Kevin Guertin

I am a gay man in my 40s who grew up as a child and teenager in a small Conservative town. Growing up in that toxic environment as a gay boy was very difficult. You couldn't come out for the risk of rejection and violence from multiple sources.

Although I kind of knew I was gay at a very young age, it was made absolutely clear when I developed a mad crush on a boy in High School. That didn't develop into anything. He was straight, of course.

I wanted to watch the Netflix series, but not before I read the original source material. I love these feel-good coming of age (and coming out) LGBTQ love stories because I think back to that crush and wish I was able to experience that when I was a boy. To just... be. I lost so much of my life because I couldn't do that.

It is nice to see that the current young generations are in a much more accepting society of fluid sexualities and genders. That's not to say that it's not bad in a lot of areas, but it is drastically better than when I was a boy.

This graphic novel perfectly captures that young love.

This is not so much a review, but reminiscing about how this was the absolute first novel I ever read that wasn't for school back in grade 8 in the early nineties. A friend lent it to me, a book that belonged to her mother who was a teacher and thus began a lifetime of reading all of his works. On the cusp of becoming a teenager, I clearly remember reading it in my closet inside my sleeping bag with a little lamp and munching on sunflower seeds, scared of leaving the security of the closet. I would end up sleeping in it until the morning. My bedroom was in a windowless basement of an old house. It got suffocatingly dark in that basement and I liked it in my closet!

My friend lent me more of her mother's Stephen King novels and that became a ritual, reading Stephen King in my closet with a lamp and sunflower seeds. It annoyed my mother, for some reason, that I wasn't sleeping in my bed.

This is a must-read classic ghost story, the best of its kind. I reread it a few years ago because I had planned to read the sequel, Doctor Sleep, and it was just as good outside of the closet! ;)