Blackwater Val

Richard Franklin has left his Midwestern roots behind to live on the coast of Maine with his family. But in the autumn of the year 2000 he must return to his Illinois birthplace on a sorrowful journey. His wife Michelle has been killed in New England by a hit-and-run driver who is never found so back home he comes with her cremated remains to fulfill a final wish and on her birthday scatter her ashes in the park along the river in Blackwater Valley--simply Blackwater Val to locals--the small town where they both grew up and fell in love. With him he brings his six-year-old daughter Katie who still grieves for her lost mother: Katie who can sometimes guess whos going to be on the phone before it rings. Who can stop all the clocks in the house and break up clouds in the sky with her mind and heal sicknesses and who sometimes sees things that arent there . . . people who are no longer alive. All gifts she inherited from her mother. Only something isnt quite right in the Val. Sinkholes are opening up revealing the plague pits the sleepy hamlet was built over in the 1830s when malaria and cholera outbreaks ran riot. Mysterious bird and fish die-offs begin to occur and Katie can see ghosts of the dead gathering all around. But what she cant see is the charred centuries-old malevolence which has been waiting for her and wants her for its very own. Or the pale Sallow Man who haunts the towns nighttime streets . . . or the river witch--another Blackwater Val of sorts--each of whom will be drawn one by one into the nightmarish bloodletting about to take place.