Ah, the terror of the coming-of-age tale. Who doesn’t like seeing the struggle between youth and experience, the crucible of early adolescence, and the nostalgic, bittersweet sorrow that heralds the onset of maturity? The lessons are hard and relevant, the stakes are high, and more often than not, the music is upbeat.
But why do we immediately conjure up works like It, Something Wicked This Way Comes, or Stranger Things when we talk about coming-of-age stories? What about the other ages that we experience? Where are those stories about growing up?
You may learn that Stephen King’s coming-of-age nightmare Carrie was a major inspiration for my new book Mary: An Awakening of Terror by reading the Foreword (and I sincerely hope you read the whole book, reader, because I believe you’ll like it). The titles are intentionally rhymed, and Mary is sort of a mirror image. Mary is about that other hormonal rite of passage, menopause, rather than the horror that is adolescence.
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As a culture, we don’t tend to discuss much about menopause. We seldom ever discuss middle age in general, save for a few jokes about “mid-life crisis.” But surviving middle age is just as much of an achievement as surviving youth. You never truly know what the heck you’re doing, as you come to realize as you get older. The struggle between youth and experience never ends; it only shifts battlegrounds since every new stage of growth is just as bewildering as the previous one.
In light of this, I made the decision to compile this list of more coming-of-age horror books that don’t focus on adolescence. I’ll admit straight away that my initial plan was to compile a list of just middle-aged horror stories, but as I struggled to come up with titles, I suddenly realized that I had already written Mary since there aren’t many others. Therefore, I slightly broadened the scope of what you’re going to read. Maybe you’ll wish I hadn’t after adding all the titles you don’t currently have to your shopping cart. Not sorry, sorry.
Kids riding bikes are usually the first thing that comes to mind when discussing coming-of-age horror stories, as I stated at the beginning. The buddy group plays a significant role in the subgenre. As Stephen King, the post-Bradbury Pope of Coming-of-Age Horror Fiction, has remarked, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve,” our friends are how we measure our own evolution and how we interpret our place in the world.
Christ, did you? That’s a no to the question. But if the same question were put to your 20-year-old buddies, they may respond, “No, and thank God,” to it. Our connections from college are likely to be among the strongest of our lives since our college pals have a very precise understanding of who we are. That’s where the outstanding book by Rachel Harrison comes in. The dynamics of the buddy group as they transition from late adolescence to adulthood are explored, including what it’s like when they start to earn more money than you do, have more social opportunities than you do, start to get married, and move beyond you. All of you still have the same references and have probably seen each other at our most pitiful and broken, but life starts to change you and mold you into new individuals. No less terrifying than the more otherworldly horrors that come after are the Return’s portrayals of that harsh, perplexing, excruciating journey into Real Adulthood.
Your twenties are a particularly pessimistic time in early adulthood, don’t you think? You’re by yourself, you have the independence that you so desperately desired as a teenager, and no one can direct your actions any more. still miserable in life. The Cipher, an existential nightmare by Kathe Koja, is one of the greatest dramatizations of that hopeless, awful freedom. It’s tempting to refer to this novel as a Lovecraftian Clerks, yet it seems childish or cliche. Neither of those things is The Cipher. It’s a somber, brutal tale about overcoming the nihilism of early adulthood and realizing that perhaps there isn’t any rhyme or sense to existence, but coming to terms with that fact is a crucial turning point in our lives.
Every time Molly Southbourne bleeds, a copy of herself emerges with the intention of murdering the original. Every nosebleed, every scraped knee… then when she reaches adolescence, there will be an additional challenge. But the novella by Tade Thompson—the first in a trilogy—is more than just a metaphor for menstruation. It’s an unexpected, constantly growing story that never zags when you expect it to. It deals with the elusiveness of the self. The autophagy that each of us must engage in in order to develop is discussed, along with how, at a certain point, it becomes hard to remember who the “original” you ever ever was.
A 34-year-old lady comes into her own—her prime, if you’ll pardon the Muriel Spark pun—and pays the price in this brief, bizarre, dread-filled novella. But does she intend to pay it? The riddles of early-middle adulthood, in particular the agoraphobic free-for-all of one’s thirties, are explored in this obscure, alienating whodunit. The age one enters in one’s 30s has a remarkable confusing quality. Although you are still youthful, you no longer feel that way. With their lingo, allusions, and childlike visage (did we seem so young when we were that age?! ), actual young people—with whom you had previously identified—now appear like some elaborate farce. You begin to identify more with folks who you may have previously labeled as “old,” and as a result, you begin to appreciate how brief our time on earth is. This book, of course, goes that notion very far, and it may be read on many other levels as well; nonetheless, consider it to be a Kafka-like work. In search of Mr. Goodbar. Although it may be read in a single sitting, you’ll likely spend much, much longer thinking about it.
