Stony River. Tricia Dower

It wasn’t all poodle skirts and rock ‘n’ roll—in Stony River, N.J., the 50s was a perilous time to come of age. Absent mothers, controlling fathers, biblical injunctions, teenage longing and small-town pretense abound, with the threat of violence all around: crazy fathers, dirty boys, strange men in strange cars, one dead girl, one never seen and another gone missing.