Gifted Children

While giftedness typically connotes a range of abilities from exceptional intelligence to musical talent, in this book I use it to refer to paranormal mental abilities, such as telepathy (the ability to read minds), telekinesis (the ability to move objects), and clairvoyance (the ability to see events or objects elsewhere). The appearance of gifted children in popular culture coincided with an increased interest in and acceptance of the possibility that such powers might really exist, and the stories are literal explorations of these abilities. ¹ However, these narratives also function as symbolic examinations of child development and childrearing theories, the psychological effects of abuse within the family, and the exploitation of The Child by larger institutions.

In several of his short stories, specifically “The Small Assassin” (1946) and “The Veldt” (1950), Ray Bradbury uses giftedness to trace out psychoanalytic theories to their extreme but logical conclusions. Many childrearing manuals of this time, relying on a Freudian framework, drew attention to the instincts that drove children, which it was the duty of parents to restrain. Although parents might see hints of these impulses, the full extent of their power would remain invisible because children typically lack the physical strength and social power to actualize them or are physically prevented from doing so by adults. By giving his children powers beyond the average child—either due to a genetic happenstance in “Assassin” or via technology in “The Veldt”—Bradbury is able to show the Freudian child in all its horrible glory. In “It’s a Good Life” (1953), Jerome Bixby takes a similar tack but chooses instead to explore what the repercussions would be were children submitted to no restraint at all—the practice of “permissive parenting” taken to its most extreme. Giftedness in these stories becomes a device by which authors can show that children are not so much “good” as they are “weak” and at the mercy of adult authority.

In later texts, like Stephen King’s Carrie (1974) and its several feature film adaptations (1976, 2013) and the movies Chronicle (2012) and Dark Touch (2013), gifted children are used to figuratively explore the widespread effects of abuse. The abused child’s emotional damage is given literal expression in the destruction caused once his or her supernatural powers are unleashed. Such stories show that abused children are not the only people who suffer due to their mistreatment; often those around these children feel the effects of that abuse when they finally lash out. Gifted children in these narratives act as powerful symbols of abused youth who turn violent, such as school shooters. The stories simply substitute dangerous psychic gifts for guns.

Another set of gifted children, which I term “exploited exceptionals,” are victims of ruthless government agencies or private corporations who view these prodigies as weapons or scientific tools rather than human beings. In these narratives, which include King’s Firestarter (1980), Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), music videos by M83, and various videogames like the F.E.A.R. series (2005–2007) and Beyond Two Souls (2013), the personal rights and freedoms of gifted children are largely ignored, and they eventually vent their anger and frustration through harmful demonstrations of their powers. In addition to engaging with the true history of international interest in the potential weaponization of paranormal abilities, these texts are also a response to educational reforms that treat the next generation of children as pawns in the battle between the USA and its political enemies, such as the USSR. During such times, children are viewed as tools to ensure national dominance rather than as kids who deserve a “normal” childhood. New Age movements also present groups of gifted kids, such as Indigo and Crystal Children, as being misdiagnosed as autistic or hyperactive and mistreated by society as a result. The “exploited exceptional” type of gifted child has also become an iconic character in children’s and YA literature, appearing, for instance, in James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series.

Freudian Frameworks and Permissive Parenting in Gifted Child Narratives

In a childrearing manual from 1943, Rights of Infants , author Margaret Ribble describes children as initially driven by “powerful instinctive urges” that will be soon met by “demands for restraint, and the prohibition on wish-fulfilment, which comes from the parents, whose task it is to turn their children from unrestrained greedy and cruel little savages into well-behaved, socially adapted civilized beings” (quoted in Hardyment 2007, 221). In early narratives, the gifted child’s paranormal powers parallel those dangerous psychic urges of the id that need to be tamed. The child’s gifts allow him or her to act on desires that in the real world would only be Freudian fantasies, thereby allowing the stories to trace psychoanalytic theories to their logical—and often terrifying—conclusions. Early gifted child narratives also critique extreme forms of permissive parenting: unrestrained by rules or regulations, gifted children force the adults around them to capitulate to their wills. These figures allow us to imagine what the relationship between adult and children would be like if children weren’t handicapped by physical and social weakness and therefore never had to rein in their threatening impulses.

Although children in Ray Bradbury’s works are often heroic and sympathetic beings, he definitely doesn’t buy into the idea of The Child. In fact, many of his stories show that children begin life as creatures of instinct devoted to their own self-preservation and pleasures. At times, Bradbury’s child characters are shockingly unsympathetic to the sufferings of others. “The Season of Disbelief” (1950), for example, is a harrowing story in which cruel children convince an elderly woman that she was never young while “All Summer in a Day” (1954) portrays childhood bullying on Venus. Other works involve more serious crimes. In “Let’s Play ‘Poison’” (1946), a children’s game causes the death of their teacher while in “Zero Hour” (1951), children abet a violent Martian invasion. Bradbury’s stories have been hugely influential on the genre of evil children, especially because so many have been adapted into other forms and are thus available to a much wider audience. ²

Published in 1946, Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin” begins with Alice Leiber in the middle of a difficult labor, believing the entire time that her child is trying to kill her. Her suspicions continue after the baby is born, but her husband, David, and her doctor both assume that she is simply reacting to the fact that birthing the baby almost killed her. Initially, we are not sure whom to believe. The child’s incessant crying does exhaust Alice and make her sick, but is it really intentionally done so for this purpose? When Alice trips on one of the baby’s toys and falls down the stairs to her death, suspicions naturally increase. However, it is not until the doctor finds David dead, the result of a gas leak in his room, and discovers that the baby is inexplicably outside of its crib and room, having been locked out when the door blew shut, that we are given irrefutable evidence that the child is, indeed, a small assassin. At the end of the story, the doctor, now convinced of the infant’s homicidal nature, hunts it down with a scalpel.

At first glance, “The Small Assassin” would seem to be a quintessential monstrous birth story. However, the short story actually shares more in common with gifted child narratives. For one, the child’s monstrosity cannot easily be sourced to flaws in the parents or the larger society, which is typically the case in monstrous birth stories. Instead, the child is an illustration of psychoanalytic processes, specifically a complex negotiation of the theories of Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud. In The Trauma of Birth —first published in English in 1929—Rank traced the foundations of personality back to the harrowing experience of birth. Rank’s theory stood in direct contrast to Freudian thought, which instead tracked psychological development to later conflicts. As Samuel Weber points out in The Legend of Freud , Freud argued that Rank’s theory was flawed because it presumed that people would be able to remember the trauma of birth, which Freud believed was impossible: “It is not credible that a child should retain any but tactile and general sensations relating to the process of birth,” he wrote (quoted in Weber 2000, 90). ³

The gifted child in “The Small Assassin” sidesteps the Rank-Freud debate, for, according to David, his baby is unique, the winner of a genetic lottery, the “one child in a billion…[b]orn perfectly aware, able to think, instinctively” (1980, 383). This child can remember his traumatic birth, and the memory of that trauma is key to his nature. Bradbury also implies through the child that emotions, such as love and hatred, are not inherent to human nature; rather, they are side effects of the pleasure principle, the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain, as Freud claimed. Alice, for example, claims that what protects people from harming each other and being harmed is love. “I feel no fear of you,” she tells her husband, “because love cushions all your irritations, unnatural instincts, hatreds and immaturities” (375). Once David also realizes the truth about his son, he, too, takes on a simplistic Freudian view and comes to believe that children are essentially born “with no more thought than self-preservation” (384).

