ABSTRACT
Violent fi ction has been around a long time, of course, in both children’s and adult fi ction. And signs of an interest in the abject are not at all exclusive to the contemporary period. In Dombey and Son (1848), Dickens describes the suicide of James Carker with evident relish; the villain throws himself in front of a speeding train, his body explodes on the impact, and the ‘white teeth of his dismembered smile’ fl ash as they are fl ung through space.3 Th ere is no doubt that violence has been with us as long as art, but it seems a distinctly twenty-fi rst century form of art which requires not only this degree of horror but this much attention to how it aff ects an observer. Th is emphasis is evident in many spheres of contemporary writing, and in fi ction for adults as well as children. To take an example from the former, which should help put the fi ction of this chapter in some perspective: Haruki Murakami’s Th e Wind-up Bird Chronicle (2003) contains a leisurely, three-page description of a man being skinned alive which no one who has read it, is ever likely to forget.4 Lieutenant Mamiya, the character forced to witness this act, tells the novel’s narrator: ‘it was something like a work of art. One would never have imagined there was any pain involved, if it weren’t for the screams’. (159) Mamiya himself is closely observed by soldiers as he is forced to witness this murder, and is beaten with a rifl e butt whenever he tries to close his eyes.
