A chilling and masterfully crafted teen horror novel guaranteed to keep the pages turning, the mind reeling, and the lamp on any reader’s bedside table on long after midnight. Privileged and popular Caleb Mason is celebrating his high school graduation when he receives a mysterious, disturbing letter from his long-lost childhood playmate, Christine. Caleb and his jokester friend Bean decide to travel to his tiny hometown of Hudsonville, Florida, to find her. Upon arrival, they discover the town has taken a horrifying turn for the worse. Caleb’s childhood home is abandoned and his father has disappeared. Children are going missing. The old insane asylum has reopened, and Christine is locked inside. Her mother, a witch, is consumed with madness, and Christine’s long-dead twin sister whispers clues to Caleb through the static of an a.m. radio. The terrifying prophesies of the spirits are coming to pass. Sixteen clocks are ticking; sixty-six murdered souls will bring about the end of the world. As Caleb peels back layer after layer of mystery, he uncovers a truth more horrible than anything he had imagined, a truth that could only be uttered by the lips of the dead.

Caleb wonders, suddenly, when this became his life. It almost seems, in this strange moment, as if he’s been sleepwalking for years. As if he’s gone through these grueling years of study and romance and sports and life without even being truly aware, without being really present. It’s as if it were all hardly real at all. Now, on this deck overlooking the black, endless ocean, he’s suddenly, disconcertingly awake. And for some reason, he thinks of the dream again, of when he was a kid

This was quite a good book from an author I’ve never heard of until today. The boy (or soon to be man), Caleb, returns to his home town to help one of his childhood friends escape from an insane asylum turned Dream monitoring and prevention station. In doing so, he loses a friend, finds out that there really are ghosts and discovers a very old foretelling which prophesized that if 66 people died, then the end of the world would come. There are 65 missing children in that lake and other unfortunate souls who lost their lives over the years.

Christine’s mother is also insane. The sheriff of the town was also insane. The mayor disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Then you find out that actually – when the insane asylum closed … dum dum dum – they released all of the inmates “into the wild”.

Now there’s a race against time to see if there’s any truth in what they say or not and the ending is bittersweet as they run away from that place with the sky getting darker and darker for mid-afternoon as they uncover another dead body, making the count 66.

I liked the book but the way it turns and twists and changes direction from horror back to suspense, back to thriller – left me a bit wanting. It’s trying to be a mystery punctuated by the supernatural and while it’s close, it’s not there yet. It’s decent horror and good for a Halloween read around the campfire but I wouldn’t strain my eyes too hard if I were you.