A magician and a dark evil at Halloween come together in an intriguing coming-of-age thriller.Readers of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and All Hallows by Christopher Golden will love this. In 1970, four boys on the cusp of becoming teenagers notice strange events occurring in Maplewood, NH, timed with the late-night arrival of an old magician who has taken up residence in a boarding house in their neighborhood where one of the tenants is a reclusive pulp horror writer. The writer's fears have kept him from venturing outside in over forty years, fears linked to the magician's previous visit. As children go missing in town, the four boys try to piece together seemingly unrelated phenomena and realize dark forces are at work, but no one will believe them.FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and...

Diagnosed with a brain tumor, Geoffrey returns to his hometown for a reunion of the Jokers Club (his childhood gang) with the hopes of unearthing the imagination he held in his youth. Upon arriving, he discovers the creative juices that drove his writing many years ago surround him: the tombstone salesman who chisels out names of the dead, the far-sighted barber with the bloodstained smock and the reclusive Tin Man, just to name a few.