Archetypes, Anxieties, and Shifting Futures: A Review of Shya Scanlon’s “The Guild of Saint Cooper”

The Guild of Saint Cooper by Shya Scanlon Dzanc Books; 350 p. As an alternative teenager in 1990 I was friends with many people obsessed with the TV show Twin Peaks. I could see that it was cool, but I found it baffling, not in the right way. The Kyle MacLachlan character in his dark suit was handsome, strange, an outsider, and vibrating with something that looked romantically like misery—and the actor had been Paul Atreides in Dune, my God, […]

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Young and Adrift: A Review of Alden Jones’s “Unaccompanied Minors”

Unaccompanied Minors by Alden Jones (New American Press; 168 p.) In the 1980s, I went to an East Coast boarding school that was made notorious by a gang-rape of a drunk girl by a group of boys, a few years before I attended. It happened in the dorms after lights-out, and dozens of kids who weren’t participants knew about it and did nothing, including an eventual friend of mine. He was 14, terrified, and hid under his bed. As a […]

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