A family is shaken to its core after the mysterious disappearance of a teenage boy in this eerie tale, a blend of literary fiction, psychological suspense, and supernatural horror from the author of A Head Full of Ghosts.
“A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare,” raved Stephen King about Paul Tremblay’s previous novel. Now, Tremblay returns with another disturbing tale sure to unsettle readers.
Late one summer night, Elizabeth Sanderson receives the devastating news that every mother fears: her thirteen-year-old son, Tommy, has vanished without a trace in the woods of a local park.
The search isn’t yielding any answers, and Elizabeth and her young daughter, Kate, struggle to comprehend Tommy’s disappearance. Feeling helpless and alone, their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration: the local and state police have uncovered no leads. Josh and Luis, the friends who were the last to see Tommy before he vanished, may not be telling the whole truth about that night in Borderland State Park, when they were supposedly hanging out a landmark the local teens have renamed Devil’s Rock.
Living in an all-too-real nightmare, riddled with worry, pain, and guilt, Elizabeth is wholly unprepared for the strange series of events that follow. She believes a ghostly shadow of Tommy materializes in her bedroom, while Kate and other local residents claim to see a shadow peering through their windows in the dead of night. Then, random pages torn from Tommy’s journal begin to mysteriously appear—entries that reveal an introverted teenager obsessed with the phantasmagoric; the loss of his father, killed in a drunk-driving accident a decade earlier; a folktale involving the devil and the woods of Borderland; and a horrific incident that Tommy believed connects them.
As the search grows more desperate, and the implications of what happened become more haunting and sinister, no one is prepared for the shocking truth about that night and Tommy’s disappearance at Devil’s Rock.
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.
Tremblay’s novel A Head Full of Ghosts “scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare,” King said. That goes a long way toward explaining why Tremblay has been anointed one of the new masters of horror, and why his work has picked up Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards, among […]
But rather than simply pit his human protagonists against a group of inhuman monsters, Tremblay uses the tight confines of their cabin and the tense atmosphere and breathless pacing of the home-invasion narrative to delve deeper into the psyches of all of his characters, both victims and perpetrators, and explore the mindset that would allow […]
This year was an interesting one for horror. Not only did genre fans see new books from established heavy hitters, they welcomed a grandmaster’s novel back into print after 52 years, encountered incredible debuts, rafts of new and disturbing short stories, and at least one satire that frightens just as easily as its source material. If there were room to list every […]
It’s October, and an odd energy hangs in the air. The days have grown shorter, and evenings have taken on a surreal, ethereal cast. A haze of pumpkin spice hangs thick around local pubs and coffeehouses. And you find yourself drawn inexorably to the spookiest books on your bookshelf. With only a few short weeks until Halloween, we’re highlighting […]
In Paul Tremblay’s latest novel, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, a 13-year-old named Tommy Sanderson goes missing. His vanishing pulls his family into a downward spiral of grief and despair, even as the police begin to piece together what happened.
