What Stalks Among Us
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
From Sarah Hollowell, author of A Dark and Starless Forest, comes a spine-tingling, deliriously creepy YA speculative thriller about two best friends trapped in a corn maze with corpses that look just like them.
Best friends and high school seniors Sadie and Logan make their first mistake when they ditch their end-of-year field trip to the amusement park in favor of exploring some old, forgotten backroads. The last thing they expect to come across is a giant, abandoned corn maze.
But with a whole day of playing hooking unspooling before them, they make their second mistake. Or perhaps their third? Maybe even their fourth. Because Sadie and Logan have definitely entered this maze before. And again before that.
When they stumble on the corpses in the maze, identical to them in every way (if you can ignore the stab and gunshot wounds)--from their clothes to their hidden scars to their dyed hair, to that one missing tooth--they quickly realize they’ve not only entered this maze before, they’ve died in it too. A lot. And no matter what they try, they can’t figure out what—or who—is hunting them.
Deeply unnerving, clever, and atmospheric, this time-bending, mind-bending speculative horror is a poignant meditation on the lasting effects of trauma and the healing powers of connection and forgiveness—all while delivering more surprise twists and turns than a haunted corn maze.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After ditching an end-of-year field trip to explore rural Indiana back roads, high school seniors and queer best friends Sadie and Logan stumble across an impossibly large, unseasonal corn maze. Initially excited by their find, the pair enter the maze, only to find themselves trapped. There, doors inexplicably appear and disappear, rooms loop in on themselves, bizarre apparent reenactments detail the worst days of their lives, and corpses emerge—the grisly remnants of other trapped unfortunates as well as their own seeming body doubles. As Sadie and Logan uncover layer after layer of their increasingly horrifying reality, the duo race to solve the mystery of their entrapment before the maze swallows them for good. Via Sadie's insightful first-person narration, Hollowell (A Dark and Starless Forest) skillfully entwines atmospheric prose bursting with 2010s pop-culture references, and disturbing scenes of body horror with sensitive explorations of neurodivergence, misogyny, internalized anti-fat bias, and emotional abuse. Sadie and Logan's friendship serves as a strong and passionate anchor, giving heft to both the physical and interpersonal stakes of this twisted ma(i)ze of surreal psychological horror. Sadie is white; Logan reads as East Asian. Ages 13–up.