Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznan, Poland. He has written extensively on vampires, monsters and the construction of difference in contemporary culture.Leo Ruickbie is a writer, editor and social scientist specialising in controversial areas of human belief and experience. He is the author of several books on witchcraft, magic and the supernatural.

• List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction, Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie; Part I Historical Case Studies; Chapter One The Possession of John Starkie, Joyce Froome; Chapter Two The Naughty Little Children: The Paranormal and Teenagers, Renaud Evrard; Chapter Three I Was a Real Teenage Werewolf: The Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trial of Jean Grenier, Leo Ruickbie; Chapter Four Deviance on Display: The Feral and the Monstrous Child, Gerd H. Hövelmann; Part II Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Undead Child; Chapter Five Imprints: Forming and Tracing the Malevolent Ghost-Child, Jen Baker; Chapter Six Undead Role Models: Why the Zombie Child Is Irresistible, Anthony Adams; Chapter Seven Children for Ever! Monsters of Eternal Youth and the Reification of Childhood, Simon Bacon; Part III Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Monstrous Child; Chapter Eight ‘Not a child. Not old. Not a boy. Not a girl’: Representing Childhood in Let the Right One In, Allison Moore; Chapter Nine Perverted Postmodern Pinocchios: Cannibalistic Vegetal- Children as Ecoterrorist Agents of the Maternal Imagination, Anna Kérchy; Chapter Ten From the Monster to the Evil Sinthomosexual Child: Category Mixing, Temporality and Projection in Horror Movies, Marc Démont; Part IV Cultural Categorization in the Past, Present and Possible Future; Chapter Eleven Evil Twins: Changing Perceptions of Twin Children and Witchcraft among Yoruba-Speaking People, Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold; Chapter Twelve Doli Incapax: Examining the Social, Psychological, Biological and Legal Implications of Age- Related Assumptions of Criminal Responsibility, Jacquelyn Bent and Theresa Porter; Chapter Thirteen Black- Eyed Kids and the Child Archetype, Brigid Burke; Chapter Fourteen Indigo Children: Unexpected Consequences of a Process of Pathologization, Gerhard Mayer and Anita Brutler; Notes on Contributors; Index.

Bacon and Ruickbie have assembled a diverse and fascinating bestiary of essays engaging the fear of and for children. With insight and nuance the contributors investigate teenage werewolves (real ones?), child zombies, ancient adolescent vampires, phantasmal progenies, evil offspring, and terrifying tykes, among other anomalous children from the Renaissance through the Slenderman era. Each essays offers an insight into the terrors of youth, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, revealing a tapestry of anxiety and dread regarding childhood and adolescence that transcends cultures and historic periods. Reader beware – you will never want to babysit again after this book. — Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Ph.D., Professor, Loyola Marymount University, Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor and author of Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema