, is live on themonsterandthechild.com. That’s “the monster and the child,” all spelled out, no ampersand. This program will run from the end of August to the end of January. That is a recent change I made based on feedback I’ve received, so if that now works better for you than the original earlier timeline, take note! Youth Monsterology will enable young people to meet with a group of peers with common interests, dive deep into monster stories in an out-of-school setting that values ungraded intellectual freedom, and develop an independent academic, creative, and/or activist project with close one-on-one mentorship from yours truly. Parents will love the benefit to college applications, and participants will love the community and ability to develop their own ideas! Or, if you’d just like a monthly book club facilitated by a monster and childhood studies scholar, I have those too, for both teens and adults. Those are slated to kick off in July. So please head over to themonsterandthechild.com to check that out! If you would like to support me in running these programs, we’re at the tail end of my Indiegogo fundraiser, which has fun rewards for different tiers of contributions, such as YouTube shorts and personalized writing feedback. These links are available in the description. Please share widely, and thank you for your support!

And here is editing me with the latest shoutouts! Since last time, I have some new people to thank: Baby Banana, Mark, Y4P, and Melissa. Thank you all so much for supporting the project! And a special shout out goes to Duncan, a.k.a. monsterancher, who was one of my first backers and has since additionally contributed a wildly generous amount that has allowed me to lower the price of the program overall. So now instead of $50 a month for Youth Monsterology, the rate will now be $40 a month – an even greater bargain when compared to comparable education programs. So thank you, Duncan, and thank you to all of the backers for showing this project such overwhelming support.

All right, so back to our “bad neighborhoods.” For this analysis, I took a look at five YA texts: Valiant by Holly Black, Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, The Fever King by Victoria Lee, and Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi. I look first at the types of urban spaces that these books place their adolescent characters into, and what they tell us about how urban adolescence is imagined in our society. Then I examine how the quote-unquote “bad neighborhoods” of the books function as spectacle, in ways that can either produce deliberate thought-provoking tension for the reader, or perhaps flatten the representation of actual urban youth realities. Or sometimes both. So come with me into the gritty and/or pretty streets of YA speculative fiction as we tease out when fantastical distance acts as a bridge and when it just builds a wall.

URBAN YOUTH: LIMINAL AGE, LIMINAL SPACES

            In Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction, Pamela Robertson Wojcik explains that in the current U.S. urban landscape, children are more constrained than their historical counterparts: “Never an uncomplicated relationship, the idea of the child roaming the city, once a rather commonplace model, now seems extraordinary, almost unthinkable” (2). The prevailing cultural school of thought is that cities are inherently too dangerous for children to traverse by themselves. They require adult supervision, and they should be confined only to certain urban areas and barred from the rest. However, when it comes to stories about fictional urban children, “While the historical conditions of children’s mobility in the city have changed dramatically, these texts point to an enduring fantasy of mobility” (6). This fantasy is the “fantasy of neglect” of Wojcik’s title, which is a kind of shocking phrase at first blush. As Wojcik points out, the various ways in which a child can be neglected – physically, educationally, emotionally, and from failed supervision – can all have real negative consequences (13). However, in fictional representations of childhood, “the notion of neglect points to the positive thrill and possible risk of the child’s freedom, independence, and movement” (12). Of the types of neglect, “failed supervision and emotional neglect are the most common and are often intertwined in the urban childhood imaginary” (13). This is why the various urchins and orphans of film and literature can regularly be seen wandering cities of their own accord, with no one to tell them what to do. Wojcik explains, “Most representations of urban children play off the tension between the negative and positive connotations of neglect and hinge on some form of parental supervisory or emotional neglect” (16). Audiences recognize that the vision of childhood on display is at odds with the ideal of protected childhood innocence, and that is meant to stir feelings of pity or concern – but also envy and admiration of the child’s freedom and self-sufficiency.

            Young adult literature is already famous for its absence of parents or adult supervision – particularly in fantasy and science-fiction – so it’s no surprise that this fantasy of neglect shows up in the imagined urban worlds of these novels. The construction of adolescence itself brings tension to this fantasy, as Caroline Hamilton-McKenna explains in her chapter entitled “‘Girl. Wherever the Fuck You Want’: The Contingent Mobilities of Literary Adolescence.” Hamilton-McKenna explains that negative connotations of adolescence, “Perceived as not-quite adults but more independently mobile than younger children,” lead to real youths being “frequently marked by boundaries of exclusion – branded as ‘out of place,’ at-risk, or inherently transgressive figures within public and civic spaces” (79). However, alongside that negative construction, we collectively also have a cultural fantasy of “a liminal, makeshift strain of untethered teenage freedom” (79). Balancing between these seemingly opposed notions of exclusion and freedom, the protagonists of YA genre fiction are adept at finding the hidden, often liminal spaces of their urban worlds, where adults cannot find them and interfere with their lives. Frequently, they seek out these spaces specifically because of the neglect they have already suffered.

For instance, in Valiant, the second in Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales sequence, the protagonist Val flees from her home in suburban New Jersey to the underground spaces of Manhattan after her mother betrays her by seducing (read: preying upon) Val’s boyfriend. Val’s new life begins in the transitory spaces of train stations, where she cuts off her hair and disappears into the anonymity of the city. On the train itself, the transitional space literally reflects Val’s identity-in-flux: “Staring out the window, she watched the suburban lawns slip by until they went under a tunnel and she saw only her new, alien reflection in the window” (21).