Alice and David’s baby has not yet learned to love (i.e., to restrain his aggression) and also has a clear reason to want to harm his parents: the trauma of his birth has made him angry, and he blames his parents for what he has suffered. David imagines the gestating child as having a perfect existence: “What is more at peace, more dreamfully content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered than an unborn child?” (1980, 384). When the child is forced “to give up its berth, is forced to vacate, rushed out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish world where it is asked to shift for itself, to hunt, to feed from the hunting, to seek after a vanishing love that once was its unquestionable right, to meet confusion instead of inner silence and conservative slumber” (384), it feels resentment and anger. This is exactly the case with the Leibers’ son, and due to his exceptional nature, he does not forget the trauma of his birth. Bradbury’s story thus critiques a Romantic view of children that sees them as naturally good and as corrupted by flawed parenting and the shortcomings of society. “The Small Assassin” instead imagines that children are born essentially selfish and must be taught to behave and love; if left unrestrained, children would grow to be entirely self-serving.

Bradbury’s “The Veldt” expands upon the ideas in “The Small Assassin.” Originally published as “The World the Children Made” in 1950, the story is set in a technological future filled with gadgets aimed at making life easier. The parents, George and Lydia, have spent a small fortune on a HappyLife Home, which includes technologies that automate the most mundane activities, including bathing, brushing one’s teeth, and tying one’s shoelaces; not only does the dining room table produce “warm dishes of food from its mechanical interior” (1980, 267), it even cuts it all up for easy consumption. One of the most spectacular pieces of technology in the house is the nursery, a room somewhat akin to the Star Trek holodeck, which detects “the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and create[s] life to fill their every desire” (268). While the children, ten-year-old twins, Peter and Wendy, have in the past primarily re-created iconic moments from children’s literature, lately the room consistently projects a rather disturbing scene of an African veldt: not only oppressively hot, it also includes a pride of lions that seem to be devouring a recent kill. The parents become concerned about what the children’s preference for this scene says about their state of mind and call in a psychologist. He claims that the children are spoiled and recommends that all technology in the house be shut down. When the parents tell the children their plan to do so, the children respond violently and beg for one last moment with their beloved nursery. When George and Lydia enter the room, looking for their children, they are locked inside, discover that the virtual reality projected by the room is no longer virtual, and are eaten alive by lions. ⁴

Although the children in this story do not have superpowers, they do have access to technologies that give them special abilities. The technology of the nursery performs an equivalent function to paranormal powers in that it can turn their deepest and most forbidden desires into reality. No definite explanation is given for the nursery’s sudden capacity to do this, but Lydia believes that Peter has rigged it to do so. She states that “Peter’s set it to remain” on the veldt, a feat he’d likely be more than able to accomplish considering “[t]hat IQ of his” (1980, 269). It is also possible that the room itself has taken on life. Every character in the story, including the narrator, entertains that idea at some point. George personifies the room before he deactivates it: “I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,” he muses and then asks, “I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?” (275). Finally, he declares, “[T]he whole damn house dies as of here and now” (275). The children definitely feel the house is alive, for Peter yells, “Don’t let Father kill everything.” Even the narrator seems to agree, confirming that the parents “threw the switch that killed the nursery” (275) and noting in the aftermath that “the house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery” (275). Most significantly, once the house is shut down, we receive this suggestive passage: “‘Don’t let them do it!’ wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery ” (my emphasis, 275). Then, once his parents are locked inside the room, Peter again says, “Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house”; to whom he could be speaking except the technology is unclear.

The possibility that the house has gained sentience is alone a frightening prospect, but Bradbury has a larger purpose for personifying the technology. The house and especially the nursery could be construed as a sort of womblike space, a place in which Peter and Wendy feel “at peace,…dreamfully content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered,” as David described the unborn child in “The Small Assassin” (1980, 384). Early on in the story, the house is described as a maternal figure that “clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and was good to them” (1980, 264). Even the psychologist who comes to visit tells the parents, “You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. The room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents” (274). Turning off the house thus re-creates the trauma of birth, as in “Assassin.” Furthermore, in Freudian terms, the children never develop a superego because the technology—their surrogate parent—never submits their impulses to restraint; instead, the children can remain in a blissful state in which their every wish is met, even if that wish happens to be a rather Freudian desire to kill their biological parents. Bradbury demonstrates that the true nature of children is the id; we simply don’t realize it because children fortunately don’t have the opportunity to bring their every impulse to life.

Though he sets his story in a fantastical world, Bradbury takes care to show that this story does apply to real children. At one point, George thinks that his children are too young to be visualizing the death imagery of the veldt, but he quickly corrects himself, noting that homicidal desires begin rather early in life: “Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with cap pistols” (1980, 268). George recognizes that children in general—not only the children in this story—are inherently hostile to anyone who opposes them. Children only learn to rein in their aggression and selfishness once they are subjected to restrictions. If they existed in a world in which they had ultimate power and were never limited in their desires, they wouldn’t develop empathy or love for others.

Such would be the case for children raised by parents so permissive that they never imposed rules on their offspring. Critiques of so-called permissiveness have appeared since that parenting technique came into vogue, which Peter Stearns identifies as occurring during the late 1930s and 1940s. Often linked to the work of Dr. (Benjamin) Spock, who published the first edition of Baby and Child Care in 1946, permissive parenting had already come under fire by the following decade. ⁵ Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee point to a 1954 article in Parents magazine that claimed that modern parents were destroying their children by overindulging them (2004, 136), and even Dr. Spock carefully revised his message for the second edition in 1957, claiming that “nowadays there seems to be more chance of a conscientious parent’s getting into trouble with permissiveness than with strictness” (Hulbert 2003, 244; Weiss 1985, 301). Despite Spock’s addendum, his manual would be attacked for many years to come. Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky claim that “conservatives blamed permissive mothers following the advice of Dr. Spock for an entire generation of flower children” (1998, 5). Spiro Agnew, vice president under Richard Nixon, certainly lambasted the childrearing philosophy in his attacks on the “Spock-marked” generation of undisciplined and disrespectful children. ⁶

In “The Veldt,” George and Lydia have engaged in the worst form of permissive parenting, and the story suggests that it has had deadly consequences. It is evident that the children do as they please. In the beginning of the story, Wendy and Peter are at a carnival across town and “televise[] home to say they’d be late, to go ahead eating” (1980, 267); clearly, the children don’t believe they have any obligation to their parents’ schedule. Later, they come home too “full of strawberry ice cream and hot dogs” to eat dinner (269). George even admits that they’re “insufferable.…They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring” (271). Used to having almost complete autonomy, the children are shocked when their parents finally enforce some rules. When told that the nursery is going to be turned off, Peter exclaims, “I thought we were free to play as we wished” (272) and follows up with a threat to his father. When Lydia declares, “We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward—secrecy, disobedience?” (271), her question might as well be rhetorical.

