It Took the Children First

IT TOOK THE CHILDREN FIRST
Book One in The Maplewood Horrors Series

A Supernatural Horror Thriller. No one leaves Maplewood unchanged. Some don't leave at all. When the Rickman family flee England for a fresh start in Maplewood, Maine, Fifteen-year-old twins Jenny and Nicholas know one thing for certain: their parents are lying.

They call it a new beginning. Jenny calls it what it is. Another escape. Then they arrive at Thorne House. Abandoned for thirty years, the old mansion waits at the edge of town behind dead trees, broken streetlights, and windows that seem to watch. Its rooms breathe with cold. Its shadows move when nothing else does. Voices whisper the twins' names from behind the walls.

And from the moment Jenny steps inside, something in the house begins to change her. Grey threads appear in her hair. Reflections hesitate before following. Nightmares bleed into waking life. Nicholas finds warnings written in condensation and feels the house turning its attention towards them with patient, hungry intent.

But Thorne House is only the beginning. Across Maplewood, old secrets are waking. A missing girl. A murdered teacher. A massacre the town buried decades ago. Beneath the lake, something remains chained in the dark, waiting for blood, souls, and the return of a coven that should have stayed dead.

As Jenny and Nicholas uncover the truth, they realise Maplewood has not been hiding from evil. It has been feeding it. And now the house wants the children first.

Dark, atmospheric, and relentlessly chilling, IT TOOK THE CHILDREN FIRST is the first book in The Maplewood Horrors series — a supernatural horror thriller about a haunted house, buried witchcraft, family secrets, and a town where the dead are not the only things waiting in the dark.