The best coming of age darkly: fiction about deeply troubled teens

"This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. This is a murder mystery," the young narrator tells us. It begins with a brutal death by stabbing; fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is arrested for killing Wellington, the neighbor’s poodle. Normally I don’t read murder mysteries. I don’t really care who done it – after all, the author holds all the cards and sets up the clues. Mark Haddon’s mystery is different. True, the author holds all the cards, but he tells the story through an Asperger/autistic teenager. I am completely engaged. I care about this kid; I want him to find the real dog murderer. Haddon uses the trope of the child sleuth – Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy – to frame a poignant story and portray an unexpected hero. Make no mistake: This is not a Hardy Boys rehash; this is the telling of a traumatic event by a young man on the autism spectrum. I smiled through my tears.

"There just aren’t enough natural deaths. You can’t explain that sort of thing to people, though." Sixteen-year-old Frank lives with his father on a remote Scottish Island. His older brother Eric was institutionalized but he now has escaped and needs Frank’s help. Oh, and Frank kills things. Insects, rodents, small mammals, people. It gets weirder and I was drawn into Banks’ psychological horror story, a twisted, tragic coming-of-age in a sick family, told through the eyes of both a perpetrator and a troubled teen who is a victim of violence. 

Can our happiness be stolen? The creator of Lemony Snicket gives us a laugh-out-loud immersion into the life of a contemporary American family headed for disaster as seen through the eyes of Phil Needle and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, arrested for shoplifting. I’m laughing but it’s an ugly laugh, and uneasy. This is definitely not a children’s story, nor is it “YA” but it is about coming of age in a piratical society. Arrrrgh – beware the barbed humor! The author breaks the rules, runs up the black flag, and I’m on the deck, bleeding with laughter. Yes, Handler’s gotten excessive, this is a farce, now he’s gone overboard dragging me along with him and suddenly it’s not funny anymore. Wait – this isn’t the cruise I signed up for – but it's too late, I’m hooked. Ultimately, there is no treasure, but the words are worth their weight in pieces of eight.

Known for her chilling short story, The Lottery, a classic once studied in every high school in America, Shirley Jackson’s work is diffused with horror; a horror that can be humorous at times, yet always understated and profound. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is told from the peculiar perspective of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine, AKA Merricat, about her isolated family and the wooded estate they hole up in. This is not a genre novel – not a stalker or slasher of teens, no gore to speak of – but insightful, funny, compassionate horror at its best. Funny, compassionate horror? Somehow, yes. 

I opened the book with trepidation – we all know someone who has done the act. All the trite explanations of “why” sound blasphemous to me. Other novelists tackled the taboo subject of teen suicide, but Eugenides’s narrative remains oddly elegiac and timeless as a Greek tragedy. The appallingly hyperbolic story is told in third person plural – we – from the outside looking in. A chorus of nameless teenaged boys function as a collective mind, of which the reader is a part. The narrators are well-meaning but unreliable because they cannot know what the girls were thinking or feeling, they can only make assumptions. I can’t say I loved a story about serial suicide, but I was drawn into the telling of it, the author’s observations and insight, and I appreciated the way he ultimately left the big question unresolved.