Revenge, racism, motherhood, cultural heritage, Aztec mythology, and bugs, bugs, bugs are all topics covered in this novel. The spark for the narrative, though, is a middle-aged woman’s search for meaning. Belinda Alvarez visits a farm to celebrate the marriage of a childhood friend, but she also takes with her a sense of loneliness and restlessness that can only come after a marriage has broken down and after a kid has grown beyond your control. The wedding makes her confront recollections of her identity as a youngster and of outmoded, ridiculous clothing.
She is painfully conscious of her fillers, the flaws that come with aging, her regrets, and her displacement. She then recalls an urban legend that her grandmother had originally told her and that may have happened right here at the wedding location, so she seizes the chance to look into it. The story starts to unwind on itself, exposing generations’ worth of suffering. You can’t help but think of the cyclical insects that make up the most notorious breed of cicadas. All of Belinda’s worries are cyclical as well.
Undoubtedly weird and not to everyone’s taste, this one. It functions as a type of compound coming-of-age story, showcasing the lives of our protagonist Pet at ages 9, 16, and 30. We see how she alters, how she does not, and how—at times garishly and absurdly—the world insists on changing around her. She also searches for her enigmatic, magical sister throughout the story in an effort to stop whatever terrible things her sister foresaw from occurring to the rest of her family.
While the story is pushing Pet farther and further into the future, she must become aware of the degree of her shortcomings, the limits of her abilities, and bend backward to confront the past. It’s the kind of book you simply must read. Since Strange Toys is complex, perplexing, ultimately disappointing if you’re seeking for only tale fulfillment, but also unquestionably excellent, it makes sense that it earned the Philip K. Dick Award in 1987. It also has many strange individuals, interesting situations, and a perplexing energy. If that isn’t life, I don’t know what is.
Although not everyone has children, and not everyone who does is a dedicated parent, those who do seem to concur that, once it does, your life is split into two different halves: Before and After. Perhaps the fantastic, phantasmagoric fantasy-horror epic by LaValle is more of a narrative about coming into a new identity than a coming-of-age story, but isn’t that what every new “age” is for us, isn’t it? Due to the fact that Apollo Kagwa was fatherless as a child, he is particularly motivated to provide for his little kid. It appears as though Apollo’s aspirations have all come true for a far too small period of time.
He has the ideal life and the ideal love. suddenly everything collapses. Every coming-of-age tale has that one crucial moment when you eventually have to question everything you previously believed. That’s what this book has in spades. It’s a novel about loss, overwhelming terror, instability, and discovery, but also about forgiveness, revelation, and how learning certain difficult—even impossible—truths changes how you view the world.
Let’s face it, I had to include King someplace. Shakespeare’s Jacques informs us that “second youth and sheer oblivion” are what awaits us all in the seventh and last age. King, however, asserts that if we’re fortunate (i.e., if we haven’t experienced any of the several life-ending catastrophes depicted in his earlier works), we just could live to the Fuck It age. At that age, you decide to forgo pretense in favor of telling the truth, no matter how painful it may be, since you have already endured too much and are just too exhausted to act any other way.
Dolores, the protagonist of King’s novel, doesn’t start her trip exactly there, but her tense relationship with Vera Donovan, her affluent and unyielding boss, aids her in finding it. Dolores is taken in for questioning when Vera is discovered dead at the bottom of her steps in this novel, which marks a stylistic change for King. Along the way, we find out the real story behind the second crime Dolores had long been accused of committing: the brutal death of her violent husband Joe. I’ve long considered this to be one of King’s lesser-known works. It’s depressing, incendiary, dark, humorous, and brimming over with scorching love for his own struggling mother.
It shares the same tinge of bittersweet nostalgia for the people we were, the people we could have become, the people we battled mightily to be, and the people who survived as It, The Body, or any other archetypal children on bikes coming of age story King ever devised. We’re all navigating the dark as best we can, whether you’re a kid battling an extradimensional murderous clown or an elderly woman dealing with abuse. and evolving as they go.
(Incidentally, I first heard Frances Sternhagen read this novel on tape in the 1990s. It’s the ideal marriage of performer, medium, and tale. I heartily endorse it. What else is a fantastic audiobook? Mary: A Terroristic Awakening. Susan Bennett reads it and completely assumes the roles of Mary and Mary’s deliciously raunchy Aunt Nadine. You ought to look into it.)
