Pricker Boy

Description

Young adult fiction has rarely been so creepy as in author Reade Scott Whinnem’s debut. A contemporary ghost story, “The Pricker Boy” teasingly walks the line between psychological suspense and supernatural thriller–and keeps readers guessing right until the end.
This is the literary equivalent of a horror movie. It’s “Lord of the Flies” meets “The Blair Witch Project.”..only scarier.
There’s something lurking in the woods just beyond the Widow’s Stone. Stucks Cumberland has seen it–a boy with skin that’s as gray as dead bark, covered head to toe in thorns.
It seems impossible. But then, nothing about this summer is as it should be. Stucks’s best friend, Pete, has grown sullen and abusive. Ronnie wears long sleeves despite the heat, self-conscious about the scar that reminds everyone of a day they’d like to forget. Vivek’s jokes seem increasingly desperate, and Emily is stirring feelings in Stucks that he doesn’t know “what” to do with.
And through it all the Pricker Boy is out there, watching them from the edge of the woods. At least, Stucks thinks that’s what’s happening. But it’s hard to concentrate with all the buzzing–the relentless buzzing that started in the trees and is now crawling around the surface of his brain….
Chilling and lyrical, “The Pricker Boy” is a ghost story with substance–a thriller that takes readers on a journey deep into the dark woods and deeper still into the dark corners of the human soul.