Halloween through Both Old and New YA Texts by June Pulliam

June Pulliam is my primary go to source for scary stories. For over a decade I have been in awe of June's knowledge of the basic horror genre. In fact, this goes beyond YA books and into film and other stories about ghosts, werewolves, and other monsters. Indeed her knowledge is a bit, well-- terrifying.  

June has other posts for Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday. Browse through the contributors' page and pay special attention for her name during the month of October.

​Thanks June.

Halloween through Both Old and New YA Texts

​by June Pulliam

My picks for this Halloween are two works of YA fiction—Ryan Douglass’s first novel The Taking of Jake Livingston and an Amazon reboot of Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise. Both offer different interpretations of haunting. Douglass’ The Taking of Jake Livingston easily fits into this category. Ever since he can remember, Jake Livingston has been a medium.  However, Jake turns away from his gift because it genuinely frightens him, and he doesn’t Jake doesn’t need anything else to make his peers think that he is strange: Jake is one of the few gay kids of color at the all-boys high school he attends, and he is closeted even to his family.

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The Taking of Jake Livingston is notable in how it thwarts common tropes of ghost fiction, where men and women have different experiences with spirits. For cis het white men, haunting is a threat to their masculinity, which is based on being in control of their bodies (and frequently the bodies of others). Haunting for these protagonists is more like demonic possession that can only be resolved by evicting the spectral interloper threatening their autonomy. For example, the male protagonist in Joe Hill’s novel Heart Shaped Box must banish the ghost that is trying to kill him.  Or the parapsychologist Dr. Montague in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, who arrogantly believes that ghosts cannot physically harm the living, stands corrected after Eleanor kills herself under the influence of the house’s spirits. In Richard Matheson’s A Stir of Echoes, Tom Wallace loses his bodily autonomy after being hypnotized by his sister-in-law: Tom is left vulnerable to the spirit world, and to regain control of his body, as well as the women in his life, he must locate the ghost’s corpse to put together the final, official narrative of her as a demanding and promiscuous woman in life. This narrative both gives the ghost the justice she desires while also banishing her to the afterlife. 

Because Jake Livingston is neither cis, nor het, nor white, his experience with haunting is comparable to how women are more typically mediums for spirits in ghost fiction. Mediumship is compatible with normative femininity in how channeling spirits is similar to pregnancy—the medium typically allows the spirit to use her body to get the justice he or she was denied in life. Jake’s body is taken over by ghost of Sawyer Doon, a boy his own age who gained notoriety a year earlier when he went on a shooting rampage and killed several of his classmates. Sawyer, as angry in death as he was in life, hijacks Jake’s body to continue his killing spree beyond the grave. Jake can only be a passive observer as Sawyer’s spirit uses his body to murder an uncle who raped him. Jake can only regain control of his body by developing empathy for the deeply unsympathetic Sawyer, which Jake does by embracing his abilities as a medium. When Sawyer possesses Jake’s body, Jake has access to Sawyer’s consciousness and learns that Sawyer too was gay, brutalized by his father and ignored by his mother in life. Once Jake understands the source of Sawyer’s anger, he uses more masculine strategies to exorcise the vengeful spirit—Jake engages in an ethereal battle with Sawyer, ultimately banishing him to the world of the dead. The experience allows Jake to feel like a complete person, someone who is secure enough to come out to his mother and brother (who are both supportive) and start dating his first crush.

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​Amazon’s reboot of Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise is a close cousin to the ghost story: the series is more about haunting than Lois Duncan’s original novel or Jim Gillespie’s 1997 film version, which have more in common with the slasher genre. The story’s basic premise is a group intoxicated teens drive home from a party and hit someone walking in the road. When the teens see the unmoving victim in the roadside brush, they assume the person is dead. Because the teens are afraid of going to jail for vehicular manslaughter, they drive away and agree to never speak of the incident again. A year later, however, the four must come to terms with their cowardice when a stranger contacts each to tell them “I know what you did last summer.” Afterwards, the teens are killed one by one. 

​Amazon has expanded and updated Duncan’s cast of characters: they are racially and sexually diverse and come from different classes. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of cell phones and security cameras in our world transforms Duncan’s 1973 tale from one about a stalker who is unrealistically good at surveilling his victims to a more believable story about the perils of living in a world where everyone can be watched through everyday technologies. The left-for-dead stalker of the Amazon series can spoof phone numbers to send threatening texts and hack phones and to leak people’s sex tapes to social media, quickly turning friends against each other when no one can be sure of who anyone really is. The stalker’s ability to use these technologies is akin to haunting in how it reveals secrets that the living would prefer to keep to themselves.  Too, in an age of mechanical reproduction, authenticity is no longer possible. This last idea is emphasized by the relationship between the person left-for-dead and the car’s driver, twin sisters Lennon and Allison respectively. At her father’s suggestion, Allison pretends to be her dead sister Lennon because Lennon was more likeable and above suspicion than her sister. Soon, Allison is no longer sure which sister she really is.
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Instead of asking us to suspend disbelief, both of these narratives ask us to consider haunting in a new light. Ghosts aren’t so much abject Others as they are manifestations of ourselves.

June Pulliam
Louisiana State University

​June Pulliam is a Distinguished Instructor who regularly teaches courses about slasher films, zombie fiction and film, and Young Adult fiction. She is the author of numerous books and articles on these subjects as well as a book about punk rock. Pulliam is also a self-taught painter who occasionally sells some of her work, an animal rescuer, and an old house enthusiast.

Until next week.