The uneasy and often destructive passage of time is made manifest in the urban settings Val falls into, which are consistently described as worse versions of what they once were. For instance, when spending her first night in the city in Penn Station, Val notices that “Above the cracked paint and mildew, a sculptural border of curling tulips was a remnant of another Spring Street station, one that must have been old and grand” (27-28). Val quickly meets up with some unhoused young people who live in abandoned subway tunnels and work for the city’s hidden fae creatures. Train tracks are even more liminal than train stations: these are places that are not meant to be lingered in, but are supposed to merely be spaces of movement from departure to destination. As a neglected adolescent, Val does not have access to either point A or point B, so she stays in the tunnels, and then later, in the hidden Manhattan Bridge home of the immortal troll Ravus. But even the undying creatures Val encounters are not immune from decay in their crumbling urban spaces. Though they may live in nominally more wealthy or beautiful parts of the city, still time makes its mark, such as when Val sees “a stone eagle with a cracked beak [glowering] over a murky green pool choked with leaves” (69). The city is as neglected as Val is, and so she fits right into its in-betweenness and disrepair.

Similarly, Victoria Lee presents an urban space for her adolescent protagonist that is also at odds with time. While Black’s Valiant is set in modern-day New York (or at least modern to when it was published, which was 20 years ago now), Lee’s The Fever King opens in a future Durham, North Carolina. Yet her protagonist, Noam, immediately takes the reader through history as he considers the spaces he inhabits: “That evening he locked the doors, pulled chicken wire over the windows, and took a new route to the Migrant Center. In this neighborhood, you had to if you didn’t want to get robbed. Once upon a time, or so Noam had heard, there’d been a textile mill here. The street would’ve been full of workers heading home, empty lunch pails in hand. Then the mill had gone down and apartments went up, and by the 1960s, Ninth Street had been repopulated by rich university students with their leather satchels and clove cigarettes. All that was before the city got bombed halfway to hell in the catastrophe, of course” (3-4). The catastrophe in question was the result of bombs released by the then-young survivor of a magical virus, a disastrous and highly deadly pandemic. Most people who contract the virus will die, but those who live come out the other side as “witchings,” capable of feats of magic that they can amplify through study. Original survivors, like Calix Lehrer, were experimented upon, leading to an uprising and extremely violent overthrow of the government, and now what was once the United States is mostly uninhabitable nuclear wasteland. The places that survived have been divvied up into autonomous countries, with Durham serving as the capital of Carolinia, where Lehrer, the series’ antagonist, still presides.

Noam’s parents are refugees from the neighboring Atlantia, which suffers from a much higher rate of the magic virus. Atlantian immigrants are segregated into overcrowded tenement blocks: “Now the university campus blocked the area in from the east, elegant stone walls keeping out the riffraff while Ninth and Broad crumbled under the weight of five-person refugee families crammed into one-room apartments, black markets buried in basements, laundry lines strung between windows like market lights” (4). Noam takes refuge in these spaces’ past, what they used to be: “Once, this building was a bookstore. It’d long since been converted to tenements, all plywood walls and hung-up sheets for doors. The books were still there, though, yellowing and mildewed. They made him sneeze, but he read a new one every day all the same, curled up in a corner and out of the way of the other tenants. It was old and worn out, but it was home” (7). Like Val, Noam is as neglected as the out-of-time places that he inhabits. In his case, his mother has died by suicide and his father has fallen into a near-catatonic depression. Unlike Val, however, Noam is not a newcomer to this urban environment. He has a deep familiarity with its abandoned spaces, and the opening sequence shows him maneuvering easily through the streets and into the hidden places where he feels most comfortable.

So, of course, the inciting incident of the novel destroys Noam’s relationship with this place. The magic virus sweeps through the overpopulated tenements, killing most of Noam’s neighbors and his father. Noam is infected, but survives as a witching. He is then taken to a Carolinian military institution to be trained with other witchings as a soldier. We have an inverse of Val’s train sequence as Noam is whisked away from the “bad neighborhood” – though that is not how Noam perceives this journey: “Durham sped past, a blur of ancient brick buildings and glittering neon nightclubs paving the way to the government district. They passed the old stadium, lit up for some event or another. Here the streets were peppered with green-uniformed Ministry of Defense soldiers. Not too many, not enough to frighten, but enough for Noam to get the message: don’t try any shit” (23). Though Noam was neglected and never physically safe in his immigrant community, he has now lost access to the neglected and therefore comfortingly anonymous spaces that he could inhabit as an unsupervised urban youth. Outside of that environment, he is surveilled and controlled – quite literally, as the plot hinges upon Lehrer’s magical manipulation of Noam’s will.

Another future youth contending with time and urban decay is Ernest Cline’s Wade in Ready Player One. In this dystopian Oklahoma City, Wade lives with his emotionally abusive aunt in the “stacks,” literal towers of mobile homes along the city’s perimeter. Wade describes his home as “a sprawling hive of discolored tin shoeboxes” (21). He lives at the very top of his particular stack, a precarious position not just due to the threat of tipping or collapse, but also because he has to climb down the rickety scaffolding to reach the ground. There is technically a staircase, but it is loud, so Wade avoids it: “In the stacks, it was best to avoid being heard or seen, whenever possible. There were often dangerous and desperate people about – the sort who would rob you, rape you, and then sell your organs on the black market” (22). It is a bit hard, due to the narrator’s voice, to determine how much of that statement is intended to be taken at face value and how much is deeply cynical hyperbole, but we can at least take Wade’s word that his urban environment is unsafe for him.

