Short Synopsis
Shirley Jackson meets The Twilight Zone in this riveting novel of supernatural horror from the award-winning author of Next Door Lived a Girl.

Full Synopsis
A village on the Devil's Moor: a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition. There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village's darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and evocative of Stephen King's classic short story "Children of the Corn" and the films The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke and Village of the Damned by Wolf Rilla.

"Too subtle to be lurid yet too spooky for comfort, this book should appeal to [fans] of psychological fiction and literary tales of the supernatural." ---Publishers Weekly

"The tender, terrifying, capricious nature of children is the repeated theme; adding to it the occasional stunning image . . . makes this an episodic, poetic, nightmarish offspring of Grace Metalious' Peyton Place and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes." ---Booklist

"A devious intimation of homegrown terrors likely to keep [fans] awake long after closing time has come and gone." ---Kirkus

"A very elegant nightmare, so appalling and so beautiful." ---Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife

"Narrators Alison Larkin and James Langton have the skill to make these creepy stories even creepier. Their gentle tones belie the horrors of a town seemingly lost in time." ---AudioFile