Born in North Carolina, raised in Arizona, and now residing in New York,
Nat Cassidy in an award-winning playwright, director, actor, musician, and author.
His new novel is
Mary: An Awakening of Terror.
At CrimeReads Cassidy tagged
eight "coming-of-age horror novels that aren’t about teenagerhood." One title on the list:
The Changeling, by Victor LaValle
Not everyone becomes a parent, and not everyone who does becomes a committed parent, but those that do are likely to agree that once it happens, your life gets divided into two distinct halves: Before and After. Perhaps LaValle’s brilliant, 
phantasmagoric, fantasy-horror epic isn’t exactly a coming-of-age story as it is a coming-into-a-new-identity story—but that’s what every new “age” is for us, isn’t it? Apollo Kagwa grew up without a father and, as such, he’s extra determined to be there for his baby son. For an all-too-brief moment, it seems like all Apollo’s dreams have come true. He has the perfect love, the perfect life … and then it all goes to hell. If there’s one thing every coming-of-age story has, it’s that moment where you finally have to reassess everything you thought you knew. This book has that in buckets. It’s a book about grief and dizzying fear and instability and discovery, but also about forgiveness and revelation and being unable to see the world in the same way once you learn some hard—even impossible—truths.
Read about
another entry on the list.
The Changeling is among
Benjamin Percy's top five novels about dangerous plants,
James Han Mattson's five top dark and disturbing reads,
A.K. Larkwood's five tense books that blend sci-fi and horror,
Leah Schnelbach's ten sci-fi and fantasy must-reads from the 2010s,
T. Marie Vandelly's top ten suspenseful horror novels featuring domestic terrors and
C.J. Tudor's six thrillers featuring missing, mistaken, or "changed" children.
--Marshal Zeringue
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