Jerome Bixby’s short story “It’s a Good Life” is also interested in the pernicious effects of permissiveness, and his story, like so many of Bradbury’s, has been adapted many times. First published in 1953, the story inspired a 1961 Twilight Zone episode of the same name, was included in a 1983 cinematic homage to the series, and then given a sequel in the show’s second revival in 2003. That the story has enjoyed such a long life in the popular imagination suggests that its image of childhood remains culturally relevant. “It’s a Good Life” focuses on a boy, Anthony, who has incredible powers. Not only is he capable of some forms of mind control, he can also read minds and teleport himself and others. In the 1961 television episode, Anthony is six years old and just seems like a very dangerous spoiled brat who harms anyone who goes against his wishes. Bixby’s portrayal of Anthony is far more nuanced. In the short story, he is three, and his misdeeds are more frequently the result of misunderstanding and childishness than malice. Bixby’s story offers a more complex critique of how permissive parenting has enabled Anthony’s confusion and his bad behavior.

One can’t exactly blame the adults in Bixby’s fictional world for avoiding confrontation with Anthony. Even when meaning well, Anthony makes some very terrible things happen. At one point, for example, Anthony reanimates the corpse of a woman’s husband, believing that in doing so he can ease her grief. As a result, the entire town carefully monitors their behavior and even their thoughts at all times, never expressing dissatisfaction for fear that Anthony will react. The narrator states: “Everything had to be good. Had to be fine just as it was, even if it wasn’t. Always. Because any change might be worse. So terribly much worse” (1971, 533). In essence, the entire town is unwillingly engaging in the most permissive sort of parenting, simply out of fear. The result is that Anthony has not received any sort of moral direction. But although he hasn’t experienced any restrictions on his behavior, Anthony has not devolved into mere self-gratification. He has already developed somewhat of a superego and does try to please others. Even Anthony’s most terrible actions often have a sort of twisted set of principles behind them. At the beginning of the story, for example, Anthony has caught a rat with his mind and is forcing it to eat itself. The act is shocking in its cruelty but not without a sort of altruistic motive, for we find out later that “Aunt Amy hated rats so he killed a lot of them, because he liked Aunt Amy most of all” (530).

Ultimately, Bixby’s story is therefore more hopeful than most of Bradbury’s, for Bixby believes that children are born with a natural tendency to do what’s right and a desire to be a part of a community, which is shown in the fact that Anthony prefers to spend time in the “grove,” a place he built to suit the preferences of the animals that live there. Because the pleasure and pain of the animals is so easy to decipher, Anthony has a clearer sense of how to interact with them: “He liked to help them. He liked to feel their simple gratification” (1971, 529). He would like to have this relationship with the people of his town as well, but they are too complicated for him to understand: “He liked to help them too, sometimes—but it wasn’t simple, or very gratifying either. They never thought happy thoughts when he did—just the jumble” (529). Bixby’s story shows that children are not born entirely savage and cruel, but without strict rules, enforced consequences for their actions, and clear explanations of both, they will not develop a nuanced sense of empathy or a clear understanding of how their actions impact others.

The strategy of revealing the true nature of childhood via narratives of giftedness has not vanished. The novel Contagious (2008) features a little girl who becomes terrifying once powerful enough to act on her every whim. The second book in Scott Sigler’s Infection trilogy, ⁷ Contagious details the second attempt of an alien species to take over Earth by infecting certain humans and converting them into servants of the invaders. When the aliens infect Chelsea, they transform her into a sort of command post, and she quickly abuses the power she gains in that role. At the beginning of the book, Chelsea is described as “in a bit of a willful stage.…Usually when she doesn’t get what she wants, she throws a tantrum,” but she is otherwise a generally sweet child. Once infected, however, she gains power over her parents, who are also infected, and uses that power to fulfill her selfish and childish desires. Some are relatively harmless, such as eating ice cream whenever she wants: “It was only 8:00 A.M., and this was her third Crunch. Mommy and Daddy didn’t get to make the rules anymore.” However, other scenes suggest that Chelsea has a sadistic streak. Earlier in the book, she feared her mother’s wooden spoon because of the spankings with which it was associated; once the tables are turned, she has her father beat her mother with it in retaliation for the prior punishments she received. At one point, her father even begs: “Chelsea, baby…I don’t want to hit your mom with the spoon again. Don’t make me do that.” Her mother becomes merely a tool to Chelsea, easily dispensed with when no longer useful: when she realizes that “Mommy [is] the weakest person in the network,” she quickly calculates that this means “Mommy was the most expendable .” At another point, she enjoys her ability to use members of her “hive” to carry out violence: “This was so cool. Better than all her best toys combined. She’d felt Dustin hit those men, like she had been there, like she had hit them herself. She liked it. It was really fun.”

Given powers that enable her to act on every desire she has, Chelsea regresses into pure Freudian impulse and amorality. A man telepathically senses that within Chelsea “wasn’t good, or evil. Chelsea didn’t know what good and evil were. She would do whatever she wanted, without remorse, without conscience” (2008). Elsewhere, Chelsea is described “as a spoiled child, a child who did whatever she wanted, took whatever she wanted.” Chelsea even proves impossible for the aliens to control: “You’re not the boss of me,” she tells her alien leader at one point. A very dangerous creature indeed, the unrestrained Freudian child.

