If You Go Down to the Woods: The most powerful and emotional debut thriller of 2018!

This is the night. These are the times.

I heard these words for the first time from a killer the summer I met the Outsiders’ Club. Years passed before I finally understood them and, by then, everyone—my friends, my family, my dog—were long gone: some to the dirt that eventually claims us all, others to the remote reaches of time and memory.

The promise the Outsiders’ Club made to each other had a part to play in the way things went down. No doubt about it. But much of it was just life itself, and things beyond our control. Yet I still wonder how it all would have turned out had other choices been made, different roads taken. This is called regret, and it’s very important you listen to what it says.

In my case, the long trail of dead that summer demands it.

Sometimes life’s fucked up that way. Sometimes the darkness lingers.

Here’s what happened.

My family moved to Payne, Arizona when I was thirteen. My dad, John Hayworth, got a job as the manager of a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and we moved there from Southern California. Mom, a college-educated woman, decided that being a mother was far more important than searching for meaning in the writing of centuries-dead English novelists, and wholeheartedly supported the move. For those prematurely crying sexism, this was a two-way street kind of respect: Dad supported her, offered to be the stay-at-home parent as she climbed the ranks of prestige in academia. But I think Mom saw more value in passing on her passion for the written word to her children, reading us stories snuggled in our beds or on the sofa, than lecturing youth enrolled in electives, packed like sardines in large lecture halls.

My sister and I had to leave our friends, and though I was sad about some of the people I left behind, I also saw it as something of an adventure. Sarah, on the other hand, sixteen going on retarded, acted like she was saying goodbye to her whole life and every shot at happiness. She had some greasy-haired boyfriend that she was leaving behind, some young stud who thought wearing a leather jacket and slicking his hair back with a few pounds of hair gel made him some sort of James Dean. I thought it made him look like he’d melted butter and greased his head with it.

I told him so once.

He flipped me off.

I laughed at him and gave the old jerk-me-off sign language.

Sarah didn’t talk to me for a week after that. That was fine by me. Likewise, I tolerated her like a bothersome rash: it was there, it caused discomfort, but there wasn’t much you could do except live through it.

Looking back, I realize she wasn’t all that bad. I might even go so far as to say she was a good older sister in some ways. But try telling that to a thirteen-year-old boy, just learning the mysteries of girls and the smaller head in his pants, living in a small house with an older sister who liked barging into his room at any hour to bestow upon him the gifts of noogies, wedgies, and wet willies.