Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is Ransom Riggs’ bestselling young adult horror novel. One of the things I’ve been trying to gauge in my own YA writing is the relative level of gruesomeness/scariness I can portray without it being deemed too much for younger readers. So I was interested in how Riggs handles the darker aspects of his narrative, particularly his monsters.
In this narrative, “peculiars” – people with special paranormal or mystical abilities such as the power to change form or control fire – are hunted by immortal, soulless monsters called hollowgasts, or hollows. If a hollowgast devours enough peculiars, it can transform into a wight, which has a more comfortable existence and can pass for human.
Overall, Riggs doesn’t pull many punches when it comes to the description of the hollows and the threat they present to the protagonists:
It stooped there, hairless and naked, mottled gray-black skin hanging off its frame in loose folds, its eyes collared in dripping putrefaction … Its outsized jaws were its main feature, a bulging enclosure of teeth as tall and sharp as little steak knives that the flesh of its mouth was hopeless to contain, so that its lips were perpetually drawn back in a deranged smile. And then those awful teeth came unlocked, its mouth reeling open to admit three wiry tongues into the air, each as thick as my wrist. They unspooled across half the room’s length, ten feet or more, and then hung there, wriggling, the creature breathing raggedly through a pair of leprous holes in its face as if tasting our scent, considering how best to devour us. (Riggs 287)
“(E)yes collared in dripping putrefaction” and describing its nostrils as “leprous holes” are fantastically gross images. Riggs relies on visual details in this description – some of which are fresher than others. I’ve read about and seen on screen plenty of monsters with this kind of toothy rictus before, and I’ve read at least two pieces in the past year that compare a predator’s teeth to steak knives (so I’ll resist that image if it comes to me in my own work).
Based on the descriptive passage, we don’t yet know what this particular creature sounds like, nor do we know specifically what it smells like, but the “putrefaction” detail would certainly not lead the reader to think the hollowgast is rose-scented, and we can imagine the terrible broken noise a creature like this might make considering its grotesquely overgrown teeth and tentacle-like tongues. So, there’s a nice little sleight-of-hand here in implying other sensory details through the visuals.
The details of Riggs’ descriptions aside, they should give most prospective YA horror writers confidence that they need not hold back too much from visceral descriptions in horror aimed at young readers. You can probably trust your own instincts as to what’s appropriate for a scene and what isn’t.