Repression and Abuse in the Gifted Child Narrative

The dangerous gifted child has also served as a metaphor for children who respond violently to abuse or bullying, such as school shooters, their paranormal powers standing in for weapons that can cause large numbers of injuries and deaths. ⁸ As Don Tresca points out, one of the most famous gifted child stories, Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), was tellingly published only three years before Rage (1977), King’s novella about a school shooter. ⁹ Carrie’s telekinetic destruction of prom night certainly shares similarities with stories of school violence. King’s Carrie and the adaptations it inspired focus on the abuse Carrie has suffered at the hands of her mother, who has forced her to repress almost all emotion. Writing 20 years after Bradbury and Bixby, King penned Carrie at a time when a dominant idea in childrearing was that “more harm was caused by the repression of children’s sexuality than by its expression” (Tobin 1997, 5) and, indeed, by repression in general. Like his predecessors, King uses psychic powers as metaphors for psychological forces, but King’s primary concern in Carrie is what happens when the normal expression of primal urges is entirely smothered. ¹⁰

The story of Carrie is probably relatively familiar: Carrie White is an unpopular girl who becomes the special target of her peers’ derision when she gets her period in the shower after gym class and panics; raised by an extremely religious mother, Carrie has never been told about menstruation and believes she is dying. Rather than helping Carrie, her classmates callously throw pads and tampons at her while telling her to “plug it up.” The stress of the moment causes Carrie to strike out with her mind and discover (or rediscover, according to the novel) her telekinetic ability. The girls involved are disciplined, and one, Sue, feels so guilty about her involvement in the incident that she has her boyfriend take Carrie to the prom. Another girl, Chris, is so angered by her punishment that she plots an elaborate revenge: she manages to get Carrie crowned Prom Queen at which moment she dumps a bucket of pig blood on her. Carrie then fully unleashes her telekinetic abilities, burning down the gymnasium and much of the town. When she returns home, her mother attacks her; having earlier witnessed Carrie’s power, she is convinced Carrie is a witch. Carrie kills her in self-defense, and her telekinetic abilities, out of control during this moment of intense trauma, literally bring the house down around her, causing her death as well.

Critics have naturally analyzed Carrie as a film about the power—and perhaps the horror—of female sexuality, noting the not-so-subtle linking of Carrie’s psychic powers with her first period and beginning of “official” womanhood, but disagree about whether the linking of the two amounts to a feminist or misogynistic reading. ¹¹ In King’s novel, however, Carrie has had her powers from a very young age. They don’t appear when she menstruates; she simply remembers that she has them. King therefore establishes a more Freudian framework for the novel by detailing the dangers that can result if sexual urges are unnaturally repressed in early childhood. Carrie repressed her powers because to her mother they were a sign of evil, just like Carrie’s desire for sexual knowledge. We learn in the novel, for example, that Carrie made stones rain down on her house when she was three years old. This event was tied to infantile sexual curiosity, for it happened when Carrie was punished for approaching a bikinied neighbor and asking her about her breasts (which her mother merely referred to as “dirty pillows”). In the book, it is the recovered memories of her powers, not the powers themselves, that coincides with her period and the understanding of sexuality that accompanies it: “And now, seemingly unbidden—like the knowledge of menstruation—a score of memories had come, as if some mental dam had been knocked down” (2011, 108). Carrie realizes that “now there was no denying the memory, not more than there could be a denying of the monthly flow” (109). The repressed has returned.

King also significantly situates the gifted child within a story about bullying, revenge, and mass violence, paving the way for gifted children to come to symbolize school shooters. Two particular characteristics allow Carrie to resonate in this way, especially in a post-Columbine era. First, although Carrie is largely sympathetic due to the abuse she suffers from both her schoolmates and her mother, she is not merely a victim. She takes a dangerous pleasure in exercising her powers, even before the conflagration at the prom, and it is this aspect of Carrie that makes her horrifying. When she approaches a fabric store to buy material from which to make her dress, she is “intimidated but not stopped. Because if she wanted to, she could send them all screaming into the streets” (2011, 107). Similarly, when she uses her powers to threaten her mother so that she will not interfere in her prom plans, Carrie thinks, “She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief” (116). Carrie’s pleasure during the prom scene is especially haunting; all of the victims describe her as smiling during the inferno, one even stating, “[S]he was glad about it. Glad! I could feel her being glad” (242). Carrie also resembles the common image of the school shooter in that she is aware and therefore responsible during the scenes of violence and murders innocent people—even people who were genuinely kind to her. Though sympathetic, she is not without culpability; her violent response is a choice, not an inevitability. Carrie puts forth two rather comforting claims. First, the types of kids who commit acts of mass violence are not everyday youth. They have suffered extreme abuse. In other words, it is not The Child who commits such crimes. The Child would have to be corrupted by abuse first. Second, though the abused child should be an object of sympathy, we need not hold back all of our outrage, for children like Carrie are not entirely innocent. They make a decision to act and frequently enjoy the violence they commit. We are therefore entitled to feel anger.

Carrie would go on to inspire several direct knock-offs, including the TV movies The Spell (1977) and Jennifer (1978), and other related films in which kids take revenge using paranormal powers of their own or with help from creatures who have such powers, such as Kiss Daddy Goodbye (1981) and The Pit (1981). But it was not until after Columbine that the Carrie narrative would make a real comeback. School shootings were hardly a new occurrence when the Columbine massacre occurred in 1999; after all, just a few years after the initial release of Carrie , 16-year-old Brenda Spencer killed two adults and injured eight children and a police officer at a school in Cleveland, and a number of school shootings took place shortly before Columbine in Bethel, Alaska; West Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas. The scale of Columbine, however, was unprecedented. The mass of school shootings in the late 1990s prompted a new awareness of school violence and the role that bullying may play in such cases. The gifted child returned as a way to metaphorically understand such events.

Carrie herself was part of this revival. After an unsuccessful sequel in 1999 and made-for-TV remake in 2002, Carrie returned to the big screen in 2013, with Chloë Grace Moretz playing the titular role and Julianne Moore as her mother. The choice of Moretz was significant. In her roles as the 11-year-old vigilante Hit Girl in Kick-Ass (2010), which she reprised in Kick-Ass 2 in 2013, and as a child vampire, Abby, in Let Me In (2010), ¹² Moretz had already associated herself with child characters more dangerous than innocent; the choice to cast her as Carrie naturally gave the character an impression of being as vindictive as she is victimized. Tresca argues that the adaptation differs greatly from the original in the amount of intent and purposefulness Carrie demonstrates in the final massacre: “Moretz uses physical movements and facial expressions to indicate that she is moving objects with deliberate intent and with an ecstatic bloodlust” (2015, 159). For Tresca, in the original Carrie , “the bullies are the ones truly responsible for everything that occurs.…DePalma’s Carrie cannot control her power’s destructive momentum.…She merely stares outward, and the power surges forth, claiming guilty and innocent alike” (2015, 156–157). Although Tresca’s interpretation of De Palma’s Carrie might be accurate, King did originally describe Carrie as taking great pleasure in her vengeful carnage; in the novel, Carrie even leaves the prom first, humiliated, then thinks, “It was time to teach them a lesson. Time to show them a thing or two. She giggle[s] hysterically” and purposefully returns to the gymnasium (2011, 220). In addition, as Paula Matusa points out, her revenge resembles the actions of the vengeful deity with whom she has been reared, which further suggests purposeful action: “The power that once accompanied Carrie’s ability to control and direct her life is not out of control; she commits indiscriminate violence, and her actions here are comparable to those of the avenging God with whom her mother is so obsessed” (1977, 36).

