Harry Potter and the Young Adult Fiction Industry

I don't know if people remember what it was like back before Harry Potter came about.

Yes, this is an article about Harry Potter, the book series that exploded into international phenomena back when we were all thirteen. We all know the impact the books made on the young adult fiction industry. You can walk into a bookstore and sneer at the young adult section and sniff at its selection. "Kids these days," we want to say, fingering the edges of the novels. "Good Christ, they have no idea how good they have it."

I understand that Twilight is awful, and packed full of damaging misogyny that impressionable young girls shouldn't be reading, but at least it's there. At least an industry has been created so a book like Twilight could be published. At least there are piles of fantasy novels out there, each brimming with attempts at intricate settings and cool characters. That's the word, really. These books try to be fucking cool.

That's all Potter's doing there, that's all J.K Rowling. Do you remember what it was like back in the day? Young adult fantasy hadn't yet made it past the seventies, and despite geniuses like K.A Applegate, Diane Duane and Bruce Coville toiling in the mud, a lot of what we had wasn't too far removed from Roald Dahl's stuff, or books like Half Magic, books rooted in a sort of quirky British sensibility, and never straying too far into the realms of self-sufficiency.

What we had was pretty dull. When I was eleven, I went straight into the kind of adolescent fantasy "adult" novels that the sixteen and seventeen year old kids were reading, awful stuff like Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, that sort of pot-boiler that guaranteed at least some action. See, besides fun material like Gordon Korman, young adult stuff could be split up into two genres: overly serious drama aiming to win the Newbury award (and good christ, to a ten year old kid, that shit is dull) and slice-of-life middle school dramedies, equally awful. It was no wonder, when the Redwall series started to repeat itself, we all moved to novels aiming for an older demographic. We couldn't stand it all.

I was twelve or thirteen when Prisoner of Azkaban was being pushed into publication. That's generally when people agree the series really became the international juggernaut that it did. But I don't want to talk about the gigantic impact it made on the young adult world, or on the publishing industry in general; enough has been written about that. I just want to drive home just how good that first book was, in comparison to what came before it, and the sort of impact kids must have felt reading it.

When I first heard about the Harry Potter series, I didn't want to read it. I was twelve or thirteen, already reading stuff like Steven Kid and R.A Salvatore, stuff with violence and sex appeal, all the things that appealed to preteen boys, and to me Philosopher's Stone was just going to be more of the same, more "Teachers Aren't Wizards" sort of thing. At the time, I hadn't been introduced to K.A Applegate or Diane Duane, whose fantasy novels are bright spots in the whole giant sea of drivel, so I wasn't prepare for Rowling at all. And when I started it, I had no reason to expect anything else.

See, one problem that has always followed the Harry Potter series throughout its entirety is the disconnect between the beginning of the first novel and the rest of the series. As soon as the series takes off, it is an entity unto itself, a setting that expects you to take it seriously, like that of Tolkien or Peake, that sort of thing. But the beginning of the book is sort Young Adult British fantasy fare: a bizarrely monstrous family, a quietly abused child around whom magical things occur, leading to even more bizarre hijinks -- this sort of thing could be happening in any Roald Dahl novel, or in Betty Brock's No Flying in the House. And that is sort of the problem: Harry is an abused child, and as the series and the setting begins to take itself more and more seriously, it becomes more and more noticeable how this is never addressed. That the nature of Harry's childhood is continuously swept under the rug for the plot's convenience is not a good aspect of the books.

At the same time, it may have contributed to its success. When you read that beginning, expecting another silly romp through young adult British fantasy in the vein of so many others, you aren't expecting what comes. As soon as Harry and friends hit Diagon Alley, the book is running at full steam, unveiling what, well, becomes an astonishing series. I remember finishing that first book, and feeling like someone had slugged me in the stomach. Like all great fantasy settings, Hogwarts had become a world I wanted to live in. The Harry Potter series had achieved that rare Star Wars-ian quality, wherein its world affixes itself to your brain and doesn't let you go.

But I wonder if it would have slugged me as hard if it hadn't pulled that switcheroo, if it hadn't provided that same-as-always beginning and then transitioned into a straight-out solid fantasy.

Nevertheless, I look at the young adult section these days, and, yes, even with trash like Darren Shan's stuff out there, I still think these kids are lucky.