TAKE A TRIP ON THE DARKSIDE, EXPLORING THE YA FICTION OF DAVID OWEN

4/3/2020

Make sure you check out our accompany interview with David where we chat about all things YA and the dark themes which snake through his thought-provoking fiction. Between 2015 and 2020 he has published four outstanding novels, including the brand-new Grief Angels, which we review below along with retrospective reviews of his three previous works. They all feature elements of the fantastic, but at their heart they are about teenagers and the struggles they face in their personal lives. He is an excellent example of an author who convincingly mixes up the everyday with the weird.

Grief Angels (2020)

How difficult is it to write honestly about the male teenage psyche? Which tackle issues which we do not hear too much about; first and foremost, the failure to communicate and being able to articulate honest feelings. Grief Angels convincingly looks at this subject of teen alienation through two fifteen-year-old boys who struggle to open-up about their feelings and in some sections use the television show Battlestar Galactica (the remake) as a way of breaking the ice, fillings the silences and deepening their friendship. The boys might not naturally have been friends, but as Owen Marlow is new to the area and his mother befriends the parent of Duncan they are thrown together whilst their mums drink tea and chat.

Grief Angels to told via two first person narratives, Duncan and Owen, both of which have different problems. Duncan has depression and is on medication but has not revealed this to any of his friends and feels he is drifting away from them, as they are beginning to find girlfriends, lose their virginity, and other interests away from the group. He feels directionless and cannot connect with them and is embarrassed by their leery behaviour towards some of the local girls. He takes comfort in escaping into Battlestar Galactica until the decidedly odd Owen is thrust into his life.

Owen Marlow’s father recently passed away, with him and his mother then relocating a relatively short distance to this new town. When he first meets Duncan, he inexplicitly leaves his shoes and climbs out the window to escape. He deals with the grief of his difficult relationship with his father, which is revealed quite slowly, by entering a weird fantasy world which encroaches our world and he regularly bunks school and returns to his old town on the train. These powerful hallucinations of skeletal birds circling above him begin to become an obsession and he detaches from reality. As Duncan becomes intrigued by Owen their friendship develops, old relationships fracture and they try to hold everything together by entering a school talent show, orchestrated by Duncan’s little sister and mime to a heavy metal tune, in a very funny scene. I loved this sequence.

Grief Angels is a very moving novel, and this is one of those subjects which is difficult to get right without coming across as too worthy, which this novel never does. Grief may take many forms and this engaging look, through the eyes of very believable teenagers, who would both like to escape from themselves, if only for a little while, is highly recommended. Actually, we’d all like to escape once in a while.

All the Lonely People (2019)

If Grief Angels predominately tackles grief, then All the Lonely People looks at the theme of loneliness, a factor which can play a large part of the lives of teenagers who struggle to make friends. All the Lonely People looks at this subject with real compassion, balancing a very observant look at how much kids rely upon their online profiles to boost themselves, or escape, the real world. In day to day life, main character Kat has few friends, finds it difficult to talk to people, and is completely anonymous at school. However, this is not the case when she is online, where she is bubbly, funny and popular. If she has a problem at school, she will turn to her internet friends for comfort, rather than the real world, or her father.

Things take a turn for the worse when she is targeted by an online bullying campaign which have influences beyond the school. It becomes so severe, for example, her image is morphed onto nasty porn stuff, her profiles get hacked and corrupted and she if forced into deleting her online accounts. To Kat this is like a death, or worse than losing her soul, as she is left with the person she does not like, her real self, in the flesh and blood real world. But without her online personality who is she?

From there on the book gets very strange, as in the real-world Kat begins to physically disappear. So, few people knew her, who would miss her? Strangely enough, one of the boys who computer hacked/bullied her notices, normally he bullies from afar, but Kat is different and the book heads into fascinating directions.

All the Lonely People has a lot to say about online culture, both good and bad, that explores the experience of loneliness in a world where everything and everyone is supposed to be connected. We all like positive comments about things we post ourselves and often write negative things about others online we would never say direct to their faces and this book takes a fascinating look at it. ‘Would anybody miss me if I was not here?’ is a tough question to answer, but young people ask it of themselves all the time. This novel, loaded with empathy, has some answers which might help.

The Fallen Children (2017)

Although I was initially dubious when I heard about the concept behind The Fallen Children ultimately, I was blown away by it. David Owen’s second novel is a very clever update of John Wyndham’s classic, but arguably dated, The Midwich Cuckoos. In Grief Angels there are many references to the classic reboot of the tv series Battlestar Galactica, you should see this ‘update’ in the same sort of light. It takes Wyndham’s story be the throat, throttles it, and drags it kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Interestingly, Owen notes in the accompanying interview that virtually no kids were aware of the original and his book was generally seen as a ‘new’ work, although I’m sure many librarians, parents and teachers were aware of the original source material!

This superb revamp is not set in a quaint English village full of white middle class kids, the action takes place in a London estate aptly named the Midwich Tower. In a single night, many inhabitants of the Midwich Tower block loses consciousness, when they wake up, four girls are pregnant. It’s quite graphic, slightly sleazy, and unsettling stuff. Answers are hard to come by; what happened to them? What does it mean? How do they explain everything? Then the pregnancies start developing much faster than they should, time is even shorter, and everything changes for these innocent teens. It’s a great YA novel which meshes horror and science fiction with the troubles the girls face, the shame, the name-calling, and having to tell parents about the pregnancies. And, of course, nobody believes them, why should they? Some might find it a tad explicit for a teen novel, but the conceptions are handled well, and the teenagers are both sympathetically and believably drawn. The Fallen Children pays considerable respect to the Wyndham novel, but it really does run on its own two feet and should not be viewed as a modern retelling of a classic, it is much more than that.

Panther (2016)

avid’s debut Panther is also set in the south London area about a teen with food issues, problems with depression, and an obsession with a creature, apparently, stalking the local night streets. As with both Grief Angels and All the Lonely People there is a certain amount of ambiguity surrounding the ‘panther’. Does it exist? Or is it a manifestation of Derrick’s personal problems? As he believes if he was to catch this beast then surely his life would take an upward turn. Panther was a very brave book, which thoughtfully tackles difficult subjects head on, whilst adding a certain amount of mystery and thriller with the black beast never far from Derrick’s thoughts.

It is not easy being young and family life can be very difficult are two of the key themes explored in this moving, but unsentimental novel. Bullying is never far from the surface; friendships are difficult and before long you’ll be hoping the Panther is real and that the troubled Derrick finds it. I do enjoy reading novels set in and about London and Panther is an authentic and believable trip around our streets and in the head of a very likable main character, Derrick.

Tony Jones