Nevertheless, Tresca does astutely identify a “change in attitude within America in the post-Columbine era [in that] the bullied who seek deadly retribution are seen by the media and the general populace as every bit the monster the bullies themselves are” (2015, 159). ¹³ This is certainly true of more recent narratives, in which the dangerous gifted child is sympathetic only for so long. In the movie Chronicle , for example, three very different boys, Steve, Matt, and Andrew, discover what appears to be some sort of extraterrestrial object that gives them telekinesis. At first, they simply enjoy their newfound abilities, such as flying, and at worst use them to pull silly pranks on people, such as scaring a girl in a toy store with a levitating teddy bear or confusing a female shopper by moving her car from one parking space to another. However, one boy, Andrew, begins to use his powers to harm others. Significantly, Andrew is an unpopular boy who also has a terrible home life. His father, a former firefighter, was hurt in the line of duty and is now on disability, and his mother, Karen, is dying of cancer. To make matters worse, the family cannot afford to give Karen the care she needs, and the father deals with his grief by drinking heavily and physically abusing his son. Andrew is, in other words, a textbook example of the type of kid who would, according to stereotypical media portrayals, “crack” and commit violence.

And that’s exactly what he does. Just when his social life appears to be picking up, he is humiliated when, during his first sexual experience, he drunkenly vomits all over the girl. In a suicidal moment, he flies up into the sky during a thunderstorm, and when Steve follows in an attempt to console him, he is struck by lightning, seemingly due to Andrew’s influence. Andrew continues to be teased at school for his botched sexual encounter. (The plot here is remarkably similar to Carrie , whose protagonist suffers similar humiliation for errant bodily functions.) In response, Andrew attacks one bully, telekinetically extracting three of his teeth. Later, Andrew uses his powers to steal money from local drug dealers as well as from a convenience store. The end of the film features a huge paranormal showdown between Andrew and the last of the trio, Matt, which concludes when Matt, unable to reason with Andrew during his fit of destruction, must tragically execute him. Chronicle seems to have been influenced by The Source/The Surge , a 2002 film in which teenagers—all of them outcasts—also gain powers from a glowing rock that they find in the forest, and both probably owe a debt to the 1996 film The Craft , in which female teen misfits use witchcraft to gain social status and punish those who mistreated them. Other films with similar plots include Tamara (2005), Devil’s Diary (2007), Tormented (2009), and Seconds Apart (2011). ¹⁴

The 2013 film Dark Touch by French director Marina de Van takes a different approach to similar subject matter. In the film, which takes place in Ireland, an 11-year-old girl, Niamh, appears to have gained psychic powers in response to years of sexual and physical abuse. ¹⁵ Initially, she doesn’t recognize the power as her own. When she sees furniture crash into her father and watches as her mother is fatally wounded by glass from a window that seems to shatter on its own, Niamh assumes the house is haunted. ¹⁶ Soon, she takes ownership of her powers, though, using them to kill another woman who is also abusing her children, schoolmates of Niamh named Peter and Emily. In her final act of vengeance, Niamh telepathically summons all the other children to the school—many of whom have been complicit in mistreating her—and collapses the building on top of them. She, Peter, and Emily then torture Niamh’s adoptive parents and, while doing so, reenact details of what they have suffered. At one point, for example, Niamh’s adoptive parents are tied up at a table, and the children give a perverse performance of a typical family dinner. Peter asks: “Have you talked to the children about what they said at school?” Emily responds: “Not yet. They’ll have to be punished. They don’t realize everything we do for them.” In the end, the children burn down the house and everyone in it, including themselves. In Dark Touch , as in Carrie and Chronicle , paranormal powers symbolize the repressed anger and fear resulting from abuse that finally erupts. These texts thus stand as expressions of the widespread damage caused by abuse, its effects rippling out beyond the abused victim to hurt even innocent people who surround the child.

The Exploited Exceptional

The last type of gifted child narrative involves exploited exceptionals, children persecuted by government agencies and secret organizations interested in weaponizing their abilities or at least putting them to wicked uses. Following the lead of King’s Firestarter (1980), these stories symbolize the ways in which institutions mistreat children, viewing them only as future contributors to the nation’s progress rather than as young people who have rights and who deserve some say over how to live their lives. In King’s novel, Andy and Vicky McGee participate in an experiment to test the effects of Lot 6, a drug with hallucinogenic effects similar to LSD. While most of the test subjects either die or go insane, Andy and Vicky develop psychic abilities: Andy gains mind control and Vicky some telekinesis. After the experiment, they marry and give birth to Charlie, who has a variety of psychic powers, most notably pyrokinesis—the ability to start fires with her mind. In a desire to harness Charlie’s powers, a government agency known as The Shop murders Vicky and pursues Charlie and Andy until they finally manage to place them in confinement and, with the help of undercover agent John Rainbird who poses as Charlie’s janitor and friend, convince Charlie to demonstrate her powers for their observation while her father is kept in a drugged stupor. At the end of the story, Charlie and Andy try to escape, but Andy is killed, and Charlie burns down the whole installation in retaliation.

As in other gifted child narratives, King connects Charlie’s powers to her psychological development, which is configured along Freudian lines. Charlie has been trained to repress her powers in much the same way that a child learns to control the biological urges to defecate and urinate in order to become “potty-trained.” Andy remembers how “they toilet-trained her…and they fire-trained her” (1981, 76). Furthermore, when Charlie accidentally sets a man on fire because she overhears him mistreating a woman, Andy describes the event as “an accident, like when you were smaller and you forgot to go to the bathroom because you were playing and you wet your pants” (89). The book depicts Charlie’s power as her id, which Charlie recognizes needs to controlled by her ego so that she doesn’t hurt others: “that Bad Thing, racing around in her head, wanting to get away again.…It was like a small, vicious, and rather stupid animal” (24). Although the story suggests that Charlie has been raised well and has her powers mostly under control, Charlie is not entirely innocent; the pleasure she takes in destruction makes her disturbing. When she is attacking men from The Shop early in the book, for example, Andy notices that “[h]er face was dreamy and thoughtful. A small Mona Lisa smile had touched the corners of her mouth. She’s enjoying this , Andy thought with something like horror” (117).

But for the most part, Charlie’s dangerous powers are unleashed in destructive ways only when she feels that she or people she cares about are threatened. Charlie’s actions would have likely been quite sympathetic at the time the book was released, an era during which Americans harbored deep suspicions about their government and its lack of respect for its people. In discussing the 1978 film The Fury , a movie that also deals with exploited exceptionals, Paul Meehan writes: “The possibility of deadly psychic powers being exploited by a covert group of government technocrats had great resonance in the post-Watergate era” (2009, 184). ¹⁷ In effect, these texts imagine psychic powers as emerging in response to abuse from a different sort of parent—the government sworn to protect its citizens.