Like his other YA protagonist counterparts, Wade seeks out the hidden places within this landscape. In his case, neglect is his salvation. There is a “giant mound of old cars and trucks piled haphazardly along the stacks’ eastern perimeter” (24). Within this pile of abandoned vehicles is a van that has remained un-crushed but invisible from outside of the mess of metal. Wade reflects, “When I first opened the door and gazed into the van’s darkened interior, I knew right away that I’d found something of immeasurable value: privacy” (24). The van is literally a vehicle, a space intended for transportation, and though it is now stationary, that is still what it remains, as it is from here that Wade accesses the virtual world of the OASIS. The OASIS is the “setting” of the novel’s plot, in which Wade attempts to solve the late tech genius James Halliday’s puzzles to access untold wealth – and ownership of the OASIS itself. To do so, Wade has to apply his knowledge of 1980s pop culture, Halliday’s overriding obsession. So Wade has coped with his horrible urban present – and the reader’s dystopian future – by turning to a decidedly suburban past, made in the image of sitcom families and mall arcades. It’s significant to note that Wade’s relationship with his “bad neighborhood” is not actually particularly mobile, unlike some of the other characters we were discussing. Wade moves through it only far enough to find a sedentary space that can more metaphorically transport him away from it and the neglect that it represents.

From these speculative versions of real cities, we now move to the wholly invented setting of Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows. This novel kicks off in Ketterdam, the capital city of the island nation Kerch, one of the several countries that make up her broader “Grishaverse.” Unlike her earlier Grisha trilogy, which largely took place in the war-torn wastes or imperial palaces of the expansive Russian-inspired Ravka, Ketterdam is a small, cramped city within a nation that maintains a tight grip on the rest of the world through trade and commerce. In other words, Ketterdam is a capitalist hellscape, where the elite literally worship the hand of the market. The novel actually begins in some of the “good neighborhoods” of Ketterdam, which it immediately reveals as rotten to the core through the choice of description: “Even here among the mansions of the Geldstraat, the air hung thick with the smell of fish and bilge water, and smoke from the refineries on the city’s outer islands had smeared the night sky in a briny haze. The full moon looked less like a jewel than a yellowy blister in need of lancing” (3). After a prologue, we meet some of our protagonists on their way to the Exchange, the center of commerce of essentially the entire world. The Exchange by day is “bustling with wealthy merchers buying and selling shares in the trade voyages that passed through the city’s ports,” but it is eerily empty at night, “little more than a large rectangular courtyard surrounded by warehouses and shipping offices” (18). Though it is meant to be neutral ground for the various criminal gangs of Ketterdam, it doesn’t “feel neutral” to the focalizing character of this chapter, Inej. To her, “It felt like the hush of the woods before the snare yanks tight and the rabbit starts to scream. It felt like a trap” (18).

As you might guess from the rural similes of the narration, Inej is a transplant to the city, as are the rest of the adolescent point-of-view characters of this first book. (In the second book of the duology, Crooked Kingdom, we get the perspective of a Ketterdam native, though he too has transitioned from “good” neighborhood to “bad” neighborhood.) Inej was trafficked to Ketterdam at the age of fourteen to be sold into sexual slavery. After she demonstrated her skills in moving without detection, a legacy of her upbringing as an acrobat in a traveling family circus, her contract was bought by the young gang lieutenant Kaz, the most central character of the duology’s ensemble. They live in the “Barrel,” the most crime-ridden area of the city. Their home base is a building called “the Slat,” “just another house in the worst part of the Barrel, three stories stacked tight on top of each other, crowned with an attic and a gabled roof.” The buildings of the Barrel “had been built without foundations, many on swampy land where the canals were haphazardly dug. They leaned against each other like tipsy friends gathered at a bar, tilting at drowsy angles” (59). Despite its dilapidated exterior, though, Kaz, himself only seventeen, has made its upkeep a priority in his bid for leadership of his gang: “It was ugly, crooked, and crowded, but the Slat was gloriously dry” (59).

All of the focalizing characters of Six of Crows are well-traveled in the dark, dangerous areas of the city. They are highly mobile adolescents, made so, again, through various forms of neglect. Inej in particular has access to the hidden areas of Ketterdam through her work as a spy for her gang. She travels over rooftops and unseen through alleys. Even her room in the Slat speaks to her mobile relationship with the city, as it has a window that overlooks “the peaked roofs and jumbled chimneys of the Barrel. When the wind came through and cleared away the haze of coal smoke that hung over the city, she could even make out a blue pocket of harbor” (59-60). Her nickname within Ketterdam’s underworld, bestowed upon her by Kaz, is the Wraith. Literally, she experiences the city as a phantom, out of mortal time, between life and death. She can go anywhere because she is not anyone: she has been removed from home and family, pushed out of childhood but with no access to a socially acceptable adulthood. So in liminal adolescence in the hidden places of the city she remains.

The other element of time to consider with Ketterdam is its aesthetic time period. The technology and material culture of this invented setting is most analogous to the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a time of rapid industrialization in our own world. So we are presented with a reimagined past that is defined by its future orientation, especially in this cultural setting that is obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. Again, adolescence as a liminal age is matched to a city setting marked by its uneasy transition between states of time, and within the dangerous neighborhoods of that setting, the adolescent protagonists find the most forgotten and neglected spaces to make their home.

The last book included in this analysis is Akwaeke Emezi’s Bitter, which serves as an outlier in a lot of ways. This is the prequel to Emezi’s more well-known novel Pet, and both are set in the same city, Lucille. We are never given a specific nation in which Lucille exists, though most indirect implications would seem to point (albeit not definitively) to the United States. There are some real pop cultural references that seem to place these novels within the reader’s own world, though Lucille itself is an invented urban environment. In Pet, Lucille is a mostly utopian setting, where citizens are treated equally despite previously oppressed markers of race, gender identity, and disability. There are no police or billionaires. But this utopia is only a generation old, and in Bitter, we see Lucille before it was transformed. Presuming that the intended reader has already read Pet, there is immediately a tense relationship with time in the story: it is the past of the better city that the reader already knows, and a dystopian near-future – or perhaps just present reflection – of the reader’s own world.

