Coffee Nerves in the Postum ads,” declares a young boy’s aunt as she paints a mustache onto his face for the annual family magic show. Elms yet untouched by the Dutch Blight shade the old houses, The Good Earth and Anthony Adverse are in heavy demand at the public library, and the headlines feature Bruno Hauptmann’s trial for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. The summer of 1935 is a hot and languorous one in Pequot Landing, Connecticut. But this is a coming-of-age gone very wrong, with a body count that should please even King aficionados. The Other, written by former actor Thomas Tryon and first published in 1971, plays out like a classic coming-of-age novel, delineating the inner life of a bright, sensitive child on the verge of adolescence in elegant prose attuned to the heightened perceptions of youth (while reading it I frequently found myself thinking of Victorine, by Maude Hutchins, also republished by NYRB Classics). Now NYRB Classics has republished another memorable example of literary horror. Henry James and Shirley Jackson successfully crossed the line, substituting psychological acuity for gore, nuance for cheap thrills, but they are outliers in the field. It doesn’t help that some of the genre’s best-known practitioners (*cough* Stephen King) are not exactly celebrated for their style or subtlety. Horror, as writer Stuart Kelly noted in a recent piece in the Guardian, is a genre that still struggles for respectability, even as others are taken into its literary fold.
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