Introduction and Guide: Damaged Youth

by L. Andrew Cooper, editor

with Monte Remer, editorial assistant

and Silas the Scribble Man, spiritual guide

Welcome to Damaged Youth, the “Baby Blue” phase of the second Exhibit from the Horrific Scribes archive of dark fiction and (some) poetry.

A lot of horror stories and their dark cousins focus on children and childhood. Even when they’re not explicitly based on the experiences of children, their monsters, according to critics under the iron-clad influence of Freud, are “the return of the repressed,” or incarnations of emotions and experiences, actual or possible, necessarily forced away from consciousness to allow a person to develop into a normal adult. But you don’t have to be a Freudian to believe that every anxiety, no matter how sophisticated or adult its origin, has a link to a basic fear born in childhood.

Childhood is when we learn how to fear. Childhood is necessarily traumatic. When you’re a kid, hurt is new, so it hurts more. And there’s plenty of room in that developing brain for the hurt to fester. Sometimes it festers into feeling at odds with everyone and everything.

Because kids hurt more, we don’t like to see kids get hurt. If we see a kid, and we identify with the kid, and the kid gets hurt, the pain we feel along with the kid will be like the pain we felt when we were a kid, the more pain, pain that might be the one part of childhood we’re totally glad we left behind.

This phase of the second Exhibit is about childhood and pain, children in pain, the effects of pain on children that show up during childhood and that show up years later, adults still coping with those effects, and the pain’s violent consequences, some of which can be very long-term.

This selection of stories emphasizes childhood trauma and its ramifications, taken to extremes.

Like Horrific Scribes in general, the Exhibits are recommended for mature readers who are not sensitive to content many people would find disturbing. For specific trigger warnings, consult the main archive. Otherwise, proceed at your own risk.

GALLERY ONE: ADULT DECISIONS

“Burn the Witch” by Shawn Montgomery. Two brothers believe their meth-cooking (and using) mother is a witch. This story’s strength comes from its narration from a child’s perspective that includes enough information for readers to understand a lot more about how horrifying the situation is. However, the information isn’t completely reliable, and since the children in the story come to a ghastly decision point based on a hard-to-believe interpretation of events, the limitations of perspective itself become terrifying. Childhood’s lack of knowledge and understanding—as well as the learning that corrects it—is traumatic.

“Every Nowhere Leads to Somewhere” by Emmie Christie. This piece is dark fantasy at its best, recalling work like Pan’s Labyrinth (film, 2006) in some of its themes. A girl enters a world of imagination in her backyard, but something she doesn’t want to confront threatens her escape. Will she confront the darkness?

“Snow Angel” by Amy Grech. Grech is a master at crafting short horror stories that are emotionally eviscerating. I was lucky to get “Snow Angel” for the archive. This story is about a little girl with cerebral palsy. She lives in constant pain. She understands the rest of her short life will be agonizing. Her father loves her so much that he doesn’t know what to do, but he thinks he knows what she wants, and he wants to help her.

GALLERY TWO: CHILDHOOD RETURNS

“The Screaming Man” by C.M. Saunders. This story works so well because the narrator takes the story backward through time with casual invisibility, moving the subject matter from a point in the narrator’s adulthood when he is revisiting a childhood haunt toward points in childhood itself, addressing memory and time thematically without calling attention to the fact that he is traveling through time using memory as a device. When he hits a certain point in history, though—an origin of childhood trauma—everything shatters into place.

BONUS: “Interview with Author C.M. Saunders: Silent Mine (2025).” This interview is about the book that was my first encounter with Saunders’s work, the western horror novella Silent Mine. The style and tone of Silent Mine, though suitable to the story, are so different from those in “The Screaming Man” that the contrast merits deep respect for Saunders as a craftsperson. I could try to stretch, but really this interview has nothing to do with Damaged Youth. That’s why it’s a “bonus.”

“My Mother’s Way” by M. Brandon Robbins. I featured this piece in the first Exhibit in the “Hauntings” gallery, where it stood in as a story about the ghost of a man’s mother who returns to continue the emotional abuse she started when he was a child. That description justifies its inclusion here as well, but in this context, I’d like to emphasize the story as an adult’s battle specifically with PTSD from childhood abuse. The abuse, far from being locked from consciousness, intrudes on the mind to repeat itself as easily as a ghost walking through a wall. The battle with the ghost, then, becomes a battle with a mental illness that five percent of adults in the United States experience in any given year.

“The Inheritance” by Trisha Ridinger McKee. The premise of this story—that when your parents die, if you’re next in line, you inherit their memories—is truly terrifying. Most people cherish some illusions about Mommy and Daddy. But what if, while Daddy wasn’t around, he was a very bad man? What if you repressed just enough so that you could have an illusion while others suffered traumas because of what Daddy really was—and now you have an insider’s perspective on causing all those traumas?

GALLERY THREE: WRONGS REDRESSED

 “Of Gnarled Roots and Rot” by Jason Frederick Myers. Not everyone finds a healthy way to cope with childhood trauma. This story is Southern Gothic about a tree that’s haunted, cursed, or maybe simply wrong. As children, you approach it with friends, and sure enough, there’s a tragedy. The tree’s roots, like the trauma itself, seem to follow you everywhere. The strangeness surrounds you, overpowers you, and pushes you toward dark conclusions.

“The Revenge Room” by Robb White. This piece also returns from Exhibit One, the “Traps” gallery, not to be showcased for the brilliant trap it involves (though if you haven’t read it, enjoy) but for the psychology of the character seeking revenge—a boy so traumatized that he becomes a monomaniacal man. The way he tries to get satisfaction for the wounds he suffered is extreme, to say the least. Does revenge soothe trauma? Don’t look for easy, moralizing answers.

“Calluses” by Tim Brown. The last two pieces in this phase of the Exhibit, like the first (Shawn Montgomery’s “Burn the Witch”), excel in their constructions of children’s perspectives. “Calluses” takes the perspective of a child so neglected that, seemingly without consciousness of any abuse, the child begins methodical self-harm to become “tough” like Daddy. Trauma builds upon trauma, which builds upon trauma and leads to catastrophe. To what extent, if at all, is this story about revenge? Might any revenge involved be… unconscious? Also note the gender ambiguity this story shares with “Of Gnarled Roots and Rot.”

“Hush” by Matt Hollingsworth. This story takes the perspective of a child who suffers from extreme noise sensitivity, and, over the years, something develops that fights back against those who seem intent on hurting him—fights back in horrific ways. Of all the stories in this gallery that touch on redressing the wrongs that have caused childhood trauma, this one seems most tragic but also most ambivalent about the idea of revenge’s monstrosity. Can lashing out to soothe a child’s suffering truly be monstrous?