The eponymous protagonist of Bitter, who we know will later be the mother of the protagonist in Pet, hates her city and most of the people in it. The novel literally opens with, “Lucille was a brutal city to live in” (1). Constant protests and uprisings from the oppressed citizenry are violently suppressed by the police and the billionaire class: “Maybe when the stomps and chants five floors down on the street turned into screams and people running, the bubble could block out the other sounds that Bitter knew would come with it – the clank and hiss of canisters, the attack dogs barking, the dull heaviness of water cannons spitting wet weight on flesh. On the bad days, there was gunfire, an inhuman staccato. Sometimes the streets were hosed off afterward” (3). In the aftermath of the latest protest, Bitter and her friends go to the park, and Bitter observes the “debris from the earlier protests, trampled cardboard and a few water bottles leaking milk” (11). Bitter is annoyed by the sight of protestors cleaning the mess, because “There wouldn’t be anything to clean up if they just stayed home in the first place” (11-12).

Despite this early foray out into the city, Bitter does not feel at home moving freely through the streets. She, like her other protagonist counterparts, is a neglected teen; her mother died when she was a baby, only living long enough to saddle her with her complete downer of a name, and then Bitter bounced around foster homes of varying degrees of abuse. Eventually, her artistic ability got her noticed by the mysterious benefactor and headmistress of Eucalyptus, a residential art school for gifted teens. Though the school itself is in the heart of the city, Bitter sees it as a haven and removal from the neighborhood outside. When she tries to convince herself to join her friends at a later protest, despite her doubts about their efficacy, fear drives her back into the school building: “She had to turn around, she had to go back to her room and lock the door, press a heavy chair against it to block out the forces on the outside, the hungry city of Lucille, eager to eat all its citizens. Bitter was running before she knew it, not out there to her friends but back into the building, back into the belly of the old brick, up the stairs and into her room” (89-90).

In this way, Bitter resists the fantasy of neglect that the other books uphold to various degrees. None of these novels shy away from the intense harms of the neglect and also outright abuse that their adolescent characters endure. Val, Noam, Inej and the rest of the gang members are all riddled with trauma. Wade, meanwhile, is a lot like Bitter in that he mostly wants to be in an enclosed space where he can forget about the city around him. But Bitter is the only one who does not take advantage of her adolescent liminality to be invisible or seek out hidden spaces. Instead, she prefers the institutional spaces of the school, under the protection of adult educators, as insulation against her urban neighborhood.

This brings us, then, to the next part of my analysis: the spectacle of the urban neighborhoods themselves. We’ve established that each speculative cityscape mirrors the neglect that the adolescent protagonists themselves have faced from the adult world. We’ve seen how the urban spaces they traverse are defined by liminal and transitional time, just like adolescence itself. Now let’s take a look at how the reader is positioned to react to these spaces. That positioning of the reader is integral to understanding the fantastical distance that exists between the urban worlds of the books and the urban environments that many actual young people inhabit. Are the cities meant to shock us, delight us, draw us in even as we are repelled by the danger and violence? And is it possible for ideas of “spectacle” and “neighborhood” to coexist?

GRITTY AND PRETTY: SPECTACLE VS. NEIGHBORHOOD

            In a sense, the concept of “spectacle” itself encapsulates a kind of fantastical distance. Guy Debord begins his treatise The Society of the Spectacle with a discussion of separation. His opening sentences are, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” To Debord, capitalism functions and communicates through mediated images – advertisement would be a prominent example. These images are eye-catching and sensationalized, but they are mere facsimiles of real lived experiences. The relationship that we collectively have with these images is passive: people can only behold them, gaze upon them, “contemplate” them, as Debord says. The images are alienated from – and therefore alienate us from – actual reality. Hence the separation, the distance.

So, I mean, at least fantasy is supposed to be fiction. Its distance from reality is upfront and out in the open, as opposed to the sneakier spectacle of news media, advertising, political messaging, etc., which tries to pass itself off as the real thing. But when it comes to the representation of “bad neighborhoods” in urban environments, fantasy authors are not immune from drawing upon those other mediated spectacles – and those spectacles can have real consequences for young people who actually live in the areas that are so sensationally represented. In “Youth, Temporality, and Territorial Stigma: Finding Good in Camden, New Jersey,” Kate Cairns discusses young people’s reactions and resistance to mediated narratives about how “bad” their neighborhoods are. Full disclosure: Dr. Cairns was one of my professors in my doctoral program, which was at Rutgers Camden, and she taught the geographies of childhood class that I took and am heavily drawing upon for this analysis. Also, she’s just super great. She begins her paper with an account of how a Rolling Stone article entitled “Apocalypse, New Jersey” defined Camden as “a space of poverty, drugs, and crime” (1). This highly spectacular media representation specifically relied upon a particular representation of youth: “Alongside tales of boarded up houses and open-air drug markets, images of young people feature prominently in these media exposes, emphasizing the especially devastating effects of poverty and crime for the city’s most vulnerable members” (2). Cairns draws upon Loic Wacquant’s concept of “territorial stigmatization” to argue that “the symbolic denigration of a place contributes to the marginalization of those who live there” (6). In other words, spectacular representation has material consequences.

