Advance buzz is already building about NEVERLAND, with authors such as Bentley Little comparing it to the beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird “as a classic modern novel that illuminates the human condition through the eyes of a child,” and New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson hailing NEVERLAND as “a powerful and thrilling tale, Douglas Clegg’s best novel yet.”

Clegg, drawing on some of the events from his own life and a long-ago visit to an island much like Gull Island, brings us the story of a family vacation gone terribly wrong, a novel about the lies adults tell and the destruction they wreak on the innocents around them.

Says Clegg of writing NEVERLAND: “This novel, my favorite of anything I’ve written, is about absolute innocence embracing the wildness—and darkness—of the imagination. I was able to explore the destructive nature of family secrets, and how children sometimes create rituals of power as an escape from the world their parents have made.”

But imaginative games are not always innocent . . . and when Beau travels to the Retreat, his grandmother’s forbidding home on Gull Island off the Georgia coast line, resigned to a boring family vacation, he finds that his cousin, Sumter, has other plans.

Sumter has found a run-down shack hidden in the woods, a place “where you ain’t supposed to go,” a place forbidden to them that smells of socks, dead sea creatures—and dread; Sumter christens it Neverland.

Fascinated and terrified by Neverland but thrilled to have made a secret life for themselves in a shack full of old Playboys, smuggled beers, and forbidden words, Sumter and his cousins create a hallucinatory world of dark fantasy, a world ruled by a god of shadows, who Sumter calls “Lucy.”

But the shack is the key to a terrible secret, and the world the children create away from their parents, bound to each other by blood oaths, is anything but innocent. As tensions build at the Retreat and the adults start on their gin and tonics earlier each day, Sumter’s games begin to invoke a nightmarish presence that cannot be contained within the bounds of imagination any longer . . .