Devils Hole

Some things the Devil does not give back.

For three hundred years, the people of Cedar Grove, New Jersey have told their children the same warning about the pool at the back of Community Park. Do not swim. The Devil lives in it. He pulls you under, and he keeps what he pulls.

In the summer of 1989, eighteen-year-old Danny Mercer watched his best friend jump from the Devil's Ledge and go straight through the Eye at the center of the pool. The body was never recovered. Danny shipped out for Fort Dix four weeks later and did not come home to Cedar Grove for thirty-seven years.

Last May, another boy drowned at Devils Hole. His name was Tyler Almeida. His arms had been folded across his chest by something that was not the current. Before he jumped he said the same words Scotty Vance had said in 1989.

It's all right. He says it's all right. Let go.

Now Danny Mercer is home, and he has one weekend to keep a promise he made on the Devil's Ledge at eighteen years old. He has the friend who never left. He has the woman who has policed the ravine for three decades. He has an old cop at the Pilgrim Diner who remembers every name the pool has ever taken. And he has the letter from Scotty Vance he carried in a drawer for thirty-seven years and finally opened in the wrong guest bedroom.

They are going into the water. They are going to find what the Devil kept. And someone is coming out without something they came in with.

A literary thriller of hometown grief and supernatural debt, set in the Watchung hills of Essex County, New Jersey.

For readers of: Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts) Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians) Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group)

From the author: I grew up on Bradford Avenue. I stood outside Capaldi's with the other kids in the summer of 1989. I went to CCD at St. Mary's on Wednesdays. I watched Doug Flutie shoot a free throw on the blacktop at Leonard R. Parks. I graduated from Cedar Grove High that June, enlisted in the Army that August, and did not come back for a long time. Devils Hole is the book I have been carrying since I was eighteen years old.