So with that in mind, let’s return to the texts to see what elements of urban life make it into the representations of fantasy, and how great the distance is between those representations and reality. Now, obviously, fantasy novels are intended to entertain – and that’s good. Aesthetic enjoyment is part of the art form of literature, and people like fantasy in particular because of the way it stretches the imagination and introduces wonder and novelty into the reader’s life. I am not arguing in any capacity that those elements of fantasy should be diminished in favor of, like, dry didacticism, especially in texts for young people. In the introduction to Children’s Literature in Place, Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec explain that “Children’s literature in particular relies on the ability to provide ‘a change of place’ as well as a sense of place because of its audience” (1). That sense of transportation is a major aspect of the pleasure of reading these texts. So when it comes to speculative fiction,fantastical distance and even fantastical spectacle are not just inevitable but also not bad things in and of themselves. They are ubiquitous elements of the genre, and like any other literary attribute, they can be more or less thematically or ideologically effective. So that is what we’re looking at here.

Holly Black’s prose in Valiant lingers on sensory details. She particularly loves to craft descriptions that marry the beautiful and the grotesque or disgusting. In the train station where Val cuts off her hair, she notes that “The room was grubby and large, with a sticky rubber floor and hard plastic walls. The odor of urine mingled with the scent of chemical flowers. Small blobs of discarded gum decorated the walls” (19). It’s a very visceral and unpleasant description, but the presence of flowers – albeit chemical – and the choice of the word “decorated” instead of something like “littered” heightens the setting from wholly gross and mundane to an uncomfortable but compelling mix of sordid and almost alluring. The latter attribute heightens as we make it fully into the city, even as the sordidness remains: “Penn Station was thick with commuters, heads down as they passed one another and stands that sold pendants, scarves, and fiberoptic flowers that glowed with changing colors. Valerie stuck to one of the walls, passing a filthy man sleeping under a newspaper and a group of backpack-wearing girls screaming at one another in German” (21). There is so much to look at here, so much to behold and to contemplate. The glowing flowers exist side-by-side with houselessness and overwhelming noise. But in the process, what becomes of that “filthy man”? He becomes part of the setting, part of the spectacle.

Now, Val herself does become unhoused in this book, and she finds a community of other unhoused teens, so we do experience the interiority of characters in poverty. Yet Val, perhaps due to her own experience of the city as spectacle, infuses her first forays into her new friends’ underground home with the allure of fantasy: “As Val jumped down onto the litter-strewn concrete after them, she thought how insane it was to follow two people she didn’t know into the bowels of the subway, but instead of being afraid, she felt glad. She would make all her own decisions now, even if they were ruinous ones” (45). Meanwhile, the faerie drug Never, also known as Glamour, literally has the effect of heightening spectacle and artifice. The first time Val takes it, she keeps “noticing fascinating things she hadn’t seen before: the sheen on a roach’s wings as it scuttled over a grate, the smirk of a carved face over a lintel, the broken stems of flowers outside of a bodega” (99). Again, there is this marriage of the grotesque and the sublime, which we can especially see in the description of the shining roach. I really dig this aesthetically; after all, that collapsing of categories is integral to monstrosity. And though Black invokes and creates spectacle, she does not do so uncritically. Never is incredibly addictive, and it alienates humans from their realities. At a faerie revel, Val observes other humans, including “a girl, too young to be out of middle school,” and she realizes her potential fate with dawning horror. These “human thralls” are “willing to do anything for a taste of Never” (226). Val tells herself, “She didn’t need to make the shadows dance. She didn’t need to keep choosing the wrong path, gloating that at least she was picking her disaster” (226). The allure of spectacle is, in fact, a really bad replacement for living in reality.

Yet is there anything beyond the spectacle in the city for a young person? Val finds the pitfalls of the fantasy of neglect, and then she returns home, having not forgiven her mother but simply come to care less about what she did, after all that she experienced in the city. She plans to return to New York for college, but she still has to finish high school in the suburbs. She maintains ties to the community she found – most notably the troll Ravus, with whom she has fallen in love – but she is distanced from the actual underground neighborhood as she resumes coming of age in linear time, marked by milestones like graduations, instead of existing in those liminal urban spaces. She and the reader enjoy the fantastical distance and the spectacle of faerie-infused Manhattan, but ultimately they are still deemed to not be the place for her as a young person.

At least Val, however, is interested in maintaining some connection with the neighborhood that she found. Wade, in Ready Player One, just wants to leave the city. The majority of the action of the novel takes place in the OASIS, a spectacle if there ever was one. The city is a backdrop best forgotten, in Wade’s view. Within the stacks, there is precisely one neighbor that he actually likes, an old woman, but otherwise, while he references the crimes that happen in his neighborhood, his city spaces are marked by the absence of people. Take this passage where Wade is heading from the stacks to his hidden van: “It was still pretty dark down here, so I took out my flashlight and headed east, weaving my way through the dark maze, doing my best to remain unseen while being careful to avoid tripping over a shopping cart, engine block, or one of the other pieces of junk littering the narrow alleys between the stacks” (23-24). There is no beauty to alleviate the poverty here, but that doesn’t make it less of a spectacle. Instead, what we behold are the markers of human life – shopping, driving – separated from the humans who would animate these objects. Wade is repulsed by this representation, and the reader is positioned to be, as well.

