Silver and Steel: Six Horror Books Featuring Elderly Protagonists

Silver and Steel: Six Horror Books Featuring Elderly Protagonists

Silver and Steel: Six Horror Books Featuring Elderly Protagonists - 505

Silver and Steel

Horror tends to focus on the young. Slasher movies tend to focus on groups of teenagers and twenty-somethings, a significant number of horror protagonists are in their thirties and forties, grappling with mid-life issues, but there isn’t a huge focus on the over-50 crowd. In fact, when elderly characters appear in horror, they’re so frequently the villains or keepers of monsters that there’s even a trope for it. But older heroes in horror should be a thing to celebrate, not a relative rarity. After all, if someone’s lived that long, they’ve seen and done much more than the average horror protagonist. Chances are, they’re tenacious and made of sterner stuff, too. To that end, here are six books featuring protagonists who, while approaching the end of their stories, are far from done with life.

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Ghost Story, Peter Straub

Straub’s gothic-horror epic of guilt and regret centers around a single question asked by four old men: “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” This question is what drives the members of the Chowder Society, a group whose nightly meetings consist of expensive drinks and utterly chilling ghost stories. But these stories aren’t as fictional as the Chowder Society would like, and slowly they form a web of death and mysterious events through the decades, centered around two enigmatic women, an “accidental” death, and a number of suicides. Straub keeps the blame ambiguous between the Chowder Society and the ancient spirit targeting them, instead focusing on the old men whose pasts finally catch up to them, and the damage their sins cause until they finally reckon with their guilt. 

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4 thoughts on “Silver and Steel: Six Horror Books Featuring Elderly Protagonists

    1. I was trying to go specifically for full books. I know that technically Earthworm Gods is a fix-up, but Bubba Ho-Tep is collected in The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (and rightfully effing so, because it’s fantastic), so I left it off.

      That isn’t to say it isn’t amazing, but also, I try to stick to specific guidelines.

  1. I think I’m one of the few people who really loves David Searcy’s “Ordinary Horror,” an oddly surreal book about an oldster in the suburbs. He plants some “gopherbane” plants to protect his roses, and weird stuff starts happening — but is it actually weird and apocalyptic, or is he just getting confused in his old age…?

  2. It is beautiful when authors treat senior protagonists with respect. My first encounter of this within the genre was Stephen King’s “Insomnia.” Thanks for these reading recommendations!

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