And why? And why now? You’re almost 70. Are you just another aging Baby Boomer short on boom angling for a last shot at making good on that “Most Likely To Succeed” albatross hung around your neck in your high-school yearbook? (Did I just type that out loud?) And aren’t you a little old to write coming-of-age stories?
September 22, 2024
Trust me, my inner monologist asks me these questions a lot. But that’s not to say I’ve answered them completely, or ever will. I do know that my decision to write these particular stories at this particular time is best encapsulated by the following lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding” (from FOUR QUARTETS):
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The last line certainly rang true for me (putting Eliot’s more spiritual meanings aside for the moment), returning to my adopted hometown (Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York) as an adult and spending extended stretches of time there to take care of my aging father, living in my parents’ house, sleeping in my old room, driving past the houses of friends and others long moved away, roaming the natural landscape, and scoping out old haunts (I stopped short at revisiting the more remote drinking spots). Forty-something years had hardly changed the place outwardly, but I began to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. And remember things long un-remembered. I even experienced a few sense-memories along the way. And I wanted to explore the pre-me history of the place as well. I wondered if returning to where my boyhood ended and adulthood started could initiate an exploration of self that was long overdue, having taken a backseat to one of the “outside world.” My aim as a writer was know the place as well as certain aspects of myself for the first time.
The foregoing experiences occurred during the early days of the pandemic, so in that period of enforced isolation it dawned on me that the something that I finally wanted to write would be long-form, a novel actually. As opposed to the stage plays and screenplays I’d completed since 2014. And I was finally convinced I really could. The kind of novel I wanted to write came later, but I knew it would take place in the town where I effectively “came of age.” And that it had to be a journey to the past on some level, for it was a major part of my past in the form of the last of the most primary two touchstones to it that was indeed slipping away. And the present was a bittersweet mix of happy and sad, joy and horror. I was not only facing my impending “orphaning,” but also my own “accelerated decrepitude.”
Even though I didn’t want to tell the stories from the point of view of adults, I did contemplate what the opposite of “coming-of-age” was, but I could never quite phrase it in a clever way. Beyond knowing it was a “going” (toward the end), that is. I was also aware that classical coming-of-age novels were also called bildungsroman (German for “novel of education” or “novel of formation”), describing novels that dealt with the formative years of a protagonist or set of characters. After searching several repositories of academic papers, i.e., college theses and journal articles, I eventually discovered a term for the opposite: reifungsroman. Literally “a ripening novel.” More directly, a coming-of-death novel. Of course, those have existed for decades, but not many have lent themselves to entertainments like I was considering … although a story about an elderly, terminally ill vampire hunter did sound interesting. The idea of a vampire, a creature that wants to live forever, being hunted by a human given a few months to live does finds it way, indirectly, into THE ISLAND, Book 1 of the CHRONICLES.
But I digress. Older reifungsroman, like Doris Lessing’s THE SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK (1973) and LOVE, AGAIN (1996), have been reprinted recently since ageism has not only become a serious issue in American society, but is being felt, perhaps for the first time, by my generation, the Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964). Many of us are caught between wanting to re-experience youth, our “Kids on Bikes” days (another genre in entertainment fiction which figures in the CHRONICLES), and read about others experiencing the onset of old age.
I deplore ageism on every level (it has run rampant in Western advertising, marketing, and entertainment in the 21st Century), and simply wanted to combine my memories and experiences of coming-of-age, both good and bad, with fantastic and, yes, frightening fiction. The frightening part – the horror – was something I believed is common to both growing up biologically, emotionally, AND psychologically for real, and the spine of every scary story ever written. And so intertwining them seemed natural. So that’s how I ended up deciding I needed to tell stories about kids dealing with the most scary things that both the real and supernatural worlds could serve up. The melding met my requirements to both revisit the good and bad parts of that past, and entertain readers (hopefully) along the way.
I’d been threatening to write a novel for years (and a substantial part of a WW II thriller languishes on an old hard drive as I type this), but my day-job kept getting in the way, sapping much of the creative energy I could muster, and worrying about one thing or the other snuffed out what little verve remained. I did complete a few other projects (in the stage and film space) that had been incubating for seeming centuries, but nothing as highly personal as what I was now contemplating. The result was many false starts.
After “being retired” from that day-job (a publishing job that honed my editing skills to veritable razors), I’d become a freelance editor, and the workload was light and, frankly, unchallenging enough that I thought I could make a stab at a first book. Even I didn’t see SEVEN books coming! One for each year, ages 12 to 18.
For whatever reason, perhaps one rooted in a return of a prodigal son (and only child) to the house no longer occupied by my mother (she passed away in 2013), and sensing that my father was on the backslope of his life at age 97, the kernel of the CHRONICLES began to germinate. Embroiled as I felt I was in what was often a house of horrors (caregiving for the elderly is often not for the faint of heart), I knew I wanted to write something akin to a traditional haunted house story, one that could serve some psychologically cathartic purpose in the face of the impending loss of one’s last surviving parent and the ensuing grief that would rule not only me, but the house itself (which I was not of a mind to jettison). I wanted it to be full of symbolically empty bedrooms, restless spirits stalking the halls, family curses, and ancient secrets. Nearly all invented, of course. I mean, I didn’t want to make ghosts of my parents. Not at all. And my Dad did eventually move on to the undiscovered country, in November 2021, two weeks shy of his 98th birthday. I called that day “The Orphaning,” no disrespect intended to actual orphans.
Note that by “haunted house story,” I mean, in narrative format terms, a “Monster-in-a-House” story, which doesn’t have to be about a literal haunted house. I detail why elsewhere in these spaces, but here are two examples: the small Maine town overrun by vampires in Stephen King’s SALEM’S LOT), and the 2022 sci-fi movie PREY, about an alien predator (from the PREDATOR franchise) hunting humans on the American Great Plains in the early 1700s. The “house” can be anything from a cabin in the woods to the far-ranging setting of PREY to the planet at large.
I also wanted to set the story in an earlier time of my life, but one in which the above lines I quoted from Eliot – “… to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time” – would hold sway. And that’s when the two concepts merged into “coming-of-age horror.” It was all about dealing with the horror. The horror of death of one’s parents therapeutically transmuted into the horror of adolescence experienced in a place that I, like many of my peers, couldn’t escape from fast enough by the time 1975 rolled around, but had returned to for an extended stay some 40 years later.
It was the same place on the map, the same one in which I “grew up” (as opposed to sideways), but it was the maps of my heart and mind that had been radically redrawn since I’d last inhabited and navigated the place. I felt rather like Ben Mears returning to Jerusalem’s Lot to write about an old house that had haunted him since childhood, only what I wanted to reckon with was what haunted my adolescence. The idea was to “monster” that and slay it along with an actual monster. Purge it from the rooms of the house, the school, and indeed the whole gosh-darn place.