Evil spawn

What do novels about evil children say about us, wonder Ruth Franklin

DURING my first pregnancy, when I found out I was having a boy, I took a piece of paper and started freeassociating around the phrase “my son,” which felt so strange in my mouth. My son is a rock star, I wrote. My son is a vegetarian. My son is a master chef. My son is a gardener. My son is gay. My son is a genius. My son is schizophrenic. My son is a stockbroker.

The idea that any future is possible for a tiny person we create is almost unfathomable. What will we unleash upon the world? Despite our efforts, things may not go as planned.

Ever since William March’s 1954 thriller The Bad Seed gave its name to the phenomenon, horror novels featuring creepy children have offered a lens that reflects darkly on our assumptions and anxieties about parenthood, putting a perverse twist on all the usual fears.

In March’s book, Christine Penmark starts to have concerns about her 8-yearold daughter, Rhoda — outwardly docile and well behaved — after one of her classmates dies suspiciously on a class picnic. This summer’s update, the propulsive debut novel Baby Teeth, by Zoje Stage, features an all-too-recognisable cast of contemporary characters: An architect dad with a hipster beard, a stay-at-home mother who opted out of work she loved to take care of her increasingly difficult daughter. But the outline remains remarkably constant: Parents come to learn, slowly and inexorably, that their worst suspicions about their child are true.

MISBEHAVIOUR OR PURE EVIL?

As every parent and teacher knows, all children misbehave. One swipes a pack of crayons in a fit of acquisitiveness; another bites her classmates. Perhaps the creepiest thing about the “bad seed” story is the trickiness of distinguishing truly aberrant behaviour from mere acting up. In The Ring, often cited as one of the most frightening horror movies ever made, an early sign that a child has supernatural powers is her never needing to sleep.

In Baby Teeth, the daughter’s oddness first becomes evident when she’s a toddler, an age at which even the most agreeable babies often turn tempestuous. Her most striking characteristic — an inability or unwillingness to speak — mimics autism, a newly prevalent disorder that also tends to appear in the early toddler years. The difficulty of separating behaviour that is typical, or at least relatively common, from actual deviance may make us wonder about our own capacity to cross the fine line between minor misdeeds and true criminality.

In a “bad seed” story, the mother is almost always the first to realise something is wrong; the fathers are absent or oblivious. Rhoda’s father is away on a business trip that lasts nearly the entire novel, leaving Christine alone to contend with her deepening fears. Even when they’re around, the fathers overlook their children’s problems — either they’re too optimistic or just easier to manipulate.

We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel about a school shooter, is narrated by Eva, Kevin’s mother, as a series of letters to her missing husband that confront him with the reality of Kevin’s childhood behaviour, much of which he ignored at the time. A similar dynamic is at play in Baby Teeth, in which the daughter turns an agreeable face to her father during the brief periods he spends with her on evenings and weekends but shows her true self to her mother, who is with her nearly all the time.

Despite the increasing prevalence of stay-at-home dads, a bad-seed novel in which a father’s insight into his child is superior to the mother’s doesn’t yet seem to exist. (Stephen King, here’s a story line for you!) It’s not just a question of who’s the primary caregiver. Rather, at the heart of this genre is a set of conventional beliefs about the relationship between mothers and children — beliefs that persist today, belying the lip service we pay to gender equality.

IS EVIL HEREDITARY?

The most basic question these stories must address is how the child got this way. Are some children simply born evil? Or do their parents make them so, through abuse, neglect, hypercriticism or overinvolvement? Here the mother’s privileged intimacy with her child is a poisonous paradox. It’s almost always her fault in some way, regardless of her intentions.

Christine Penmark learns, to her horror, that she’s the only surviving descendant of a notorious female serial killer. She was adopted as a small child and has only the barest memories of her mother, but the seed she carries sprouted nonetheless.

In Gillian Flynn’s novel Sharp Objects (2006) — now a mini-series on HBO — a teenage girl is the killer, but the ultimate blame still rests with her mother, who narcissistically controls and neglects each of her daughters. These stories evoke normal parental fears of harming a child — passing on a genetic disease, dropping a newborn slippery from the bath — in order to take them a fatal notch further.

Then there’s the constellation of guilt particular to the working mother. That’s the heart of the conflict in We Need To Talk About Kevin, in which Eva is forced to abandon a career she loves as a travel writer after she becomes a mother. She observes that her son was filled with rage even as a baby — but also that when she first held him she felt nothing. Did she fail to respond to him because she sensed, even then, that he was disturbed? Or did he become sociopathic because she was temperamentally unsuited to mothering, longing for the freedom of her previous life?

Less ambiguously, Baby Teeth suggests that the daughter is a classic psychopath whoiscapableoflittleemotionalattachment and who shows no remorse for her violence. But it also depicts her mother, Suzette, as an artist whose creativity is stifled by her domestic obligations.

If we see our children as reflections of ourselves, then perhaps more frightening than their behaviour is what it reveals about us. Suzette suffers from Crohn’s disease, for which her mother, who was depressed, failed to get her prompt treatment. (Again, a mother at fault.) Complications from surgery once left her with a fistula — an opening in her intestine that oozed waste and pus — which she obsessively fears might recur.

Beneath our smooth surfaces, we all contain ugliness, from literal excrement to distasteful feelings we’d rather not have come to light. At one point, guilty about her joy in being temporarily relieved of her daughter’s care, Suzette presses her hand to her mouth to keep from blurting out her “unforgivable thoughts.”

What parent hasn’t felt the sweet relief of dropping off a child at school or happily anticipated the end of the evening bathbooks-bed routine? Part of what we fear in children is the way they are uniquely capable of bringing out unpleasant aspects of ourselves.

But the deepest fear may be the most existential: How little we ultimately understand other human beings, even our own children. “I have no clue. Who she is,” Suzette laments. That cluelessness, alas, is one of the fundamental conditions of parenting. It’s a shock to discover the inscrutability of newborn babies: We initially have no idea what makes them cry or how we can stop it.

When children are little, their parents probably know them better than anyone else does, but facets of their personalities will always be mysterious. As the years go on, parenting becomes an act of giving up control, accepting that a child is an independent person, wholly separate. Whether he becomes a gardener, a stockbroker or a school shooter is ultimately not up to us. Is that a consolation or a curse?