It Took the Children First

IT TOOK THE CHILDREN FIRST

No one leaves Maplewood unchanged.

Some don't leave at all.

When fifteen-year-old twins Jenny and Nicholas Rickman are dragged across the world to the forgotten town of Maplewood, Maine, their parents call it a fresh start. Jenny knows better.

Their family has been running for years. From house to house. From lies dressed up as accidents. From the fire her mother still refuses to explain. But Thorne House is different. It doesn't just wait at the edge of town. It recognises them.

Shadows move where they shouldn't. Reflections hesitate. Voices whisper from empty rooms. And something inside the house has begun calling to Jenny by name. Then a local girl goes missing.

Kirsty Hollings was kind to Jenny when almost no one else was. Now she is trapped somewhere between the living and the dead, and the thing that took her is reaching for the twins next.

As Nicholas is drawn toward a rusted water tower and Jenny begins to change in ways she can no longer hide, the Rickman family discovers that Maplewood's cheerful streets are built over something old, hungry, and unfinished.

Thirty years ago, a massacre was buried beneath the town's polite smiles.

Now the dead are returning.

The Ferryman has come to collect.

And Thorne House has been waiting for the children.

Atmospheric, emotional, and relentlessly unnerving, IT TOOK THE CHILDREN FIRST is a supernatural horror novel about family secrets, haunted bloodlines, and the terrible things that happen when a town refuses to remember what it sacrificed.