WHISPERING PINES

An unearthly, eyeball-stealing cosmic horror stalks kids.

Whispering Pines, Connecticut, is a strange town where the speed limit has a decimal point and school rules include bans on both chalk and the wearing of garlic. New-kid Rae wants a fresh start—a year ago, the middle schooler had confided in her best friend that Rae’s father was abducted by the government to cover up alien existence, only to be betrayed when her secrets were spread, leading to ridicule and ostracization. Her neighbor Caden is the school weirdo: His mother’s a ghost hunter, and his gift of paranormal empathy landed him in trouble in his younger years. Moreover, his brother has disappeared, and he’s responsible. While both kids navigate desire for friendship and connection as well as their places in complicated family dynamics, what brings them together is a mystery about something hunting kids and stealing their eyes—and its possible connection to a terrible adjacent dimension packed with horrors. The scary parts (aside from eyeballs, bodies, abominations, and the like) capitalize on sensations of wrongness, primal fears, being watched, and twisted games of hide-and-seek. The third-person narration alternates between the two characters, and in addition to their plots (both the realistically nuanced family-and-friend storylines and the genre-specific pulpy thread), the town’s overflowing with red herrings to complicate the mystery and seed future Whispering Pines stories. One side character has a Japanese surname; otherwise characters default to white.

Perfect for reading under a blanket with a flashlight.