Boy in the Box

February 3, 2020
Desolate landscapes and guilt-laden consciences pervade this fraught horror novel from Fitch (Dirty Water). Ten years ago, Jonathan Hollis traveled with three friends to the Adirondack Mountains for a bachelor party weekend of drinking and hunting. The inebriated men mistook a young boy wandering the wilderness for a deer and killed him. Realizing their mistake, they locked the body in a storage trunk and buried him in the woods, but the weight of their shame caused deep rifts and led to the suicide of the man who pulled the trigger. Now developers are razing the burial spot and the threat of exposure sends Jonathan and his surviving friends, Michael and Conner, back to the woods to move the body before their secret can be unearthed. Returning to the bleak, remote terrain brings to light the truth of the boy’s identity and his nightmarish reason for being in the woods in the first place. Though the characters suffer from a lack of nuance, the deeply unnerving imagery (“The skin seemed to fall away from the bone like a carcass left in water”) will keep horror lovers hooked. Fitch spins isolation and paranoia into a successfully frightening yarn.

March 1, 2020
Ten years ago, brothers Conner and Michael and their friends Jonathan and Gene went hunting deep in the Adirondack Mountains. Somehow, in those deserted woods, it wasn't a deer that came out of the trees when they took their shot; it was a young boy. The four conspired to bury the body and their secret, but none of them was ever the same. Now, Gene has killed himself and the other three men are left with not only the guilt but a very real threat to their secret in the form of a new building development. They go back to the woods to try to make things right, but something unnatural has been patiently waiting to collect its final payment. Narrated mostly by Jonathan, the novel is a slow but compelling burn, where every dread-inducing detail matters. By the time the three friends make it to the hunting grounds, readers will feel just how unstoppable the horror is, and they will not be able to look away. This is a harrowing and intense psychological horror novel for fans of Peter Straub, Jac Jemc, and Ania Ahlborn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)