 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Top 5 Friday. Today we are talking about my Top 5 Coming of Age novels not written by Stephen King and not The Girl Next Door. Every time you hear about Best Coming of Age you hear about Stephen King's It or The Body or numerous, some people even say Dreamcatcher because of the flashback scenes, but I'm going to not include those books. I'm not going to include The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum either. I'm going to try and give you guys options that are not the most popular. One of them I know for a fact that it's probably on everybody's list. Not everybody, but it's going to be on quite a few people's lists, but I can't help but to include it. The inspiration for today's post is we're finally getting, if there's other ones available, I do not know. I haven't read them, I haven't been able to find them, but we're finally getting a Coming of Age about a group of girls called The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters. I'm super excited about that one. It's coming out in December 10th in hardcover, ebook, audiobook, I think all that. I got an ARC from Netgalley and the publisher, so I'm going to be getting to that well before December. I'm super excited about it. I'll probably be getting to it maybe, maybe as soon as next week. Who knows how long it'll take me to read it because I think it's like 400 or so much pages, but I'm definitely going to be getting to it soon. Let's go ahead and jump into it. The first one, these aren't really in any kind of order, and now looking at it, I know at least two of these are going to probably be on a whole lot of people's list, but I know one of them is going to come out of left field, going to come out of nowhere. I got a bug flying around here. It's just a moth, I think. But the first one is Boys Life by Robert McCammon. This is an easy pick, of course. It's one of the best Coming of Age novels, of course. It's just a fantastic novel overall, and if you haven't read it, I highly, highly recommend you do. There are the complaints that I do hear when I do hear a complaint. It's usually, sometimes, the complaint about it being overwritten for what it is. I don't agree with that. I think it's very sparse for what it is. Maybe not as sparse or stark or succinct as a Jack Ketchum kind of novel or two of the other ones on this list, but it is. I don't think it's overly wordy, especially not compared to some of his other stuff like Usher's Passing, which I just finished. It's definitely nowhere near as wordy as that one. But this one is a fantastic novel about a little boy growing up in Zephyr, Alabama. I'm pretty sure Zephyr is 100% make-believe that it's a fictional town, you know, like Derry Maine and Castle Rock and all that stuff. But Boys Life is on here. It's just the saga feel of it. There's so much life crammed into this one story and so much goes on. And one of the coolest parts of it is the alligator. The alligator and the wasp. There's a lot of stuff in here that as a boy I ran into myself. Now, I didn't run into alligators, but everybody has a story around their hometown about the monster in the water or the monster in the woods kind of thing. And what McCammon did for Zephyr was create that monster in the water and I really, really enjoyed that aspect of it. Alright, let's go with the other obvious one. I almost dropped books all over the place. Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. You can see this is a fantastic cover. Unfortunately, I don't have a really good version of it. And the version that's available now has a really ugly, boring cover. It's like just foggy, kind of like a foggy night, foggy morning kind of deal. But this one's pretty cool. It has the, the, is it die cut? I don't know, but it's the cut hole in it and then you got this gorgeous bit. Yeah, it's very, very nice. I'd love to, if there is a, come on, focus, focus, you gonna focus? Stay focused. If there is a like sign limited edition to this book, I'd love to get my hands on a copy because there's so many, especially like the rendering truck, the roadkill truck. Sorry, my nose is itching. I would love to see pictures of all, all of that stuff, especially like the school and whatnot. This also has one of the most surprising character deaths ever that I've ever come across. This and Song of Collie, Dan Simmons really knows how to kill his darlings. Now that, that term is actually used for writing, you know, getting rid of your fancy language or whatever or sections that you really, really like, but he gets rid of very popular characters and he's, he's, he's long been an inspiration for my own work because of that. If you've ever read any of my work, you'll know that nobody is safe as the same way in a Dan Simmons novel. Next up, maybe on quite a few lists also, but less so than the other two is The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Layman. This in my opinion is Layman's best novel. It's his most mature work. And that's saying something because the book is still very, very immature, but I think there's a lot of theme. He played with theme, that kind of thing with, with the book and the ending especially is fantastic. It comes out of nowhere. You're thinking, okay, well this is just going to be your typical, you know, Layman gore porn fest here at the end. And then you get to the very last couple of pages and you're like, holy shit, wait, what, what? Layman didn't do too many twist