Teaching Love Through Monsters

What kind of books are we giving young readers?

My class and I had a long discussion today about the kinds of things that young readers are reading these days. Around and after COVID, the genre of dark romance became extremely popular. One book, published around 2021 and still widely spoken about today, is Haunting Adeline.

What's so special about it, though? Why do readers flock towards it like flies to honey? There is non-consensual sex, pretty much rape. There are graphic descriptions of that rape. There are things like trafficking, abuse, stalking, and basically other things that you would probably put a man in jail for doing to you in real life. And yet this book is extremely popular, with readers starting as young as fifteen, despite the trigger warning that appears at the beginning.

It is important here to think about how influential writers can be on their readers, especially when those readers are young. A fifteen-year-old who reads this book is not necessarily going to interpret it in the same way as an adult who has already experienced relationships and has had time to develop an understanding of consent, manipulation and abuse. There is a real question of what happens when violence is presented within a romantic context.

If a teenager reads these things in a way that romanticises them, because the girl eventually falls in love with the man who does all these cruel things to her, what does that teach her about love? What happens if she begins to mistake possessiveness for affection, control for protection, or violence for passion? I am not saying that every teenager who reads dark romance will go on to seek an abusive relationship. That would be far too simple. But I do think we have to question what young readers are being taught when the person hurting the protagonist is also presented as the person she is supposed to love.

There is already enough evil in the world. We do not need to pretend that fiction itself is evil, but we should be willing to ask what happens when fiction becomes one of a young person's only sources of information about relationships.

Another aspect to think about is the culture for which this kind of book was written. As someone who has studied abroad, I have noticed differences in the way teenagers in the United States and teenagers in India are allowed to experience and discuss relationships. I would not say that American teenagers are inherently more mature than Indian teenagers, or that Indian teenagers are less capable of understanding these subjects. The difference, to me, is more about exposure and access.

Things like sex, dating, and relationships are generally more openly discussed in many Western families and schools. Teenagers may have more opportunities to date, talk about relationships, and learn about boundaries and consent. In India, these subjects can be much more difficult to discuss. Dating is still discouraged or forbidden in many families, even though teenagers continue to date, often secretly. Sex is even more heavily surrounded by embarrassment and taboo.

This creates a strange situation for an Indian teenager who encounters a book like Haunting Adeline. If their parents have never spoken to them openly about sex, consent or healthy relationships, and their school education has not given them much space to discuss these subjects either, where are they supposed to learn? A book can become an accidental teacher.

And Haunting Adeline is not a safe textbook for learning about relationships.

An Indian teenager who reads a book like this without any other framework for understanding what they are reading could potentially develop unhealthy interpretations of sex, love and power. They might begin to romanticise abuse or violence, or misunderstand behaviours that should be recognised as warning signs. Again, this does not mean that every young reader will react this way. It means that we cannot assume every reader has the same tools with which to process the material.

This is where the responsibility of authors and publishers becomes important.

Writers who come from one cultural environment often write with that environment in mind. Their books may assume that readers already have a certain amount of knowledge about sex, relationships, consent, and boundaries. But books do not necessarily stay within the cultures they were written for. They travel. They are translated, exported, recommended on TikTok and Instagram, passed between friends, and sold in countries where the social context surrounding them can be completely different.

Publishers therefore have a responsibility to think about distribution and audience. A trigger warning can tell a reader that a book contains rape or sexual violence, but it cannot teach that reader how to understand those things. A warning is information about the content; it is not education about the content.

An American teenager may have access to conversations, classes, parents, counsellors, media and other resources that allow them to understand what a healthy relationship looks like before they encounter an extreme fictional version of one. An Indian teenager may have fewer places where these conversations can happen openly. If fiction becomes one of their only sources of information, then giving them a book that romanticises abuse is a serious problem.

The question, then, is not whether young people should be allowed to read difficult books. Young people have always read books that contain violence, fear, death and difficult subjects. The question is whether we are giving them enough context to understand what they are reading.

Because a fifteen-year-old should be able to read about a monster without being taught to mistake the monster for the hero.