Word: monsters
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...skinheads? For a time it was difficult to divine how many parts monster they were and how many parts fashion victim. The evidence, however, increasingly suggests that they can no longer be perceived merely as exhibits in the great American freak show, good for throwing a chill into Oprah or obliging another host's ego by breaking Geraldo's nose on camera. Rather, the skins have found their niche in American society. It is a far larger niche than most Americans would like them to have, especially as its inhabitants tend to kill people...
...copy of R.L. Stine's The Babysitter III: "His expression was blank, as blank as death. And with a quick, simple motion, he grabbed the baby's head with one hand, twisted it, and pulled it off." Across the hall, Junior, 11, turns the pages of Christopher Pike's Monster: "Mary pointed her shotgun at Kathy's face and pulled the trigger. The blast caught Kathy in the forehead and took off the top of her skull, plastering a good portion of her brains over the railings of the nearby staircase...
Books like The Babysitter III or Monster -- and there are suddenly a remarkable number of books very much like them -- do not reach such underage readers by subterfuge or stealth. Adolescents now constitute a booming niche market for the peddling of published gore and violence. "Teens' interests go in cycles," says Patricia MacDonald, editorial director of Archway Paperbacks, an imprint of Pocket Books and a major player in the teen-horror field. "In the '70s it was problem novels, the disease of the week. Then it was romance novels, soap operas like Sweet Valley High and Sweet Dreams...
...hunt for a monster can warp the pursuers. The wanted man was one of the most loathsome creatures of modern times: "Ivan the Terrible," who hacked at his naked victims with a sword as he herded them by the thousands into the gas chambers he operated at the Nazi death camp Treblinka. American and Israeli officials were certain they had found him in John, formerly Ivan, Demjanjuk, a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent. He was extradited to Israel in 1986, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and condemned to hang after a dramatic trial that transfixed...
...collective memory of the war against the predator beasts is preserved in myth and fairy tale. Typically, a mythical hero starts out by taking on the carnivorous monster that is ravaging the land: Perseus saves Andromeda from becoming a sea monster's snack. Theseus conquers the Minotaur who likes to munch on Athenian youth. Beowulf destroys the loathsome night-feeding Grendel. Heracles takes on a whole zoo of horrors: lions, hydras, boars. In European fairy tales it's the wolves you have to watch out for -- if the cannibal witches don't get you first...