Of course, much of the novel hinges upon the tension between the extreme spectacle of the OASIS and the quote-unquote “real world” defined by the city that Wade so wants to leave. One of the digital treasure hunters he teams up with, Art3mis, wants to use the reward money to do good things for the neglected world, while Wade just wants to escape it. At the end of the novel, Wade concedes that he will use the money for good, though his motivation, in my reading, is more the fact that he has fallen for Art3mis, because he does not at any point revise his disgust for his original environment or the people in it. That may well be psychologically realistic, considering the abusive and neglectful household in which Wade grew up, but it does create an unresolved and, I imagine, unintended tension with the themes of embracing real life. Though the avatar of Halliday opines from beyond the grave that “as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness” (364), that message is severely undercut by the preceding 360 pages that sneer at the spectacle of urban poverty and positively revel in the media and consumer spectacle of 1980s pop culture. If you couldn’t tell, I didn’t like this book, which at this point is not any kind of hot take. But one of the reasons that I think it fails is because it only very superficially challenges the distance that its central character desires from lived experiences in favor of spectacle. Its uncritical representation of sensationalized urban poverty is part of that construction. There is no sense of a living neighborhood, of a community of real people (as opposed to, say, NPCs), within the city in this text. Instead, we’re given images straight out of “Apocalypse, New Jersey” to contrast with the more exciting, more distanced world of the OASIS.

I am much more ideologically and aesthetically aligned with a text like The Fever King, which shows a teenager engaging with a much more complex negotiation with place. Noam does not deny that the refugee slums constitute a “bad” neighborhood in many regards. There is a lot of crime here, and the magic virus is not the only health hazard: the overcrowding and mold and pests also create a constant baseline of illness. Noam hates the Carolinian government that has created those conditions, but he refuses to hate the neighborhood itself. Though Noam’s ex called the tenements the Ninth Circle – “She meant it in Dante’s sense” – Noam muses, “Sure, maybe you shouldn’t wander around the neighborhood at night draped in diamonds, but Noam liked it anyway” (4). The description allows the urban mundane to be beautiful without being sensational: “Now it was night, the deep-blue world illuminated by pale streetlight pooling on the sidewalk” (7). And Noam mourns when he realizes that, in addition to the countless deaths from the magic outbreak, the actual physical environment is likely to be firebombed, as well. His memories in this moment are not necessarily good, but they are focused on the people and on the physical realities of living in that place: “In that neighborhood, people lived two families to a home and boiled swamp water for drinking. He knew every person who lived in the bookstore, from old Mrs. Brown to the family downstairs with six kids who never slept. There was mold damage on the ceilings and a rat nest that came back no matter how many poison traps Noam set out” (23). Here, the grotesque is not juxtaposed with the sublime, but just with the human. This choice narrows the fantastical distance despite magic viruses and witchings, because the representation of the city cleaves as close as possible to embodied realities. Noam’s removal from his neighborhood is not temporarily necessary like Val’s or deeply desired like Wade’s, but it is a huge trauma for him. This place is part of his identity.

Noam’s relationship to his city is very similar to what Cairns found in her research with Camden youth. Cairns describes these teenagers engaging in “re-scripting” the sensationalized media narratives about their home by “invoking the city’s prosperous past and possible futures to locate goodness in the present” (4). None of them denied the hardships that their city and the people in it (including themselves) had faced, but they refused to let that flattened representation replace the more nuanced reality. It’s interesting that the mix of times that we discussed earlier in the fantasy cities also appears in the young Camden residents’ narratives of their own. Bringing in past and future acknowledges that the city is not static; it can’t actually be captured in a still image and printed in Rolling Stone. Noam’s interest in his city’s history likewise acknowledges that the story of his neighborhood is not just one thing. He is very involved in the efforts to make his neighborhood better for the people in it, especially when it comes to refugee rights. He has engaged in direct (sometimes illegal) action and community protests, and he wants to rejoin those efforts, despite his new identity as a military witching. Unsurprisingly, he meets resistance on that front, which Lehrer then exploits. But though Noam spends the bulk of the novel physically removed from his neighborhood, it remains a major part of his identity as a character. Despite the distance of this speculative Durham from the real place via time and magic, Lee’s narrative reserves the greatest spectacles of fantasy for the military classroom and renders the city itself with nuance and care.

Themes of protest and resistance are also a major part of the representation of urban youth life in Bitter. Now, one of the ways that Bitter remains, again, kind of an outlier in this set of texts is that, while the rest are all very rich in sensory description of their settings, this book is fairly light on it. There’s some, to be sure, but it spends a lot less time filling in the physical details of the space than it does exploring Bitter’s feelings about it. So in that regard, the technical spectacle element of the invented city – as in, presenting things for us to behold – is somewhat deemphasized. And it definitely doesn’t linger in visual images of poverty or hardship the way the other texts do. The protest litter that I mentioned before, as well as a description of the “graffiti-soaked picnic table and benches” in the park, are some of the only stereotypically urban images that we get (14). Otherwise, we as readers remain somewhat insulated from the outside world, just as Bitter has tried to become within the walls of Eucalyptus. Even the name of that school invokes nature as opposed to the built environments of a city.

The biggest spectacle in this novel is reserved for the most overtly fantastical element of the text: the eldritch avenging angel that Bitter calls to life from her painting. The creature that names itself Vengeance is massive, with a scaly head “about half the size of her body, with seven narrow and opaque eyes, all a feline yellow with black slits” (105). Based on the materials Bitter used to paint it, it has a waxy red neck, a spine of broken eggshells, and a body made of “compressed smoke that was having a hard time staying together; it kept giving off thick gouts of gray and white that would then pull back to the body” (105). The awe and fear and wonder of fantasy is present in this creature of emotion made manifest. We get those sensory details for Vengeance to emphasize Bitter’s inner world – which is a reaction to her environment, but is put into much greater focus than the environment itself.

