Description
The time: the waning years of the 1990s at the dawn of the millennium.
The place: an isolated rural town called Auburn, which could be anywhere at all - a town where everyone knows everyone else?where dark secrets run through its veins like blood.
Everyone knows that sixteen—year old Mikey Childress is "different." A target for bullies since he was a small boy, everything Mikey does attracts abuse: the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks. Everyone knows he's not like the other boys in Auburn?the boys who play hockey, who fight, the boys who pursue girls. Only his friend Wroxy, a girl almost as isolated as he is, can even guess at the edges of his pain, or the depths of his yearning for love.
But even the people who hate Mikey couldn't dream of how many secrets he has, or how badly he could hurt them if he wanted to.
Until the night Mikey is pushed beyond endurance by his abusers. The night he makes a pact with dark forces older than time to visit a terrible vengeance on his enemies. The night he inadvertently opens a doorway that should never, ever have been opened, and unleashes something into the world that should have remained damned.
About the author
In 2003, Michael Rowe became the first Arsenal Pulp Press author to win a Lambda Literary Award, for Queer Fear II, the sequel to his first critically-acclaimed queer horror anthology, Queer Fear. He is an award-winning independent journalist who has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva, and Paris. His work has appeared in the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the United Church Observer, and numerous other publications. He has been a finalist for both the Canadian National Magazine Award and the Associated Church Press Award in the United States. He is the author of several books, including Writing Below the Belt, a critically acclaimed study of censorship, pornography, and popular culture, and the essay collections Looking for Brothers and Other Men's Sons, which won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. A contributing writer to The Advocate, in 2009 The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan nominated Rowe for the Michael Moore Award "for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric" for his work on The Huffington Post for which he is a political blogger. He considers it his proudest moment as a new media journalist.
