Neverland

From Douglas Clegg, New York Times bestselling author of Isis, comes a southern gothic tale of family secrets and games of innocence turned to darkness. For years, the Jackson family has vacationed at Rowena Wandigaux Lee's old Victorian house on Gull Island, a place of superstition and legend off the southern coast of the U.S. One particular summer, young Beau follows his cousin Sumter into a hidden shack in the woods—and christens this new clubhouse "Neverland." Neverland has a secret history, unknown to the children... The rundown shack in the woods is the key to an age-old mystery, a place forbidden to all. But Sumter and his cousins gather in its dusty shadows to escape the tensions at their grandmother's house. Neverland becomes the place where children begin to worship a creature of shadows, which Sumter calls "Lucy." All gods demand sacrifice... It begins with small sacrifices, little games, strange imaginings. While Sumter's games spiral out of control, twisting from the mysterious to the macabre, a nightmarish presence rises among the straggly trees beyond the bluffs overlooking the sea. And when Neverland itself is threatened with destruction, the children's games take on a horrifying reality—and Gull Island becomes a place of unrelenting terror.

From Publishers Weekly

An adolescent's cruel mischief proves a pathway to a dimension of otherworldly terrors in this creepy supernatural thriller, first published as a mass-market paperback in 1991. One summer on Gull Island off the coast of Georgia, Sumter Monroe indoctrinates his cousin Beau Jackson into the marvels of Neverland, Sumter's name for a tumble-down shack on their mutual maternal grandmother's property that's a shrine to a god he names Lucy. In Neverland, reality and illusion blur eerily, and the spirit of fun takes a malevolent turn as Sumter begin offering sacrifices of an increasingly disturbing nature to placate Lucy and sustain his special relationship with her. Clegg (The Vampyricon) crafts a haunting story redolent with the influence of Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, and other classic horror writers. His credible rendering of the internal lives of children and their imaginations give this flight of dark fancy a firm and frightening foothold in reality. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling author of Isis, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among other novels. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award.

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