Disappearance at Devil's Rock: A Novel

Paul Tremblay

Jun 2016 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

From Paul Tremblay, the author of A Head Full of Ghosts, comes a contemporary psychological suspense concerning a family shaken to its core after the mysterious disappearance of a teenage boy.

“A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare,” raved Stephen King about Paul Tremblay’s previous novel. Now, Tremblay returns with another disturbing tale sure to unsettle readers.

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.

Ratings and reviews

Paul Tremblay's A Headful of Ghosts was a 5-star read for me last year, so when I received an ARC of Disappearance at Devil's Rock, it immediately jumped the queue and went to the top of my TBR pile. I should have left it at the bottom. Disappearance at Devil's Rock was so disappointing that I hate to see it shelved next to its fabulous predecessor. From the beginning, Tremblay made some stylistic choices which I found at first annoying and then downright irritating. First were the chapter headings, reminiscent of Dickens, which summarize the key events of each chapter, from "Elizabeth and the Call" (Chapter 1) to "Elizabeth Talks to Dave, Dinner for Two, Notifications at Night, a Fight, a Sketch" (Chapter 10) to "Elizabeth and Kate and the House and the Notes" (Chapter 15, the book's last). A fascinating article in The New Yorker on the history of the chapter explains that such headings were originally intended as "finding aids: devices for quickly locating specific material in long texts that were not meant to be read straight through." While this device comes in handy when I read the 800 pages of The Pickwick Papers, I still have sufficient memory skills to handle the 336 pages of Disappearance at Devil's Rock without the author's help. Second was Tremblay's decision to tell the story of Tommy's disappearance in present tense, with regular flashbacks to earlier events. I suspect the use of present tense was intended to make the reader feel a part of the search for Tommy, but I found it artificial and strangely emotionally distancing. Third, and most irksome, was Tremblay's innovative (to me, at least) method of conveying dialogue, not with the standard, "Tommy says …" but with the character's name followed by a colon - a quirk which reared its ugly head on page 18 and progressively worsened until Tremblay was writing conversations like this one after Josh spills his drink: "Luis: 'You need a straw or a sippy cup?' Tommy: 'Chirps!' Josh: 'I'm gonna be all sticky. Bugs will be all over me now.'" I felt like I was watching an old pinball machine, as the conversational ball bounced from friend to friend. I could echo the complaints of other Goodreads reviewers, such as Teri's "repetitive writing"; KC's "boring and unnecessary" dialogue; and Jessica Weil's "wish [that] the pieces of this story came together in a more satisfying way." Instead, I'll simply put down my pencil and go find something better to read. I received a free copy of Disappearance at Devil's Rock from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I didn't want to put it down. It is bleak. It makes you ache for the characters and out of fear of yourself maybe having to experience something like that in your own life. Tremblay is a gifted writer.

Thoroughly enjoyable.

About the author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.