Monster mash

HAVE TRUCK Kraus has no qualms with exploring the dark side of adolescence.

The way Daniel Kraus looks at it, the stuff he read as a young teen—think of the darkest books in the Stephen King canon—traumatized its characters far more than anything that befalls the young middle-schoolers in his debut novel, The Monster Variations.

“At that age, I was inhaling Stephen King, and this would be barely a blip on the radar compared to some of the stuff in Pet Sematary,” laughs Kraus, 34, on the phone from his Chicago apartment. “And at this point, there is literally nothing that hasn’t been done in a young-adult novel; every sex and violence variation is in there.”

We don’t mean to give the wrong impression. The Monster Variations is not about sexual deviance or even really persistent violence. It’s not, even, about monsters. The book takes place in a small, somewhat rural town. At the outset, James Wahl has decided to split early for college, driving himself to campus and leaving his divorcing parents at home. When he stops just outside of town to fill his tank, he runs into his old friend Reggie Fielder, whom he hasn’t talked to in years. The tension between them is real enough to force them both to ball their fists.

The book then circles back to years before, when Reggie and James were 12 and thick as thieves with the diminutive Willie Van Allen. The flashback opens with Willie lying on the side of the road, having just been hit by an unidentified silver truck.

“Willie’s arm, or what was left of it, was tamped into the dirt, now part of the old tar road along with stones and bugs and beer cans and scrub-grass,” writes Kraus. It’s not so much an introduction to a grisly story as it is an entrance to the book’s darker themes. Shortly after, another boy is struck by a silver truck and killed, and a curfew is imposed, keeping kids indoors after 8pm. Reggie, the instigator and leader of the three, immediately makes plans to break the curfew, and the three stumble upon a reasonable theory as to who’s operating the deathtruck.

The Monster Variations has been marketed and labeled as a horror or thriller for kids, so we’ll resist going much further into the story for those who want to read it that way. But there are much bigger, richer things going on here than a menacing plot. In fact, when Kraus was writing the book, he hadn’t planned for it to be released as a teen novel.

“I think of a book like A Separate Peace, which uses literary mannerisms for a young-adult audience,” says Kraus, who works as an editor for the American Library Association’s review journal Booklist, mostly covering young-adult fiction. “I wanted to have this feeling of a bygone childhood, even if it’s read by teens, who maybe have some sense of forward-projecting nostalgia.”

Variations keys into a fair number of the coming-of-age hallmarks. There’s some class tension between Reggie—whose working single mother often leaves him alone at night—and James, whose father owns one of the biggest houses in town. The three face very real danger together, and the mistrust that springs up among them leaves an indelible mark. The framing device, too, of returning to the present showdown between Reggie and James years removed from that summer, touches on the issue of how memories, even when we’re young, warp us into different people.

It’s heady stuff for kids but also the kind of thing teens are looking for in their literature. To that end, Kraus and two other young-adult authors (Adam Selzer and James Kennedy) have formed the Brothers Delacorte, a Chicago trio of young-adult authors all published by Delacorte, intent on getting the attention of boys. The three put up a website featuring them bedecked in black turtlenecks and exhorting young dudes to read.

“In young-adult literature, there are many more female writers and readers, so it seemed to make sense to bind together,” says Kraus. “And, we share an ability to look good in turtlenecks.”

The Monster Variations comes out Tuesday 11.

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