King points out in the afterword to the book, Firestarter engages with the history of the American government’s involvement in paranormal research, a history that is surprisingly long. As W. Adam Mandelbaum demonstrates in The Psychic Battlefield , US interest in harnessing psionic abilities dates back “at least until World War II” (2000, 134); in 1952, for example, the navy invested in J.B. Rhine’s Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University (Mandelbaum 2000, 142). Meehan explains that rumors of the government’s involvement in the paranormal received validation in 1960, when the French publication Science and Life reported that the “U.S. government had conducted a successful experiment in telepathic communication with the crew of the nuclear submarine Nautilus .” Meehan claims that in response, Russia also began investigating parapsychology, and the result was “[a] new arms race based on psychic technology had emerged into the fabric of the Cold War” (2009, 177). King also claims that the Lot 6 experiments are specifically influenced by the “undeniable fact that the U.S. government, or agencies thereof, has indeed administered potentially dangerous drugs to unwitting subjects on more than one occasion” (1981, np).¹⁸ King appears to be referring to the fact that “[i]n 1975, a Senate committee…uncovered evidence that the [CIA’s] MK-ULTRA psychological warfare program had experimented with the mind-bending hallucinogen LSD on unwitting American citizens.…LSD had even been given to CIA employee Frank Olson, who subsequently committed suicide by jumping from a high window in a New York hotel” (Meehan 2009, 179–180). ¹⁹

The exploited exceptional was also an effective symbol of the most negative repercussions of educational reform in the post-Sputnik era. As Andrew Hartman shows in Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School , the launching of Sputnik in 1957 prompted a moral panic about the status of education in the USA and an appeal for educational changes that would make American children more competitive with their Soviet counterparts. Central to this change was the gifted child, whose special talents needed to be harnessed by the government. The educational reforms that followed were not without their critics, however, and Hartman claims that the call to produce “more scientists in the mold of Soviet schools” was “coupled with a nervous apprehension about replicating the anti-democratic methods of the enemy” (2008, 178). A similar moral panic developed in response to the threat of Japanese progress in the 1980s, with similar repercussions. The exploited exceptional, stripped of his or her freedom and treated solely as an implement of national progress, became the perfect symbol of the worst possible outcomes of educational reforms done to ensure national supremacy over foreign competitors. ²⁰

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), first published as a short story in 1977 and later adapted for film in 2013, captures exactly this sort of exploited exceptional. The novel imagines a futuristic Earth facing a conflict that could end the planet. However, rather than involving the squaring off of the USA and USSR, it is the Buggers that humankind fears, an insectoid alien species that has attacked Earth twice already. In expectation of a third battle, exceptional children are selected at a young age to go to Battle School, where they are trained in combat and strategy. ²¹ The book depicts Battle School and its adult leaders as largely indifferent to the plight of its children—both the brutal jostling for position that naturally results as well as the stress of competition and expectation. Graff, one of the leaders of Battle School, directly admits that his relationship with the children is purely functional: “My job isn’t to be friends. My job is to produce the best soldiers in the world.…Nowhere...does it say I have to make friends with children” (1991, 25). The children are well aware of the ways in which they are mistreated and exploited. One of Ender’s schoolmates tells him, “It’s the teachers, they’re the enemy. They get us to fight each other, hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win. It amounts to nothing. We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other and all the time the old bastards are watching us, studying us.…I was six years old when they brought me here.…They decided I was right for the program, but nobody ever asked me if the program was right for me” (77). And it doesn’t take long for Ender to realize that although—and possibly because—he is their prize pupil, he “ha[s] no control over his own life. They ran everything. They made all the choices” (107).

The New Age movement has identified its own brand of exploited exceptional. So-called Indigo children and other similar types, such as Crystal children or Rainbow children, are considered by many New Age pundits to be evidence that humankind is entering into the next stage of evolution. The premise is that around 1970, a new generation of children appeared who were to be “spiritual healers and leaders specifically sent to aid in the coming of the ‘new age’” (Kline 2013, 353). The movement—which Daniel Kline traces back to the early 1980s, making it an age-mate of Firestarter —has since become well-known, at least in New Age circles. The Indigo movement is very clearly a return to the Romantic image of The Child: the natural child is good, and it is simply civilization that doesn’t understand. ²² Since their “discovery,” Indigos and their ilk have continued to command cultural attention. A documentary called Indigo Evolution was released in 2005 and a variety of books exist on the topic with titles like The Children of Now (2007), Indigo Adults (2009), Empowering Your Indigo Child (2009), The Indigo Child’s Survival Guide (2012), The Children of Now…Evolution (2014), and even The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Indigo Children (2007).

Significantly, Indigos and other types of gifted children are said to frequently suffer from disorders like attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism. ²³ Their advocates argue that what are considered problematic symptoms by the dominant culture are actually signs of the children’s advancement. In other words, Indigos are exploited exceptionals who are hindered and harmed by institutions and practices that misunderstand and therefore mistreat them. ²⁴ Kline thus sees “Indigo Children, in addition to their role in New Age discourse, [as] part of a larger anti-medical discourse” (2013, 360), which has proponents outside of the New Age movement as well, especially those concerned about the overmedicalization of children. ²⁵ And, as in stories like Firestarter , the mistreatment of these gifted children can have fatal consequences. As Kline shows, one writer rather casually remarks that “[t]hese young children—every one of them I’ve seen thus far who kill their schoolmates or parents—have been Indigos” (quoted in Kline 2013, 359). ²⁶

The exploited exceptional has re-emerged in the new millennium. Their comeback is partly a side effect of the era’s obsession with superhero films, in which youth often appear as sidekicks and secondary characters. ²⁷ Though not primarily focused on children, the television series Heroes (2006–2010), for example, tells the story of several characters who discover they have superpowers, one of whom is a cheerleader named Claire Bennet, who, like Wolverine, has the gift of rapid regeneration. Many of the characters, including Claire, are hunted by “The Company,” a private organization not unlike The Shop in Firestarter . Similar plots involving gifted children and nefarious scientists or organizations who hope to harness their powers can be found in the movies The Echo Game (2009), Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), Midnight Special (2016), and—at least judging by the trailer—the upcoming film Morgan (2016) as well as in the one-season TV series Believe , canceled in 2014, and the first season of the Netflix series, Stranger Things . In addition, the weaponized gifted child frequently surfaces in video games as well, like Alma Wade in F.E.A.R . (2005), F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origins (2009), and F.E.A.R. 3 (2011). Similarly, the protagonist and player character of Beyond Two Souls (2013), Jodie Holmes, essentially has supernatural powers due to her psychic link to Aiden, a spirit connected to Jodie since birth, and she is used by the government because of it.