Bitter, like Pet before it, reads as a sort of progressive parable. The characters must establish and live out the values that can turn a dystopia to a utopia. In this case, Bitter must repudiate Vengeance for actual justice. Parables are generally heavy on theme and light on detail, as they can be applied to various situations. However, the lack of specificity for Bitter’s urban environment – her actual neighborhood – to me doesn’t make the book feel more broadly applicable , but rather the opposite. By flattening the complexity of the embodied experience of a specific place, I feel like the text also flattens the complexity of what it would look like to actually have a revolution against the forces of capitalism and carcerality. All of the detail is focused on Bitter’s emotional state, and had that remained the focus – if the book were just about how Bitter learns to cope and resist in an unjust environment – that would feel more consistent with the established scope. But then the city of Lucille wouldn’t be transformed into a (mostly) utopia in time for Bitter’s daughter in Pet. The result for me is that Lucille never fully feels like a real place, and that fantastical distance imposes a barrier to my ability to connect this world to the cities and young people of my own world, despite the text’s obvious intention to be about just that.

Finally, we can consider Bardugo’s Ketterdam, the city that on its surface has the most fantastical distance between the text and the reader, as it exists within an entirely invented universe. Here, spectacle is very much the point of the Barrel, widely known as the worst neighborhood in the city. If spectacle is a function of capitalism, then a place that worships the hand of the market will obviously have it in spades. For example: “The infamous tangle of narrow streets and minor waterways known as the Barrel was bracketed by two major canals, East Stave and West Stave, each catering to a particular clientele. The buildings of the Barrel were different from anywhere else in Ketterdam, bigger, wider, painted in every garish color, clamoring for attention from passersby – the Treasure Chest, the Golden Bend, Weddell’s Riverboat” (69). The two main businesses in the Barrel are gambling dens and brothels. They and the other vendors create an environment of decadent sensory overload: “Music floated out of parlors where the doors had been flung open, and men and women lounged on couches in little more than scraps of silk and gaudy baubles. Acrobats dangled from cords over the canal, lithe bodies garbed in nothing but glitter, while street performers played their fiddles, hoping to garner a coin or two from passersby. Hawkers shouted at the sleek private gondels of rich merchers in the canal and the larger browboats that brought tourists and sailors inland from the Lid” (72).

Much like Black’s faerie New York, Bardugo’s Ketterdam simultaneously critiques and indulges in spectacle. Again, the aesthetic pleasure derives from the tension between these two states. The reader is positioned to be as overwhelmed by the surroundings as a tourist – but then is brought back down to reality by the observations of the adolescent characters who actually live in poverty in the midst of this excess. For instance, in a scene set in one of the Barrel’s many brothels, we learn that “Onkle Felix, the bawd who ran the White Rose, liked to say that his house girls were as sweet as his blossoms. But the joke was on the clients. That particular breed of white rose, the only one hardy enough to survive the wet weather of Ketterdam, had no natural scent. All the flowers were perfumed by hand” (74). Our attention is specifically drawn to the distance between the representation of spectacle and the actual reality.

One of the benefits of having multiple point-of-view characters in this duology is that we get a variety of perspectives about the city, and those perspectives also change over time. The character Nina, for example, is only here by necessity, and she longs for the day that she can leave. Her attention lingers not on the decadence of Ketterdam but on the literal rot underneath: “Fog lay low over the water, damp and curling. It carried the smell of tar and machinery from the shipyards on Imperjum, and something else – the sweet stink of burning bodies from the Reaper’s Barge, where Ketterdam disposed of the dead who couldn’t afford to be buried in the cemeteries outside the city. Disgusting, Nina thought, drawing her cloak tighter around her. Why anyone would want to live in a city like this was beyond her” (81). Kaz also sees the worst of the city – it was his observation about the white roses earlier – and that fits his self-image as one of the worst things in it. Inej, meanwhile, wants badly to leave, but her ability to see past both the decadence and the decay – or, perhaps more accurately, to see above those things from her vantage point on the roofs – leads her to find hope for this place, unwilling to give up on it even as she prepares for a life on the high seas at the end of Crooked Kingdom. She aims to take down slaver ships through piracy, which will have the effect of making Ketterdam a less harrowing place for young people like her. This diversity of perspectives lends a psychological realism to Ketterdam as a complex city with complex people in it.

Yet there is one aspect of fantastical distance that I always get hung up on with this series. Six of Crows is obviously an enormously successful title, and it has been praised for its characters, its worldbuilding, and the fun, twisty heists of its plot. The representation of physical disabilities, PTSD, ADHD, learning disabilities, and addiction – all without the intrusion of those contemporary terms into the text, but while still making those situations clear, and maintaining the specificity of the characters beyond just “representing X attribute” – all of that, to my mind, very well done. Also, full disclosure, this duology is absolutely in the upper echelons of my favorite books. Top ten for sure. But one thing I don’t see discussed often, in either critical reviews or fandom spaces, is that all of the main characters are members of an urban gang – a thing that very much exists in the real world. Gang activity is an actual lived experience of some real teenagers. But the real-world analogues of these characters are, at least in my experience of reading and writing about these books, basically never brought up by readers. And I’ve written like half a dozen papers on them at this point, so I have done the research here.

