11 Books Every Edgy Millennial Read As A Teen

If you were a fan of this book, you can probably quote the whole thing. The Gashlycrumb Tinies contains an alphabet rhyme that chronicles the deaths of 26 children, beginning with “A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs.” It’s dark, it’s funny, and it’s what every edgy emo kid was reading in the early 2000s.

If you take ABC Afterschool Special, dial the stakes up to 11, and turn it into a manga, you get Confidential Confessions. This manga anthology series deals with self-harm, coercive sex work, sexual assault, drug addiction, and more — all involving teenagers. Its willingness to confront these issues head-on makes Reiko Momochi’s manga series downright shocking at times, and even ill-advised to read. One story contains an in-depth discussion of suicide methods that has stuck with me for the last 20 years, so this is your so-not-edgy warning to make sure you’re in a good headspace if you’re picking this one up.

There are some books you just can’t un-read, and Coin Locker Babies is one of them. Based on a real-life phenomenon in 1980s Japan, the novel centers on two young men, Hashi and Kiku, who are abandoned in coin-operated lockers as newborns. I’d tell you this book becomes downright distressing in places, if one of those places wasn’t its very first line. If you’re a fan of the utter weirdness of postmodern fiction and can stomach the novel’s grossest scenes — including the aforementioned first line, in which Kiku’s birth mother sexually molests him before taping him up in a box and abandoning him — you’re in for a wild ride with this one.

Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for taking things to a weird place, but it’s his most experimental novel that deserves attention here. Haunted follows 17 writers, alternating between their experiences on a doomed retreat and the stories they write and share. The most famous of these stories is “Guts,” the tale of a teenager whose masturbation habits put him in a life-or-death struggle at the bottom of his family’s swimming pool. Dubbed “the purest distillation of Chuck’s style and sensibility” by Peter Derk, reading “Guts” was a like a rite of passage for edgy, bookish Millennials. Other stories in Haunted deal with all forms of sexual exploitation, dismemberment, transphobic violence, and suicide, so trust me when I tell you that a masturbation accident is the least of your worries here.

Quentin P wants to create the perfect companion. So he kidnaps young men, drugs them, and lobotomizes them with an ice pick. Inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer’s killing spree, Zombie takes the form of Quentin P’s diary, walking us through the killer’s fascination with his victims, his methods of torture, and his personal opinions regarding the quality of his work. It’s far from an easy read, and it hasn’t aged all that well. Reading Zombie in the 21st century, you’re bound to notice its problematic conflation of mental illness with criminality and homicidal tendencies.

Before The Hunger Games, there was Battle Royale. Koushun Takami’s subversive novel takes place in a near-future, fascist Japan. As in Panem, terror is the name of the game, and how better to keep the people from rising up than to kidnap their children and force them to kill one another? Trapped on an island rigged with explosives and each given a random weapon, a class of 9th graders must duel to the death if they want to make it out alive. Along the way, we learn about their tragic home lives, which include sadism and sexual abuse. As their numbers dwindle, a handful of the teens mount a resistance effort no one can forget, making Battle Royale perhaps the most triumphant book on this list.

Although he’s perhaps best known for creating Invader Zim, Jhonen Vásquez’s breakout project was Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. The eponymous Johnny C. is out to rid the world of assholes, jerkwads, and people who could hurt him. He’s left rivers of blood in his wake, often killing in broad daylight, but no one ever links him with his crimes. When Johnny’s anonymity — and evident immortality — begin to weigh on him, however, his mental state deteriorates, and he finds himself going toe-to-toe with God, Satan, and his own demons. Riddled with violence and gore, JTHM may be the tamest entry on this list.

As of 2020, roughly one-third of Millennials have at least one diagnosed behavioral health condition. We may have Gen-Xers like Elizabeth Wurtzel to thank for helping reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness. That doesn’t change the fact that many of us struggled to access mental health care growing up. Many continue to struggle today. Wurtzel’s 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation, was a beacon to Millennials who realized they were different from their peers — and consequently learned that they were not alone.