One of the most striking appropriations of the exploited exceptional recently is the series of interconnected music videos produced by Fleur and Manu in 2011 and 2012 for the band M83. Although a trilogy, it is the first two videos that manage to so succinctly distill the major tropes and plot events of the exploited exceptional child narrative into approximately ten minutes. The first, “Midnight City,” begins with a young boy being escorted rather roughly into some sort of facility—a man pulls him along by the wrist rather than the hand. In the room, we see other children performing various psychic tests: a bored-looking boy solves a floating Rubik’s cube; another girl participates in a test for telepathy, choosing a card that matches the one being looked at by the adult testing her; a third girl changes channels and manipulates a television with her mind. All of the children’s eyes glow blue when using their powers. The appearance of the boy disrupts the placid obedience of the room; as his eyes begin to glow, the other children and attendants look at him. That night, under his leadership, the children combine their powers to blow open the doors of the institution and escape. They are chased by men with flashlights, which one child causes to malfunction, and flee into the dark. The next scene finds them in an abandoned building where they use their telekinetic abilities to playfully throw things around and generally make a destructive mess. Then, standing together and holding hands on the roof of the building, they join forces and cause the sun to quickly set.

“Reunion” begins where “Midnight City” left off, only now we meet another little girl in a wheelchair hooked up to an IV and electrodes. She is clearly working for the same organization that had imprisoned the children in the first video. She telekinetically targets the youngest of the escapees: a bright light explodes from the little girl’s body, signaling their location, and the little girl collapses, dead. The children are chased by the organization until the boy leader finally turns to confront them. The girl in the laboratory—whose eyes glow red to signal her allegiance to the dark side—takes control of one of the men at the scene, and a battle breaks out between her and the other gifted children. Because the “good” children work together, and more suddenly show up to help, they manage to triumph. Defeated, the red-eyed girl stands up, removes all the equipment from her body, and leaves, the suggestion being that she will no longer work for the organization. The gang of gifted children then go to a church and stare heavenward, arms outstretched; light begins to glow from them, signaling their Christ-like transcendence into another form. These videos pose that gifted children are only a threat when mistreated by larger institutions that focus only on their powers and not the people behind them.

The genre continues to expand in the new millennium in children’s and YA literature, too. In fact, the exploited exceptional appeared in YA texts long before adult-oriented works. Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time , published in 1962, features exceptionally intelligent children sought after for their special abilities. ²⁸ The novel Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander H. Key, published in 1968 and adapted into a Disney movie in 1975, also includes psychic kids pursued by a wealthy man.

James Patterson’s When the Wind Blows (1998) imagines a fiendish agency, significantly named The School, which is manufacturing gifted children via genetic manipulation, and the book inspired the YA Maximum Ride series, which to date includes nine books published between 2005 and 2015. The first novel in the series, The Angel Experiment , is narrated by Max, who takes care to establish The School as simply diabolical. Max starts out by telling the reader that she and her adoptive siblings “were made on purpose, by the sickest, most horrible ‘scientists’ you could possibly imagine” (2005, 1) and “grew up in a science lab/prison called the School, in cages, like lab rats” (2). The cruelty of The School’s workers is shown to the reader directly in their willingness to turn a seven-year-old boy, Ari, into an Eraser, a human–wolf mutation designed to hunt down the escapees. Although the children are highly ethical and typically feel terrible guilt for any crimes they are forced to commit, the book does occasionally hint that the abused may become the abuser. In The Angel Experiment , for example, the eponymous character uses her psychic abilities to get a woman to buy her a teddy bear (287). Max believes Angel’s actions possibly predict future misdeeds: “I thought she knew that influencing that woman to buy her Celeste was wrong. But she had done it anyway. Which I found disturbing” (289). Gifted children are also institutionalized and weaponized in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), a novel by Ransom Riggs that now has two sequels, Hollow Souls (2014) and The Library of Souls (2015), and a 2016 cinematic adaptation. The four books that make up The Mysterious Benedict Society series (2007, 2008, 2009, 2012) also feature gifted children, wicked adults, and secret societies. It’s hardly surprising that the exploited exceptional has become a hero of YA literature. The plot has all the ingredients of an appealing YA story: a misunderstood young protagonist who doesn’t yet understand the full power of his or her talents; conflict with an adult world that is insensitive at best and injurious at worst to the younger generation; a story that gives young characters enough power and autonomy to right the wrongs caused by the older generation and thus prove their worth. The exploited exceptional is a ready-made YA hero.

Conclusion

That the exploited exceptional type of gifted child narrative is dominating the cultural imagination in the new millennium tells us about far more than just the predilections of young adults. The label “YA literature” is, after all, misleading since those works are written and largely consumed by people much older. As Natalie Robehmen noted in a 2014 article for Forbes , “55% of YA books are bought by people 18 and older. Adults aged between 30 and 44 accounted for 28% of all YA sales [in 2012].” There’s a reason why the exploited exceptional appeals to this population, for it primarily consists of millennials. Born roughly between 1980 and 2000, millennials are now approximately 16-36 years of age. Millennials have plenty of reason to identify with exploited exceptionals. As a generation, millennials are expected to shoulder a great burden. They have inherited a global arena of war and terrorism, huge amounts of college debt, an economy still recovering from a terrible recession, and ever worsening evidence of serious climate change. Millennials are, in many ways, quintessential exploited exceptionals, mistreated and disrespected by the institutions that are supposed to serve them and yet simultaneously expected to save the day.Nowhere was this paradoxical perspective of millennials more evident than in Joel Stein’s cover story on the generational group, which appeared in the May 20, 2013, issue of Time , and the response it generated. The cover features the image of a young woman lying on her stomach taking a picture of herself with her cell phone. Above her are the words: “The Me Me Me Generation. Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.” Stein’s piece provoked many angry responses, perhaps most compelling a series of parodies collected by Zainab Akande on the website mic.com. One reads: “The Doomed Generation. We pissed their future away on endless war, golden parachutes for bankers, and handjobs for stockbrokers. Why? Fuck ‘em, that’s why.” Another: “The Indentured Generation. We trampled their rights, tanked the economy, and trashed the planet for our benefit—but expect them to foot the bill. Why we call them narcissists.” In producing and consuming stories about exploited exceptionals, millennials likely find vindication for what must seem an incredibly unfair mixture of hardship and expectation.

Notes

1.

J.B. Rhine’s book Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) began a new era in parapsychological research, which led to the founding of the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University the next year.
2.

Most of the stories I discuss were featured as episodes of Ray Bradbury Theater : “The Small Assassin” (1988), “The Veldt” (1989), “Let’s Play ‘Poison’” (1992), and “Zero Hour” (1992). “The Small Assassin” also inspired a 2007 short film and is cited as the inspiration for Stewie on Family Guy . Among the many adaptations of “The Veldt” is a song and music video by Canadian electronic music producer deadmau5. “Zero Hour” was made into a thirteen-episode television series in 2015 titled The Whispers .
3.