I believe that the setting accounts for this disconnect, especially due to its aesthetics of time. The nineteenth-century-esque technology, clothing, and even weaponry stretches the fantastical distance between this imagined gang life and the contemporary experience of it. There are guns, sure, but they’re pearl-handled pistols, beautiful spectacles in and of themselves. This series is actually what first led me to contemplate this concept of fantastical distance. Also, I would be remiss not to mention race here: though the cast of Six of Crows is multiracial, four of the titular six are described as white, which further distances this gang from the mediated racial and racist images that the word “gang” is associated with in the U.S. I don’t necessarily intend that as a critique of the text, but more of a critique of the fact that no one makes the connection of real gangs to this text. So from this example, it’s clear to me that fantastical distance is not uniform across the board for any given text. The self-conscious spectacle of Ketterdam may call a reader’s attention to the artifice of capitalism at the expense of the urban poor, something that is so commonplace as to be frequently overlooked in the real world. So there, the distance is just great enough to jolt the reader into noticing an otherwise taken-for-granted real phenomenon. But then the distance between the heightened aesthetics of the old-timey gangs of Ketterdam and the real thing may simultaneously be too great for a reader to make the connection with real urban violence in the lives of actual young people today.

The balance between spectacle as entertainment in a fantasy text and the spectacle of sensationalism that “bad neighborhoods” often endure is very fine. The thrill of danger, the decadence of excess, the voyeurism of poverty and hardship from the safety of the other side of the page – all of these are aspects of urban speculative fiction’s allure. It takes a deft hand to use these elements to establish depth and complexity of theme while a) not being overly didactic and b) still being a fun fantasy book. From these disparate examples, we can see various approaches of drawing a spectacular city, a bad neighborhood, and/or an urban community.

CONCLUSION

            My lease is up in July, and my wife and I are currently looking at new places to live within our own city. I will admit that in pretty classic millennial fashion, I never really got to know my neighbors well in the place where we are now, even though I’ve really enjoyed living here. My wife and I have made it a goal to actually get to know the people we live near in our next place – our next neighborhood. That’s something that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to me as a fairly shy individual, but it is a value I want to live by, so I’ve resolved to make the effort. It’s obvious and trite to say that it’s the neighbors that make a neighborhood, but like it’s also true. And that’s also why, even though I have spent this essay talking about the literary construction of “bad neighborhoods,” I am extremely against that terminology in real life. Hence all of my air quotes around “bad neighborhood.” Calling a place bad automatically calls the people within that place bad, and aside from being obviously harmful, that just simply is never accurate for everyone within a particular environment. Learning from Kate Cairns about territorial stigma really cemented that in me. Now that I’m looking around the city for a new place to live, a lot of people want to tell me about what neighborhoods are “good” or “bad,” and while it’s true that I would like to live somewhere where I don’t have to face the hardships and dangers of some of the characters that I’ve discussed today, I also reject the apocalyptic spectacle of the “bad neighborhood.”

            It’s clear that there are some fantasy texts that uphold the biases and beliefs that are baked into this spectacle and others that push back against it – and, honestly, most do some combination of the two. Applying the concept of fantastical distance to speculative texts, and particularly to their treatment of setting, is, I think, a useful way of determining how the author is using genre elements to reflect, reinforce, or resist the hidden status quo of our own world. Ultimately, the most important element of setting is how the characters who live within it interact with it – and the more diverse interactions the text is able to provide, the more complex and compelling (and true to life) those relationships will be. Do the authors actually present neighborhoods beneath all the spectacle of speculative fiction? In YA, are the young people shown as active participants of those neighborhoods – not just as independent agents due to the fantasy of neglect, but actually enmeshed within the communities and geographies of their worlds? And can we as readers and also just people begin to view real urban young people with that complexity, too?

            This was a bit of a departure from my usual fare on this channel due to the looming conference, so I hope that you enjoyed it. It was nice to return to books for this one – I always enjoy the movie and TV analysis I do here, but literary analysis is my first love. Also, thank you for bearing with my somewhat wrecked voice in this one. My city has experienced just about every weather and temperature imaginable in the last week, and this area of my body is letting me know that it didn’t like that, so I was fighting for my life with this one. Anyway, if there are any city-set speculative novels that you find particularly fascinating, please let me know in the comments. I always love to add to my truly out of hand TBR. Please remember to give the video a like and subscribe to the channel if you have not already done so for more discussions of the metaphors we make in storytelling about young people. Also remember to check out my website for more information about Youth Monsterology and the monthly adult and teen monster book clubs. I cannot wait to bring those to life! You’ve got a week left to support that via Indiegogo, but you could always also support through Patreon or with super thanks on here. Also, the best support right now would be to get those programs in front of any teenagers you think might be interested.

I will be back with another video essay in either two or three weeks – it’s going to be variable since I am getting the other projects underway. This one will probably be three weeks because of the conference, for which I will have to cut this paper down to ten pages, lol. But in the meantime, you will see more chapters from my own YA manuscript, Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth. That’s set in more of a town than a city, but hey, if you’re listening to that, I’d love to know what your thoughts are on my setting. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• Valiant by Holly Black (2004)
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)
• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (2015)
• The Fever King by Victoria Lee (2019)
• Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi (2022)

References:

• Cairns, K. (2018). Youth, Temporality, and Territorial Stigma: Finding Good in Camden, New Jersey. Antipode, 50, 1224-1243.
• Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Black & Red.
• Flegar, Z. & Miskec, J.M. (2024). Introduction: Children’s Places, Spaces, Literature, and Culture. In Flegar, Z. & Miskec, J.M. (Eds.), Children’s Literature in Place Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture, pp. 1-9.
• Hamilton-McKenna, C. (2024). “Girl. Wherever the Fuck You Want”: The Contingent Mobilities of Literary Adolescence. In Flegar, Z. & Miskec, J.M. (Eds.), Children’s Literature in Place Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture, pp. 79-87.
• Levy, M. & Mendlesohn, F. (2016). Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
• Wojcik, P.R. (2016). Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. Rutgers University Press.