Troubled teen Tommy Sanderson -- introvert, zombie-obsessed -- disappears one night while out with his two best friends. He seems to have disappeared into the (real) Borderland State Park. The questions of 'why' and 'how' and 'where' will occupy the rest of the novel.
His best friends Luis and Josh are clearly hiding something. His sister seems to know something. And his mother is also haunted by memories of his father, who deserted them and then disappeared himself, into death after a single-vehicle accident.
Soon, mysterious apparitions (if they are apparitions) and messages start to appear. The mother has a vision of a gruesomely disfigured Tommy. And they everything seems to focus on a Borderland landmark called Devil's Rock.
Except it isn't really called Devil's Rock -- that's the name Tommy and his friends gave to it, without any real provenance. A story about the Devil lurking in the park since time immemorial also seems to be dubious. But strange things keep happening. And getting Luis and Josh to tell the truth about that night seems to become more and more difficult as Tommy's disappearance stretches on.
Tremblay's novel ends up being as much about the sort of secrets that can devastate families, and the sorts of problems that can snowball into horror for teenagers. There's more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies in some of the revelations towards the end of the novel -- but touches of what may or may not be the supernatural throughout also suggest a certain inevitability to Tommy's narrative.
The novel does a nice job of creating believable human evil, in teens or adults, without giving us anything along the lines of teen psychopaths and bad seeds. The entire enterprise tilts a bit more towards sorrow than horror, though there are several scenes of excruciating awfulness.
Tremblay notes in his afterword that the title and some of the novel's concerns are a nod to Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its mystery surrounding the disappearance of a school teacher and several students in Australia. Tremblay's book is ultimately more concrete than that mysterious film, and somewhat more conventional. Recommended.
