When children’s literature meets the health humanities: the case of «A Monster calls» by Patrick Ness (2011)

The aim of this article is to analyse Patrick Ness’s novel A Monster Calls (2011) and the film that translates it intersemiotically (2016), in order to emphasise that – while undoubtedly belonging to young adult literary and cinematographic production – both novel and film should be regarded as medical pathographies and bibliotherapy resources (Shechtman, 1999) which, as examples of narrative and graphic medicine (Charon 2006), help patients and the people who take care of them cope with a terminal illness like cancer. Indeed, even though the title and the opening lines of both texts seem to assign them to the “horror” genre, they progressively assume the form of actual narrative, graphic and filmic pathographies, describing the strategies that the young protagonist Conor, whose mother finally dies of cancer, adopts to come to terms with this traumatic experience. As such, these products demonstrate how, as neuroscience suggests, the type of controfactual thought (Roese 1997; Byrne 2016) they stimulate become important coping mechanisms. Both the narrative and filmic versions of A Monster Calls therefore represent a cross between different “cultures” (scientifc and humanistic), different levels of culture (the visible traits of the illness and the invisible espects it has on patients and their families) and different genres (narrative, graphic and filmic texts) and, by crossing different “borders”, they should be considered as products which, on the one hand, clearly belong to children literature, while on the other can be clearly identi)ed as products of the Medical Humanities, whose interdisciplinarity allows for a constant revision and broadening of its boundaries.