For Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children, the move to tiny Steuben, North Carolina, offers new hope and a new beginning. But from the first, eight-year-old Stevie's life there is an unending parade of misery and disaster.

Cruelly ostracized at his school, Stevie retreats further and further into himself -- and into a strange computer game and a group of imaginary friends.

But there is something eerie about his loyal, invisible new playmates: each shares the name of a child who has recently vanished from the sleepy Southern town. And terror grows for Step and DeAnne as the truth slowly unfolds. For their son has found something savagely evil ... and it's coming for Stevie next.

Good read. First time for this author. Love reading about LDS. Interesting twists.

Sending as a RABCK to anathema-device. Enjoy!

It has arrived; thank you so much! :D
The double cover is great - very creepy. Looking forward to reading this!

Reading this while at home with the flu (my doctor "prescribed" staying in bed with a book). I'm only about a third in so far, but my internal cogwheels are already quite busy... So far, Card has spent over 150 pages establishing not only a "good", functioning, loving Mormon family (with very rigid and conservative roles) to identify with - but also some very intense offender(s)-and-victim(s) relationships. There are potential threats and hierarchies of power all around (some more openly displayed, some more covert) - at Step's workplace everyone seems to try to screw him over (oops, a bad word!!) or potentially molest his children; the eldest son is being bullied at school and perhaps also manipulated by adults at church, who may be trying to do the same thing on a different scale to his mother as well - and now the righteous main character proclaims that in his view, a man can justifiably resort to anything (even murder) if his family is being threatened. Oh, and his wife seems to be really turned on by this. I wonder who the real monsters are (and whether the author would even consider my position)...

Update: He was considering it for a second.. which resulted in a "OMG I brought this [plague of crickets] upon myself" religious kind of interlude. Ughhh. Well, it might be even less fun than the average Stephen King novel, but now I really want to see where this is going. And the "main" part of the plot hasn't even started yet...

Later: I'm halfway through the book, and hardly anything has actually happened yet (above all, no horror plot!!!!). Plus I think it might really be written for Mormons, since there are a lot of passages like "it's just like [prophet one] and [prophet two]" without any further explanations. It also made me google Mormon underwear, and I'm not sure I learned anything significant...

Next day: Finished! Correctly guessed the killer (and the location of the graves) about halfway through. Endured more stuff akin to the things already listed above. Absolutely disliked the way the last "plot twist" was conducted. Concluded that some stories work better as short stories rather than novels. And that I'm not too keen on reading more by this particular author - at least not in the horror genre. And maybe "mainstream" horror (if it can ever be called that) is just not my cup of tea after all.

Released on a bench in Terminal 1.

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