Synopses & Reviews
From a master of horror, dark fantasy, and suspense comes a compelling and uniquely original work of paranormal suspense in which one man finds himself trapped in a web of ever-shifting reality which threatens to remake the whole of the world unless he can find a way to stop it.
For Will James, facing his tenth high school reunion is far from his finest hour especially since his life has not gone exactly as he planned. Dumped at the altar by his high school sweetheart and with his dreams of being a prize-winning reporter dashed by his job at a Boston tabloid, he is not sure he is ready to face his former peers.
But what he does find at the reunion is far more than he bargained for. He soon learns that one of his buddies had died several years back even though Will had received an e-mail from him only a few days before. It is not long before other people Will was convinced were alive are turning out to be dead as well or married to other people, or childless where they used to have children. And new memories are swarming in to replace what Will is convinced was his old life, until he no longer knows what is real and what is not. The only thing he does know for certain is that he has to figure out why he alone remembers snatches of another life before everything dissolves into this new, darker reality.
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"Golden takes a truly creepy fantastic premise and delivers in spades; this gripping story is not to be missed." Booklist (Starred Review)
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"[A] well-crafted horror novel....More sensitive younger readers will pick up on the book's moral lessons, while adult fans will overlook the didactic element and appreciate the suspenseful plot and strong atmosphere." Publishers Weekly
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"Rod Serling territory....Golden takes another step toward becoming a major player in horror fiction." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Harkens back to classic Stephen King. A harrowing, paranormal time-trip. You won't want to put it down." Dark Realms Magazine
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"High pulp." Kirkus Reviews
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"Christopher Golden is one of the most hard-working, smartest, and most talented writers of his generation, and his books are so good and so involving that they really ought to sell in huge numbers. Everything he writes glows with imagination." Peter Straub, author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl
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"Christopher Golden collides the ordinary and the supernatural with wonderfully unsettling results. The Boys Are Back in Town is a wicked little thriller. Rod Serling would have loved it." Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition
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"Christopher Golden is the master of the slow creep the kind of story that sneaks out of the everyday, so quietly, that you don't realize anything is really amiss until the world seems to shift and the ground gets all spongy underfoot. Golden has a wonderfully smooth prose style the payoff is immense. And intense. The Boys Are Back in Town is an eerie, fascinating tale...with style and heart, and a cast of characters that you can't help but like." Charles De Lint, author of Spirits in the Wires
About the Author
Christopher Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of such novels as
Wildwood Road,
The Boys Are Back in Town,
The Ferryman, and the
Body of Evidence series of teen thrillers. Working with actress/writer/director Amber Benson, he co-created and co-wrote
Ghosts of Albion, an animated supernatural drama for BBC online, which will soon become a book series from Del Rey.
With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the co-author of the dark fantasy series The Menagerie, as well as the young readers fantasy series OutCast. Golden and Sniegoski also wrote the graphic novel BPRD: Hollow Earth, a spinoff from the fan favorite comic book series Hellboy. Golden authored the original Hellboy novels, The Lost Army and The Bones of Giants, and edited two Hellboy short story anthologies.
Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University. There are more than eight million copies of his books in print.
Author Q&A
Bringing the Boys Back to Town
By Christopher Golden
What do you cherish?
It’s a word that makes some people squeamish. The word love is such a part of our daily lives, even for people who aren’t all that familiar with what it means, that it’s tossed about haphazardly. But cherish is a different sort of word. What do you hold close to your private heart? What means so much to you that merely the thought of it makes you emotional?
If you’re a parent, surely your children fall into that category. Particularly when they’re sleeping instead of driving you insane. If you are fortunate enough to be in love, then your partner, certainly. But how many other things can you honestly brand with that word?
For me, and I suspect for many of you, the word conjures up images of keepsakes, souvenirs of past moments kept in a box. I cherish my memories, even many of the bad ones. I hold them close.
The subject of cherishing the past has infiltrated several of my previous novels, but it took time for me to formulate precisely what I was attempting to say on the subject. I’m a nostalgic. Proud to be one, in fact. There are those who will look down their nose at this confession, but I make no apologies. Unfortunately, nostalgia has become a bad word in the Western lexicon. It brings to mind images of people who are stuck in the past, who cannot find pleasure in their present-day lives or any hope for the future, and so linger in their memories and wishes about what might have been.
But to me being a nostalgic simply means that I cherish the past. I cherish every day I look back upon, and the relationships I have had, and the years of my youth as gifts I have been given.
I live for today, and for tomorrow.
But without yesterday, I am nothing.
Without the skinned knees and the tears and the broken friendships, without the Christmas mornings and the whispered promises and the wide-eyed discovery, I am nothing. Every experience, every relationship, from the moment of my birth, has contributed to making me who I am now.
The same is true of you as well.
Of all of us.
Think about that for a moment.
And then about this . . . in the entirety of human existence there is nothing that we find more unsettling than having what we cherish taken away. Our parents. Our children. Our homes. Our work. Our keepsakes. An exaggeration? I think not. On the nightly news, when a fire has claimed a family home, one of the first things the unfortunate former homeowners always say is that they are devastated by the loss of their family photographs. Irreplaceable memories.
Now stop and think . . . what would it feel like if rather than just photographs, the fire had claimed your actual memories? What if the friendships and experiences of your most formative years could be damaged or rearranged?
How might it change you?
We are all aware—some of us tragically from firsthand experience—how the memory loss of Alzheimer’s disease also leads to a loss of self, an utter change in behavior, usually very much for the worse.
What do you cherish?
If, like me, you cherish your memories, your past, you will share my fear of having those things taken away. The very thought is more than unsettling. If those memories and moments are the building blocks of who we are, what happens if some of the blocks are taken away?
Beneath the magic and the mystery of The Boys Are Back in Town is that fundamental fear. And in writing the novel, I added a second question to the first.
What do you cherish?
Are you willing to fight for it?