The Dare

THE DARE (approx. 24,000 words, illustrated middle grade, ages 8-12) is a Halloween story set in Huntington, on Long Island's North Shore, in October of 2003. When seventh-grader John Murphy fishes a strange gold key out of a storm drain, it shows him visions of a boy leaping from a cliff in 1954 - visions that connect to a string of impossible disappearances in town. The culprit is Eloise Vanderpoole, a mother whose grief over her son's death forty years earlier turned her into a witch, and whose revenge plan ends with John's own father. To save him, John and his friends must out-plan a woman who has spent four decades planning - and discover the truth about a dare that went wrong long before any of them were born. At its heart, it's a story about grief, forgiveness, and what a lie can do to a person who believes it for forty years.