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.

To me, good horror has to be about the characters. I mean, of course you could say the same for pretty much any genre. But for me, horror (books & movies & TV) really lives & dies by the quality of the characterizations. No amount of ambience or gore or terror is going to make up for paper-thin characters. And of course, when we really care about the characters, the scares come easy. The terror feels real.

Paul Tremblay strikes me as an author that puts as much thought into the characters in his novels as he does the fucked-up & nightmarish situations he’s going to put them through. Disappearance of Devil’s Rock is only the second of his books that I’ve read (along with A Head Full of Ghosts), and at this point, I’d for sure consider him an auto-buy author.

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock is the story of the Sanderson family. In the middle of the night, Elizabeth Sanderson, a single mother to two children, gets one of the worst phone calls imaginable: Her fourteen-year-old son, Tommy, has disappeared in the woods. He was there with his friends, Luis & Josh, and according to them, Tommy just ran off into the woods & never came back. The boys weren’t supposed to be in the woods that late at night. They were having a sleepover at Josh’s, and snuck out.

The tension in the early parts of this novel is just…palpable. Elizabeth is desperate for answers, as are the police. And Luis and Josh are not entirely reliable. There are parts of their story that don’t add up, and there are things they are selectively leaving out to try & stay out of trouble.

The book bounces around a bit, chronologically. We get to spend a lot of time with Tommy & Luis & Josh prior to Tommy’s disappearance, and this is where the book really shines. These are three kids with three distinctly different personalities, and Tremblay does a great job of getting us to understand each of these boys, and to appreciate why they chose each other as friends. And I have to mention that as a Massachusetts native, I was delighted to see the use of expressions like “wicked” and “no suh”…just awesome little details.

This one definitely got under my skin quite a bit…the feeling of helplessness that Elizabeth feels…the sense of creeping dread & that something about this just isn’t quite right…it’s all pretty intense. And then, yeah, shit gets weird.

With Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, Paul Tremblay takes a very simple yet horrifying concept, the disappearance of a child, and puts his own twisted spin on it. The result is a character-driven horror novel that goes to some hellishly dark places. This book is also insanely addictive…I was through this one in just a couple days! This was a great October read…super creepy & with a great cast of characters…I loved it & I’m excited to check out more of Paul Tremblay’s books!