Coming of Age Stories

Abstract

Some of King’s most powerful tales feature the coming of age stories of children crossing the threshold into young adulthood. This is a moment at which many high school and college students find themselves as well, complete with their own developing identities and uncertainties about the future, and King’s coming of age stories can strike a particularly powerful chord with young adult readers. One of King’s best known coming of age stories is The Body (included in the 1982 collection Different Seasons), which is often better known by the name of its film adaptation, Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986). Despite the dead body of the title of which the boys go in search, there are no supernatural or ghostly horrors, as King focuses instead on the bond between four young men and the different paths their lives are about to set them upon as they move toward adulthood. A darker coming of age tale, also in Different Seasons, is Apt Pupil, in which Todd Bowden, a boy who is struggling with some of these same questions, befriends an elderly Nazi war criminal in hiding, who takes Todd under his wing and turns him into a monster. Finally, while The Body and Apt Pupil consider the coming of age quests of young men, King’s first novel, Carrie highlights the horrors faced—and inflicted—by a high school girl as she struggles to define herself, with the real-life coming of age turmoil here veering into the supernatural with Carrie’s telekinetic power, though the cliques and bullying described are all too familiar in the real lives of contemporary young adult readers.¹