The Hour before Dark Book

As children, they played the Dark Game...

When Nemo Raglan's father is murdered in one of the most vicious killings of recent years, Nemo must return to the New England island he thought he had escaped for good, Burnley Island . . . and the shadowy farmhouse called Hawthorn. But this murder was no crime of human ferocity. What butchered Nemo's father may in fact be something far more terrifying--something Nemo and his younger brother, Bruno, and sister, Brooke, have known since childhood.

There are secrets buried on Burnley Island.

Within the rooms of Hawthorn, beautiful Brooke Raglan has begun to go mad. She sees faces at the windows and wanders the night, trying to find what she believes is a monster.

Bruno Raglan has wiped the memory of a terrible event from his mind. Now he compulsively picks apart Hawthorn and discovers that within its walls lies a forbidden secret.

As he unravels the mysteries of his past and a terrible night of his childhood, Nemo witnesses something unimaginable . . . and sees the true face of evil . . . while Burnley Island comes to know the unspeakable horror that grows in the darkness.

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed . . .

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

"Clegg delivers!" -- John Saul, bestselling author of Midnight Voices.

"Douglas Clegg is one of the best!" -- Richard Laymon, bestselling author of Island and The Traveling Vampire Show.

"Clegg's stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby." -- Dean Koontz, bestselling author of From the Corner of His Eye.

Publisher's Weekly -- Starred Review - Douglas Clegg

Alongside the dominant stream of horror fiction that, at whatever level of artistic achievement, relies on shock and gore, runs a quieter stream that relies on atmosphere and inference for its unsettling effects (think Machen, Blackwood, sometimes Ramsey Campbell). Clegg (The Infinite; Naomi) has added a superior new title to this latter tradition, with a psychologically astute and genuinely shivery story of a young man who returns to his ancestral home on a remote island offshore Massachusetts. Nemo Raglan, a failed novelist, is back at Hawthorn, on Burnley Island, because his father, Gordie, has been found slaughtered in the family's smokehouse. Also at Hawthorn are Nemo's errant younger brother, Bruno, and their sister, Brooke, a high-strung artist who'd been living with Dad; the siblings' mother had disappeared from the family when they were children. The killer has, weirdly, left no traces and thus no clues; but then much about Hawthorn and the siblings is weird, particularly the game they played as children, a risky form of mind-projection taught them by their father, who used it as a POW, whereby they were able to explore worlds known and unknown. As brothers and sister get reacquainted and ponder the murder, the air grows tense but also dark. Nemo senses an unseen presence; is the house haunted? Clegg delves deep and precisely into the familial ties that bind but also sunder even as he celebrates the magical isolation of a New England island so adrift from the mainland as to be its own planet. Suspenseful and relentlessly spooky, told in economical prose yet peopled by characters as fully realized as one's own blood kin, this is at once the most artful and most mainstream tale yet from one of horror's brightest lights.