HOLLOW NIGHT

Sixteen-year-old Amber Kowalski arrives in Maple Hollow, Vermont, still grieving her mother and hoping a fresh start will help her father and her nine-year-old brother, Toby, heal. The town is beautiful in exactly the way an apple-picking postcard is beautiful, until Amber notices the faceless cornstalk figures standing on every lawn, all quietly facing the road, and the corn that whispers at night with no wind to move it. Behind the warm casseroles and the cheerful neighbors lies a three-hundred-year-old bargain: once every thirty-three years, the valley must give something back to the thing buried in the north field, or lose everything the bargain ever gave it. One woman on the edge of town has spent her life trying to warn people and being called crazy for it; a respected town elder has spent his making sure nobody else gets to ask the question twice. Digging through missing newspapers, a librarian's guarded secret, and that old woman's memories, Amber realizes the next harvest falls due this Halloween, and that the town has already quietly decided who will pay for it. With her new friend Dez at her side and her little brother's name drifting closer to the center of an unspoken list, Amber has only weeks to break a silence three centuries of neighbors have kept, before Hollow Night comes due again.