Ronald Malfi

In the fall of 1993, the quiet suburb of Harting Farms is shocked when children begin to vanish, and one is found dead near December Park—a great, sweeping expanse that is sunken below the streets and surrounded on three sides by vast woodlands—a place children believe is haunted. Newspapers call the abductor the Piper because he has come to lead children away, while kids whisper darker names for him in the school halls. Angelo Mazzone and his friends discover a link to the dead girl and take up the search for the killer, vowing to stop the Piper's reign of terror. Their teenage pledge becomes a journey of self-discovery and an odyssey into the darkness of their own hometown.

December Park

Casie Blevins

DNF at page 283. For god's sake this novel needs to go on a diet. It's bloated and fat and pointless. Of what I read so far I feel like he could have chopped it down by 200 pages and that would have vastly improved the story. There are so many floating scenes with just a bit of dialogue that serve no purpose. The motivations of the characters seem weak or waffly. There's not enough forward motion to the plot to carry it further. I am just all around disappointed by it. 

I was tricked by the lovely cover.

“A complex and chilling tale of friends, family and the often murderous secrets that hide in the dark” from the award-winning author of Bone White (Robert McCammon, New York Times–bestselling author). The Piper has come to take the children away . . . In the fall of 1993, fifteen-year-old Angelo Mazzone sees his first dead body. The murder is linked to the Piper, the possible abductor of three other children—who haven’t been found—over the past few months. Some people in town say the woods are haunted, but Angelo and his friends head in anyway, to search the darkness for a monster. What they find there will change who they are—and everything they once believed in . . . “A frightening, thoroughly engaging read with a deeply moving series of narrative motifs running throughout, ones that needle the mind and tug at the heart in the best way . . . A triumph of suspense, an affectionate ode to adolescence and by far Ronald Malfi’s strongest effort to date.” —Horror Novel Reviews “Malfi is a man of many voices, a sort of literary version of Mel Blanc (the ‘man of a thousand voices’), but all of his voices are captivating, though none of them quite the same. Horror and crime fans will find much to like here.” —Booklist