Her Dark MaterialsShould children read Philip Pullman's trilogy—or the incest classic Flowers in the Attic?

Dakota Blue Richards in The Golden CompassI'm pretty sure that I'm not going to go see the new movie based on The Golden Compass, the first novel in Philip Pullman's transcendent trilogy, His Dark Materials. It's not that the film looks bad. It's that I loved the books so much that I don't want any actors or special effects, no matter how well-cast and well-rendered, interfering with my own imaginings.

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But the depth of my Pullman devotion doesn't make me want to give his books to my two boys, who are near his intended audience. Pullman's work is a hybrid: It's sold to adults as complex fantasy, and to the 12-year-old crowd as Harry Potter-plus. In some ways, the trilogy is part of the coming-of-age tradition of literature for young teens (and inevitably, somewhat younger kids, too). It tells the growing-up story of Lyra and Will, Pullman's wild and enterprising child characters. But it's a complicated and dark and unsettling coming-of-age, with grotesquely ruthless parents who threaten to sever children from their souls. Maybe this is an idea that's more horrifying to read about as a parent than as a child, but giving Pullman to my still-small sons, even a couple of years from now, is an experiment I'm not about to conduct.

At the same time, when I think back to my own preteen reading, I'll admit that the whole point was to read books that I wasn't ready for, without my parents' approval. Is this kind of illicit read damaging to kids, or is it an inevitable excursion into pseudo-maturity that beats a lot of the other likely avenues? Better a disturbing, too-adult book than an indelibly horrifying movie or Internet game or video (or, it goes without saying, an encounter with real scary people)?

These questions take me back to the awful fiction that obsessed me when I was 11: Flowers in the Attic and its even less redeemable progeny. Flowers was published in 1979 and became a sort of rite of passage for the girls I knew. It still is, to some degree: The books (officially called the Dollanganger Family series) have sold more than 100 million copies, and their biggest audience is teen and preteen girls. The author, V.C. Andrews, ranks with Stephen King as one of the all-time best-selling denizens of mass-paperback gothic horror.

It's a disservice to Philip Pullman to mention him in the same sentence as Andrews. He writes lyrical, soaring prose; she writes sentences like, "Golly-gee, but it was a beautiful day! If only we were allowed out, rather than having to sit in this musty old attic and starve to death!" His books represent the best of the fantasy tradition. Hers are unpleasant entrants in what might be called the Miserable and Tortured Lives of Unloved Children genre. And, as Eden Ross Lipson, former children's book editor for the New York Times Book Review, pointed out to me, the polarity between the two authors is also exterior vs. interior. Pullman roams the world. Andrews never goes anywhere. Lyra and Will have no home and are swept up in struggles over world domination and religious power. Cathy and Chris, the brother and sister at the center of Andrews' tale, are trapped (literally) in their attic home and (also literally) in the incestuous family relationships that define her brand.

When I reread the Andrews books last weekend (while hiding the garish covers from my boys), I discovered that the incest starts on Page 6. "He warmed our lips with kisses," 12-year-old Cathy writes of her father—who is supposed to be the good guy, which is why he is quickly offed in a car accident. On the next page, Cathy describes waiting to watch her mother "emerge in a filmy negligee." What 12-year-old thinks about her parents in these ways? Or, at 14, following "a frantic struggle of his strength against mine," succumbs to her older brother's sexual fantasy about her?

Granted, by then Cathy and Chris have been locked in a room next to the attic for three years by their still-sexualized but neglectful mother and their sadistic grandmother, who never misses an opportunity to call the kids the "devil's spawn." But the absurdity is also part of the whole bizarre appeal. Cathy is full of guilt and shame and yet never really is responsible for her transgressions, given how she's been treated. She gets to act out all of an 11-year-old girl's worst fears about sex, without becoming evil. For a lot of us, she may have been the only such outlet. I don't think that I encountered another character like her in my preteen reading. The girl in Judy Blume's Forever has prosaic sex with a boyfriend who calls his penis Ralph. Cathy has twisted sex not just with her brother, but with the older doctor who later adopts her and Chris and their younger sister, and with her mother's second husband. No boundary goes uncrossed, because no man can resist her; she is Madonna, the whore, and Lolita. Andrews, never one to miss an opportunity to overwrite, makes this explicit. When Cathy invites her stepfather over to steal him from her mother, he tells her: "You are an intriguing combination, half child, half seductress, half angel." (Three halves!) Andrews continues in Cathy's voice: "I laughed short and bitterly. 'That's what all men like to think about women.' "

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX.

Still of Dakota Blue Richards in The Golden Compass ©2007 New Line Cinema. All rights reserved.

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