Disappearance at Devil’s Rock

Cover image and summary from Goodreads:

Late one summer night, Elizabeth Sanderson receives the devastating news that every mother fears: her fourteen-year-old son, Tommy, has vanished without a trace in the woods of a local park.

The search isn’t yielding any answers, and Elizabeth and her young daughter, Kate, struggle to comprehend his disappearance. Feeling helpless and alone, their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration. The local and state police haven’t uncovered any leads. Josh and Luis, the friends who were with Tommy last, may not be telling the whole truth about that night in Borderland State Park, when they were supposedly hanging out a landmark the local teens have renamed Devil’s Rock— rumored to be cursed.

Living in an all-too-real nightmare, riddled with worry, pain, and guilt, Elizabeth is wholly unprepared for the strange series of events that follow. She believes a ghostly shadow of Tommy materializes in her bedroom, while Kate and other local residents claim to see a shadow peering through their own windows in the dead of night. Then, random pages torn from Tommy’s journal begin to mysteriously appear—entries that reveal an introverted teenager obsessed with the phantasmagoric; the loss of his father, killed in a drunk-driving accident a decade earlier; a folktale involving the devil and the woods of Borderland; and a horrific incident that Tommy believed connected them all and changes everything.

As the search grows more desperate, and the implications of what happened becomes more haunting and sinister, no one is prepared for the shocking truth about that night and Tommy’s disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

I picked this up because I read and enjoyed Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts. I read this book in two days and really enjoyed it!

Like A Head Full of Ghosts, this book had its creepy moments! And I really enjoyed the way the story showed the reader not just Elizabeth’s perspective, but Josh and Luis’s as well. This is one of those stories where I thought I knew what was going on, then started to doubt and question, and then by the end, I wasn’t entirely certain what to believe. But the ending was kind of heart-breaking, and I was frantically reading to try to figure out what really happened.

While I picked up my copy from the horror section of my bookstore, I thought this was more of a mystery/suspense story, with some elements of horror. While it wasn’t frightening in a horror way, there were elements of this that frightened me (and it would be a spoiler for me to say what they are but if you read the book you can probably figure it out).

This was a really absorbing story, and I think if you enjoyed A Head Full of Ghosts you’ll enjoy Disappearance at Devil’s Rock as well.