Darker Days: A Novel [9780063472525]

Overview

"Darker Days is a meticulous work of terror, a harrowing drop into a moral nightmare. If you can imagine the philosophical oomph of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal joined to the rustic shocks of Midsommer, and all of it transported to America's suburbia, you'd have something like Darker Days. It’s a scream.”—Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author of King Sorrow

“One of the most vital and exciting voices in modern horror.”—Film Director Mike Flanagan

From the author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller HEX comes a modern horror story with echoes of Paul Tremblay, Joe Hill, and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” about a gilded street in a small Pacific Northwest town where the charmed residents have made a frightening bargain . . . with devastating consequences.

Sometimes you think you can see things behind the fence. Bad things. So it’s better not to look. . . .

In Lock Haven, a quiet little town in Washington State, Bird Street is a special place. The residents of this pretty cul-de-sac on the edge of the woods are all successful, healthy, and happy. Their children are prodigies: well-mannered, unnaturally smart, and enviously talented.

But come November, the Darker Days descend, bringing accidents, bad luck, conflict, and illness. Luana and Ralph Lewis da Silva prepare for this, and so do their children, Kaila and Django. It is in November when a stranger appears to collect on a longstanding debt. A price must be paid for the good fortune the Bird Street community enjoys the rest of the year. A sacrifice must be made.

So it has been for more than a century. To assuage their guilt, the residents of Bird Street choose carefully who will be sent into the woods. Usually, it is an elderly or terminally ill individual who wishes to enter the void with dignity.

But this year, things don’t go to plan and events take a terrifying turn. . . .