Award-winning poet Michael Cadnum has fashioned a superb tale of the macabre, building subtly from a low note of quest foreboding to a shattering pitch of terror.
Leonard Lewis was an odd child. Not nasty, but definitely odd. He was almost obsessed (or was it possessed?) by the grandfather who had died before he was born. It was when he began photographing cemeteries that his mother began to worry. Of course, it was nice that Len had a hobby. He won awards for his eerie, nocturnal images. But then Mary Lewis found her son's secret pictures—the ones he kept under lock and key—and her worry turned to fear.
Mary's nephew, Paul, was a restaurant reviewer. When Len went missing, Mary asked Paul to look for him; the boy had been staying at a remote cabin in the wine country. To Paul, a trip to the woods seemed like a welcome break from his rounds of trendy restaurants, but it was a trip he soon regretted taking. For what awaited him at the rustic hideaway was, quite literally, the stuff of his worst nightmares.
Chilling, brilliantly written, this novel, Michael Cadnum's first, marks the arrival of a noteworthy new voice in horror fiction.
