Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Six thrillers with missing, mistaken, or "changed" children

C. J. Tudor is the author of The Chalk Man and The Taking of Annie Thorne.

At CrimeReads she tagged six thrillers featuring terrifying changelings, including:
Pet Sematary, by Stephen King

Sometimes dead is better ... When Louis Creed, his wife Rachel and their two young children, Ellie and Gage move into a beautiful old house in Maine, it all seems too good to be true—and it is. Ominously, there’s a busy highway that runs past the house, and in the woods behind, a “Pet Sematary” where the children of the town bury pets that have met a grisly end on the tarmac. When the Creed’s cat, Church, is run over, their neighbour Jud takes Louis not to the Pet Sematary, but to the “real” cemetery: a far more ancient burial ground. Nothing too bad about that ... until Church returns home the next day. But then, tragically, Louis’s infant son, Gage, is killed, and he starts to consider the unthinkable ... Even Stephen King himself considered the novel too dark to be published.
Read about another entry on the list.

Pet Sematary is among Jeff Somers's top 25 cats in sci-fi & fantasy, Jessica Ferri's five top books on American small towns, and Sandra Greaves's top ten ghost stories.

--Marshal Zeringue