The following article was written by Kristin Keck, a Teen Associate at the Manitowoc Public Library.
Sometimes you just know how it’s going to end, you know?
You recognize the characters on the first page. The Small Town Girl and the Sassy Best Friend in the Cozy Neighborhood Coffee Shop. In strolls the Bad Boy Ex with a Heart of Gold. Really the only question is whether the Sassy Best Friend will pick up a suitably Adorkable Love Interest along the way.
What we’re dealing with here are tropes. According to one of my favorite time-wasting websites, TV Tropes, (click at your own risk) “a trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize”. Any kind of story you care to name has its tropes, from the Meet Cute of Romance to the Desert Planet of Science Fiction.
Overworked tropes can easily become cliches, but the tropes themselves aren’t inherently bad. They’re the building blocks of a story. Stack them up the right way and you could have a cathedral, or you could have a shotgun shack, or really any kind of building in-between. Tropes are endlessly malleable.
Kristen Keck
Take, for instance, one of my favorite tropes, the Buddy Plot. Two people of contradictory views and tastes are forced to work together, and I’m there for it. Obviously, it’s a staple of cop shows and westerns, but really The Odd Couple is a Buddy Plot. So is The Emperor’s New Groove. And Laverne and Shirley. There can be all kinds of weird variants—check out the Inspector Rutledge series for one of my favorites. Their friendship will be formed (or tested) by fire, but by the end of the story they will stand triumphant. I love a good Buddy Plot.
Likewise, I love a good Haunted House. Or Haunted Hotel—I’m looking at you, Overlook. In general, I’m too easily spooked to like scary movies, but I enjoy hunkering down under the covers with a scary story, particularly as the November nights draw in. I particularly like tales of hauntings, be it a Gothic mansion on the edge of a moor, a lonely stretch of dirt road in the woods, or a brand-spanking-new build in the suburbs. That’s great thing about the Haunted House trope: it is so versatile. Stephen King suggests that the trope should really be called the Bad Place because it encompasses multitudes, sometimes quite literally. In the book I’m reading right now, all of medieval France is the Bad Place.
Next to romance, it seems to me that horror fiction has the most tropes to play with. From the bait-and-switch of the Cat Scare to the victorious Final Girl and her compatriots (often Too Dumb to Live), we all recognize the blocks of these stories. That doesn’t mean we won’t enjoy them.
If you’re between the ages of 11 and 18, and you like taking apart stories—particularly ones that go bump in the night—then drop by the library on Saturday, November 14, at 1PM for the Teen Hang-out: Terror Tropes with Blackheart Books. Join bookstore owner and horror aficionado Jessica and I as we swap favorite tropes and book recs. Leave with some new knowledge and maybe some new scares.
After all, the days are getting shorter and there’s an awful lot of night to shiver through before spring.
