![]() ![]() When I wrote about Tuttle’s “A Friend in Need,” I referred to it as “existentialist horror.” I was half-joking but I think I was onto something. ![]() Night Shyamalan-type twist ending but Tuttle downplayed it into something not as jarring but more central to Sharon’s being. –she hides under her old bed, accepting the role of monster. However, how can you live outside your true time? With nowhere else to go and nothing else to do– Remembering the last time her family was happy, Sharon is transported back in time to watch herself in childhood, back when her only worry was the monster under the bed. In “Stranger in the House,” Sharon, the third-person protagonist, is abandoned by her snide significant other while traveling through the neighborhood where she grew up. ![]() The last two examples were grim but Lisa Tuttle’s take spun the concept to a another type of strange horror. This happened to Bruce Willis in The Kid, Binkley in Bloom County, and in a Twilight Zone episode and a Harlan Ellison story that I can’t remember the titles of. Other times a character meets his childhood self, usually to the younger self’s disappointment and disgust. Alfred Bester in “5,271,009” treats it as absurd. In Ken Grimwood’s Replay, the concept is played straight. Many writers have created scenarios where their protagonist returns to their youth. ![]()
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