endings. And if he did, they were either phoned in or they were so off the wall as to be considered cheats. You know, just fixing something there at the end with either, but he rarely uses supernatural, but fixing something with the most outlandish possible conclusion. This one is outlandish, but I find it exceedingly awesome with what he did there at the end. It just, it comes out of nowhere and it fits thematically with the rest of the book. Next up is one of my personal favorites that has somehow which stood the test of time. If you're a fan of the channel, you know how I feel about this author nowadays. In fact, we're doing a whole series on his stuff as I go back and reread through his stuff, but The Voice of the Night by Dean Koontz. This is one of the first coming of H novels I ever read that I actually sat down and read. I had seen Stand by Me, which is based on the body by Stephen King and Goonies and all that stuff. I had seen those movies, but I had never actually read one until I read this one. Oddly enough, I bought this because it has a train on the cover and I was a huge fan of trains when I was a kid. I still am a fan of trains, but I've never actually been on a train. So that's where, it's probably more along the lines of something I can not never have, but something that I haven't experienced is one of those things. Also, my grandfather, not my blood grandfather, but the one that married my grandmother after my real grandfather died. His son, Scott, owned the train that was used in Back to the Future. He also did all that. He did several movies because he owned his own trains. He did his own stunt work. He drove the trains. He did all of that stuff, and I thought that was a pretty cool little tidbit, but I can't remember. I guess Scott Clark is the guy's name because my grandfather's name was Jim Clark. I don't think that's going to give anything away because Jim's been dead for a long time. So anyways, and anybody who knows Jim, hang on, anybody who knows Jim, my head's itching completely. Anybody who knows Jim already knows who I am just by the look, so I ain't too worried about it. But yeah, the voice of the night finally is one that's going to come out of nowhere for a lot of people, especially since y'all know that I don't like YA. I don't like young adult. I feel that the writing is usually too dumbed down or too simplistic or the themes are too heavy handed. I also don't like that it's called YA, called young adult. I don't believe in young adult or new adult or any of that stuff. Not that I believe like it's a figment of my imagination, but I don't agree with labeling these things that. Maybe middle grade is fine. Of course children's books are fine, but middle grades even kind of float in it because with Wonder, Wonder was a fantastic novel. And it wasn't written in that dumbed down way that even King, Stephen King, has had a problem with. When he tried to do The Eyes of the Dragon, it came off as him writing down to people. And one of the only authors that I know of, I know of, I know there's probably more out there people, but I know of is Andrew Smith. He wrote Winger, Standoff, I think is the sequel, and this utter joy, Grasshopper Jungle. This was a impulse buy. You see how, yeah, I love, not gilded, but I love painted edges. And this one kind of just called from me, called to me from the, from the shelves at one Barnes and Noble in Mobile, Alabama. It was sitting there and I saw the beautiful, I pulled it out and I saw this and I was like, I have to have it. I don't care what, what it, what it's about. And then oddly enough, I got home and I read, I read a list of the best current YA authors and they were talking about Andrew Smith. I read the book over the course of like three days. I blew right through it and I fell in love with it. It also has LGBTQIA themes. It's got all different kinds of wonderful stuff in it. It is also super, super brutal. I enjoyed the horror aspect of it. And yes, it is about gigantic, not Grasshoppers. It is about gigantic like praying mantis-esque type of creatures. In fact, I think they actually are praying mantises that have grown into human size or else they were, it's human beings turned into praying mantises. But there's a sequel coming. The book is fantastic. If you have not read it, you need to go out and check it out. If you haven't read Andrew Smith at all, you need to go check out Andrew Smith. If you, if you're not too into the weird side of things, then definitely pick up Winger. That's a fantastic novel and that ending just utterly destroyed me. There's also a thousand or a million something steps or it's got a horse on the cover, whatever it is. But he's got a bunch of other stuff that I haven't read. The only three that I have read is are this one Winger and standoff. But I highly recommend this stuff just because of the way he writes. He's got this, he almost like a male Caroline Kepnis. So if you enjoy Caroline Kepnis' writing style, you're definitely going to like Andrew Smith. So my challenge to you is without using Jack Ketchum as a girl next door, without using Stephen King, without using those ones that you hear about all the time. I know I did, I did Boy's Life and that's kind of cheating. But without using those ones that are used all the time, what are your favorite coming of age novels? Let me know down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U. This has been another Top 5 Friday. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!