Volume 44, Number 17 · November 6, 1997
Killer Kids
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Bad Seed
by William March
Ecco Press, 217 pp., $9.95 (paper)
First published in 1954, when it was an immediate and much-discussed bestseller, The Bad Seed has long been out of print and its eccentric author, William March, author of five previous novels and three short story collections, long forgotten. Popular culture swallows the creations of individuals and excretes them, so to speak, as autogenetic-mythopoetic figures: of those worldwide millions familiar with Frankenstein (that is, Dr. Frankenstein's unnamed creature) and Dracula, for instance, presumably only a small fraction know that these are literary creations, still fewer the names and identities of their authors. Popular culture has no memory, or sense of chronology; 'history' is a matter of costuming, not a complex matrix of forces yielding complex meanings. To the degree to which horror fiction is successful, it tends to be detached from a specific author and from the vehicle of language itself. So with The Bad Seed, which germinated a mass-market harvest of evil, murderous children where none had previously existed; or, if they'd existed, had been too nuanced and ambiguous in their meanings, thus too difficult of access, to have emerged as mythopoetic.
Review, 3750 words
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