Alfred Adler, another psychoanalyst whom Christina Hardyment claims was influential on childrearing manuals, held a position that could be considered a compromise between Rank and Freud: “he assigned all adult neurosis (and indeed all normal adult activity) to the feeling of inevitable inferiority as the godlike baby was forced to come to grips with the reality of his position” (2007, 159). Adler’s theory sounds very much like the general plot of Damon Knight’s “Special Delivery” (1954), in which an intelligent fetus forces his mother to obey his every intellectual whim; once he is born and finally subject to the control of his parents, he becomes an ordinary baby. As the husband explains, “I don’t care how much of a superbrain he is, once he’s born—you know what I mean? The only reason he’s had the bulge on us all this time is he could get at us and we couldn’t get at him” (1976, 101).
4.

A comparable plot structures an episode of the rebooted The Twilight Zone in 1985 entitled “Children’s Zoo,” only in this story, parents who are more apparently neglectful are placed in glass chambers rather than sent to their deaths. There, they must wait until they can convince another child visitor to the zoo that they are now ready to be good parents.
5.

In the Myth of the Spoiled Child , Alfie Kohn argues that Spock hardly deserves this reputation. Not only was his brand of permissiveness quite conservative but also “traditionalists were decrying what they saw as permissive parenting before this particular pediatrician ever set pen to paper” (2014, 15).
6.

See Thomas Maier’s Dr. Spock: An American Life (1998), 322–325.
7.

The first book, Infected , was released in 2006, and the final installment of the trilogy, Pandemic , in 2014.
8.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988) would also fit in this category. Neither the mistreatment that Matilda suffers nor her response to it are anywhere as serious as in Carrie , but she certainly does use her powers against her family, who neither understands nor appreciates her.
9.

King allowed the book to fall out of print after it was connected to at least four subsequent school shootings.
10.

The connection between repression and paranormal phenomena was hardly King’s invention. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), for example, had pondered whether the poltergeist of Hill House was simply an expression of the sexually repressed Eleanor’s bottled-up psychic energy. King is a huge fan of the book, as he makes evident in Danse Macabre . Nor was King the first to connect psychic powers to abused or neglected children: D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1926) had already drawn this link. King was well aware of the tradition in which he was writing. Firestarter directly mentions Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” (55) and alludes to “Rocking-Horse” when it discusses “the little boy in the D.H. Lawrence story, the one who could pick the winners at the racetrack” (1981, 84).
11.

Shelley Stamp Lindsey notes that most critics see Carrie as progressive: “They believe she represents nothing truly terrifying and only threatens a repressive society we would all rather do away with anyway” (1996, 281). Lindsey, however, argues that “Carrie presents a masculine fantasy in which the feminine is constituted as horrific” (281) and that “[h]er telekinesis signifies the threat that unchecked female desire may pose to society” (285).
12.

Let Me In is an adaptation of the Swedish film Let the Right One In (2008), itself an adaptation of the 2004 novel of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist. I discuss the novel in “Changelings.”
13.

Significantly, Tresca notes that King’s attitudes toward the character also changed. At the time, King was quite sympathetic to Carrie. However, in later years, as Tresca demonstrates, King’s attitude changed. In On Writing (2000), published only a year after Columbine, King is far less supportive of the character.
14.

The Final (2010) is another bullied-revenge film, but it involves no giftedness, only an elaborate scheme of vengeance.
15.

In this way, Niamh is similar to Danny Torrance in The Shining , who, as Joe L. Kincheloe points out, “develops the psychic power to see beyond the limits of time and space after his father (Jack Nicolson) in an alcoholic stupor broke Danny’s arm” (1998, 168).
16.

The movie thus calls upon a popular idea in paranormal circles, namely “that poltergeists are the outward expression of the repressed anxiety and pent-up sexuality of adolescents, usually girls” (Horn 2009, 86). An American Haunting (2006) employs a similar concept.
17.

The Fury is based on a novel by John Farris, published in 1976—the same year that De Palma directed King’s Carrie . Two years later, De Palma would direct the cinematic adaption of Farris’s novel.
18.

King’s language here suggests that his book may also be influenced by the history of medical experimentation, which Allen M. Hornblum, Judith L. Newman, and Gregory J. Dober show in their book Against Their Will was conducted without “an inkling of doubt about the exploitative practice” until “[c]racks in the morally fragile façade…appear[ed] in the 1960s,” culminating in “the stunning 1972 revelation regarding the Tuskegee syphilis study” (2013, 10), in which the US Public Health Service surreptitiously studied poor African American men infected with the disease without making them aware what disease they were suffering from and with no intention of treating them. Their book looks specifically at experiments conducted on children.
19.

A similar experiment was conducted with mushrooms at the Duke Parapsychology lab in 1961, but the outcome was far less dramatic, amounting only to what Timothy Leary called “six affectionate and sacred hours” (Horn 2009, 180).
20.

Another movie from the era featuring exploited exceptionals is Real Genius , in which a group of STEM-smart teens develop a laser that, unbeknownst to them, the government plans to use as a tool of assassination. Though a comedy, it raises the same sorts of concerns about the misuse of the nation’s gifted children in the Cold War.
21.

The drafting of children into Battle School in Ender’s Game resembles the conscription of young Jedis (“Force Sensitives”), child telepaths by the Psi Corps in Babylon 5 (“Psi Corps”), and the treatment of River Tam and children like her by The Academy in Serenity (“River Tam”).
22.

In The Children of Now , for example, Meg Blackburn Losey nearly duplicates language from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”: “In earlier generations, as we arrived on the day of our birth, we quickly forgot our origin. We forgot our giftedness, our Source, and our perfection. The Children of Now not only remember much of what we have forgotten, they embody it” (2007, 25–26).
23.

According to Gerhard Mayer and Anita Brutler, Benjamin Witts explains the Indigo Children phenomenon as “provid[ing] parents of children with an ADD/ADHD diagnosis a more attractive, but positively connoted, explanation (‘giftedness’) of children’s deviant behavior” (2016, 254).
24.

In many ways, The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980) by Willo Davis Roberts captures the image of Indigo children.
25.

See, for example, Lawrence H. Diller’s The Last Normal Child .
26.

Mayer and Brutler claim that Indigo , a 2012 novel by the Austrian writer Clemens J. Setz, also emphasizes the dark traits of Indigo children.
27.

I’m thinking specifically of the tendency in the X-Men films to focus on younger and younger mutants and especially those who seem to have not yet recognized that “with great power comes great responsibility”: Pyro in X-Men 2 (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and the sassy Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016). Another example would be the cocky teenaged Spiderman in Captain America: Civil War (2016).
28.

A Wrinkle in Time was followed by two sequels in the 1970s, A Wind in the Door (1973) and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), and then two more in the 1980s, Many Waters (1986) and An Acceptable Time (1989).

3. Gifted Children

Freudian Frameworks and Permissive Parenting in Gifted Child Narratives

Repression and Abuse in the Gifted Child Narrative

The Exploited Exceptional

Conclusion

Notes