Black Gate

Paul Tremblay wrote what is easily one of the most acclaimed horror novels of last year, A Head Full of Ghosts, about a hit reality TV show that captures a real exorcism, and the investigation into what really happened, 15 years later. Nathan Ballingrud called it “Outstanding. Creepy, surprising, occasionally funny, always compassionate… one of the best horror novels I’ve read in years.” Tremblay’s follow up novel, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, arrives in hardcover next week from William Morrow, and needless to say, expectations are sky-high.

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.

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock will be published by William Morrow on June 21, 2016. It is 336 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. Read an excerpt at (of all places) the Wall Street Journal.

A new collection by Patricia A. McKillip is a major event. In the first four decades of her very accomplished career she released a scant two short story collections: The Throme of the Erril of Sherill (1984) and Harrowing the Dragon (2005). Taychon Publications has doubled that number just in the last four years, starting with Wonders of the Invisible World (2012), and now Dreams of Distant Shores, on sale in trade paperback next week.

Dreams of Distant Shores includes four short stories, a novella, and a short (121 page) novel, Something Rich and Strange, set in Brian Froud’s Faerielands, which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature in 1994. It also includes “Writing High Fantasy,” a 6-page essay by Patricia A. McKillip, and “Dear Pat: Afterword,” a new 6-page essay by Peter S. Beagle. See the back cover above for the complete description (click for a more legible version.)

Dreams of Distant Shores will be published by Tachyon Publications on June 14, 2016. It is 274 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Thomas Canty.

This is the year of Disney. Three of the top four films (Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, and The Jungle Book) are Disney properties… not to mention the new Star Wars film scheduled for release in December. And on the small screen, the Disney Channel original film Descendants — featuring the children of Disney’s most famous villains, including Maleficent and Jafar, and Cruella de Vil — has proven to be a big hit.

Melissa de la Cruz’s The Isle of the Lost, released in hardcover by Hyperion last year, was the prequel to Descendants, and it became an international blockbuster. The novel spent thirty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list — including fifteen at the #1 spot — and has more than a million copies in print. Descendants proved to be the #1 most watched cable TV movie of 2015 (#5 of all time), and even its soundtrack soared to #1 on iTunes.

Now de la Cruz brings us a second book, Return to the Isle of the Lost, which bridges the gap between Descendants and its sequel, currently in development. Everything changes for our villainous heroes (heroic villains?) when they receive anonymous messages demanding that they return to the Isle… and when their arrival sets them on the path of a new and exciting magical adventure deep in the catacombs beneath the Isle of the Lost. Return to the Isle of the Lost will be published by Disney-Hyperion on May 24, 2016. It is 313 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover, or $12.99 for the digital version.