Children’s literature going downhill with silly books

Children’s literature is “going downhill” because publishers are flooding the market with silly books rather than proper stories, Anthony Horowitz has said.

He suggested that JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series would not find success if released today, as young people’s attention spans have been shortened by exposure to social media.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, Horowitz said: “JK Rowling somehow managed to create a 600-page book with some quite demanding ideas in it and then the later Harry Potters, which are quite dark and certainly long, and they were this phenomenal international hit.

“Do you believe that any book published now, which had 150,000 words in it and aimed at a market of eight to 15-year-olds, would have any chance?” Horowitz said.

“It worries me that the world of children’s books has changed. It is beginning, I worry, to go downhill in the sense of lowering expectations – so many books, which are just funny, silly, bad jokes, and the actual idea of the literate children’s book, the well-written, real story, is less popular now,” he added.

“It seems to me that if there’s a trend in modern children’s books, if you just walk into a bookshop and look at the covers around you, you now see the same imagery, the same gaudy colours, the same pandering down to children rather than raising their expectations.”

Horowitz published the first of his Alex Rider novels about a teenage spy in 2000, and they became a best-selling series.

“I came in on a wave of really great writing, where books were long and sometimes challenging,” he told The Telegraph, citing Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson adventures, in addition to Rowling.

“We’re talking about books that are classic stories, which have a proper base. I’m not saying that these books don’t exist any more, but they’re being pushed into a corner by the commercial success of many of the less challenging books.

“That sense of books as being something you can aspire to, rather than something you merely giggle at, is less obvious now than it was when I started my writing career.”

Horowitz described himself as a big fan of David Walliams, whose books dominate the children’s charts, but said that the author’s style has been allowed “to colour the market too much” as publishers try to replicate his success.

“David Walliams has his imitators, and that’s where I think the problem lies.

“David Walliams is marvellous; children who did not read love David Walliams, and you can’t argue with that. But as soon as publishers see the success of David Walliams, they want to emulate it and suddenly the market is flooded with imitations,” he said.

‘I fear dying before my last chapter’

Discussing social media’s influence on young minds, Horowitz said: “Something has happened to attention spans. I think it is largely to do with our absorption into social media: Twitter or X started the trend for 140 characters and that was it. Everything now is so simple and so fast. TikTok is a tiny little slice of life, cut down.

“[This] is not necessarily a bad thing – the world changes, things are lost and things are gained. But, as a writer myself for so many years, I have noticed that nowadays the novels I used to write are not the ones that are wanted any more.”

Horowitz, whose prolific writing career includes three Bond continuation novels, the Foyle’s War television drama and many episodes of Midsomer Murders, is not sure whether his Alex Rider series would be a hit if it launched today.

“A book succeeds because of the time in which it’s proposed. I wrote Alex at exactly the right time,” he said.

“Would it happen now? It’s hard to think of a series of books that has been launched in the last two or three years that has gained traction.”

Horowitz, 69, is currently finalising the latest in his series of Magpie Murders books for adults.

In case of emergency, he travels with a notebook containing the secrets of his final chapter, so if he got run over by a bus before finishing it, fans should not despair. At home, he has written the plot denouement and stored it safely.

“The one fear I have in life is dying before I get to the last chapter. Can you imagine how annoyed I’d be if I was run over? As I’m lying in the road, it won’t be my poor wife or my poor children, it will be that nobody will know how it ended!

“So if you come to my house in London you’ll always see behind my desk when I’m writing one of these books an envelope which has got a message in it, but the message is the end of the book, so somebody else can finish it.”

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