Paul Tremblay

In a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. But unlike rabies, the disease has a terrifyingly short incubation period of an hour or less. Those infected quickly lose their minds and are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before they inevitably succumb. Hospitals are inundated with the sick and dying, and hysteria has taken hold. To try to limit its spread, the commonwealth...

The fifteen pieces in this brilliant collection are all monsters of a kind, ready to loudly (and lovingly) smash through your head and into your heart. In "The Dead Thing," a middle-schooler struggles to deal with the aftermath of her parents' substance addictions and split. One day, her little brother claims he found a shoebox with "the dead thing" inside. He won't show it to her and he won't let the box out of his sight. In "The Last Conversation,"...

When her fourteen-year-old son disappears during a summer sleepover at Devil's Rock, Elizabeth and other residents of the town begin to see his ghost throughout the town, which leads her to believe that he is dead. She tries to maintain a sense of calm to help her younger daughter, Katie, but her anxiety builds when she begins to find crumpled pages of Tommy's journal which contain disturbing connections between Tommy's father's death, a stranger...

While on vacation, a family is taken hostage by a group of strangers who demand that they make a choice to avert the apocalypse.