A Dark Matter Book

"Charismatic and cunning, Spencer Mallon was a college campus guru in the 1960s who attracted the undying devotion of his young acolytes. One fateful evening, he invited his most fervent teenage followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow. All does not go as planned, and at the end of the evening what remains is a gruesomely dismembered body and the shattered souls of those who were present." "Years later, the mind-bending horror of that cataclysmic event still grips the once inseparable group of friends. Donald "Dilly" Olson, the surpassingly handsome leader of the pack, is now a down-and-out ex-con; Jason "Boats" Boatman, a compulsive shoplifter long graduated into a life of serious crime, flinches from thoughts of what he calls "the dark matter"; Hootie Bly, the beloved "little brother" of the group, has become a mental patient who mutters fragments of Hawthorne; and the gorgeous, whip-smart Lee Truax, affectionately referred to as the Eel, still harbors an unthinkable secret." But when a chance encounter stirs up long unsettled questions about the past, it is Lee Harwell, the Eel's high school boyfriend, now husband, who attempts to work out what happened to his wife and friends all those years ago. Lee was the only one in this tightknit group of friends who was not in the field that terrifying night, having never been swayed by the charismatic Mallon. His sense of urgency encourages them to finally face the unspeakable events that have constricted and deformed them in ways they can only barely understand. As the old friends try to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with harrowing questions about the very nature of evil.