Maggie Stiefvater: The Dream Thieves

            The Raven Boys ended with Ronan Lynch announcing to the others that he could bring things out of his dreams. The Dream Thieves allows that story to play out, pitting Ronan against the nihilistic Kavinsky, another boy from the same elite private school. When I put it that way, it sounds so small, boys not even eighteen yet, fighting their battles with drag races and drugs, angry with their overbearing fathers and family situations. But one of Stiefvater’s real gifts is bringing these young people to life without that kind of condescension. She never treats their experiences as anything but full life experiences. And, crucially, we do not know how these stories are going to end.

            One of the least interesting young adult tropes for me is the coming of age story. It’s interesting to everyone as it happens to us, of course. Discovering new things about ourselves, learning how large the world really is, finding out our strengths and limitations. But it can be excruciating to watch this happen for someone else, especially when we also know, from our own experience, how the shine will go off those new and exciting things, how everything will fade and darken, how people will let them down, and how much things will hurt. This actually reminds me of something so outrageously depressive that my mother said once that I have to include it. I had just adopted a six month old puppy and my mother said, “But it’ll just get old and die one day!” And although I’m sure parents feel this way about watching their children go through major life events, imposing that on the children is unfair. This is exactly the wrong attitude to bring to young adult literature.

            I started reading another novel to write about here, but it was suffused with this attitude to the point where I had to close the book and put it away. It was the distance the writer built into the story, an adult point of view, watching things happen to a fifteen year old who had no context for understanding those events, that really put me off. Distance from your characters might work in some circumstances (though I’m finding it impossible to think of any good examples right now) but it’s deadly with young adult.

            That’s the most extreme example of the type of distance from a character that alienates me as a reader. But that distance is crucial to the ongoing discussion of what we know and when we know it. Anyone older than a young adult will have more perspective on things, will know that your life at any given time seems more important than any other because you’re in the middle of it. Our perspective gives us perspective, so to speak. But that’s patronizing and condescending to tell anyone, if not downright cruel. I’m still agog at the puppy comment and that was in 1991. Stiefvater avoids this entirely. I’m going to wear out these books trying to figure out how she does it.

            Partly she just doesn’t tell stories that are clearly a, b, c. There is nothing obvious like the good-looking bad boy in the leather jacket, the one the good girl falls for who then later does her wrong. There aren’t any of the usual coming of age tropes. It’s incredibly refreshing. But I have to study this much more (possibly at another time) to see if I can nail down how utterly present we are in the lives of these characters, not even a sliver of that deadly distance that turns shared experience into jaded superiority or voyeurism.

            One ability Stiefvater demonstrates extremely well is the vivid atmospheric description of a scene’s psychological effects. There are two nightmare party scenes, for example. I’ve seen this in many other works, where a party that’s supposed to be fun somehow takes a turn into terrifying or overwhelming. In fact, this occurs quite often even just in young adult. But these are not those parties. The first is a congressional fundraiser for Gansey’s mother’s campaign, held at their family mansion. Adam, the poor boy from Henrietta, Virginia, goes with Gansey to be introduced to people who could be useful for him to know later on. Adam wants nothing more than a better life. There is no keg, no older kids, no illicit alcohol, none of the usual boundaries being crossed, no fire, no cars, no danger. But it’s a horrifying scene worthy of Dante, all of the wealthy and coiffed and bejeweled adults laying heavy hands on Adam, images crowding in:

            “A hand slapped the back of Adam’s neck; he flinched badly. In his head, he fell down his father’s stairs, fingers grabbing dirt. He could never seem to leave Henrietta behind. He could feel an image, an appraition, looming behind his eyes, but he pushed it away. Not here, not how. ‘We always need young blood!’ boomed the man. Adam was sweating, flipping between the memory of biting stars overhead, the fact of this present assault. Gansey took the man’s hand from Adam’s neck and shook it instead. Adam knew he was being rescued, but the room was too loud and too close for gratitude” (257).

            And a little later: “The party had become a devil’s feast, will-o’-the-wisps caught in brass hunting lamps, impossibly bright meats presented on ivy-filigreed platters, men in black, women, jeweled in green and red. The painted trees of the ceiling bent low overhead. Adam was wired and exhausted, here and somewhere else. Nothing was real but him and Gansey” (259-60).

            Stiefvater writes from inside someone’s experience, Adam flashing back to the final assault from his abusive father that led to his leaving home. What we know is what Adam knows, nothing more. We know it when he knows it. This lends an immensely powerful immediacy to the scene. I can see just by typing these quotations that I have to be severe with myself in the editing process, keep lopping off those extra helpful things I keep trying to pop in there as the writer who knows all. I really love how complete this is, purely with what the character himself knows.

            I noticed this very clearly at another point, where the author does the opposite. It was shocking to me, because I’d been watching very carefully who knows what when. The day after the party, during which Adam and Gansey had a terrible fight, this chapter starts out: “Adam was gone.” That’s it, the entire first paragraph. It’s what Gansey finds out in the rest of the first page, but the narratorial voice tells us before he finds out. Why? I’ve been going over and over this page.

            Reading Gansey’s search of the house and the way he mobilizes his whole family and finally the police to search for Adam, we already know, as readers, that Adam is gone, because we’ve been told. Without that, I realized, I would be afraid that Adam would be found dead. The search of house and grounds reads like it’s leading up to a horrifying discovery. That’s a terrific reason to break a rule, right? If following the rule misleads the reader, then we break the rule.

            But I also wonder whether that heightened tension might not have been a good thing. When Adam is found, it’s a driver who finds him by the side of the 395, miles south of the Pentagon, fifteen miles or so from the Gansey residence. That’s a terrifying road. It’s not a place to be walking. It’s a place of brutal automotive speed. The driver who found him lying by the road thought she had seen a body. And Adam was utterly destroyed by the combination of the hellish party and the subsequent fight with Gansey. Of course, another way to read “Adam was gone” would be that Adam is dead.

            The other bookend party takes that classic teen party trope and turns it on its head. Fireworks, alcohol, drugs, fast cars: all those things are there. We are expecting them. There isn’t any of the usual fun turning into a nightmare that everyone seems to write. Instead, all of those trappings are normal. The terror comes from the horrific creatures that Ronan and Kavinsky pull from their dreams to fight each other in the night, while Blue and Gansey and Adam search a hundred cars for Ronan’s kidnapped younger brother. I love the way our expectations are simply irrelevant. In this world, none of those other stories matter at all. Anything can happen. Ronan’s monster fights to win and Kavinsky’s own dream-born fire dragon flies right through him and kills him, setting the car ablaze just moments after they rescue Ronan’s brother from the trunk. Not the usual end to a nightmare party story.

            Suffice it to say, I had no idea what was going to happen at any point in this novel and I loved that about it. Even upon rereading, I still get caught up in the terror and the atmosphere. Writing people with only what they know right then to inform their perceptions must take incredible control and skill. It’s something powerful to work for!