Some monsters never leave the neighborhood. They just wait. 

In 1963, a wandering drifter is dragged screaming into the earth behind a quiet Wisconsin house. A year later, nine-year-old Henry Adams narrowly escapes the same fate — and watches in horror as a neighborhood bully is devoured by whatever lives beneath Old Lady Appleton’s overgrown backyard. The Big Boys call them crocodiles. Henry knows better. And he spends the next fifty years running from what he saw.

Now, in 2012, Henry — known to the world as bestselling novelist Luther Adams — has come home. His parents are dead. The old house on Dekoven Avenue is his to empty, his to sell, his to finally leave behind. But the crawl space beneath the family kitchen is exactly where it’s always been. The field out back is still hungry. And something down there remembers him.

As Luther sorts through a lifetime of memories and family secrets, the boundary between childhood nightmare and adult reality begins to crumble. The disappearances that plagued the neighborhood weren’t coincidence. The stories the Big Boys told weren’t stories. And whatever fed on Willie Stinson, on Morris, on all the missing pets and forgotten drifters — it’s still there, still patient, and it has waited a very long time for Henry to come back.

A slow-burn horror novel steeped in small-town Wisconsin atmosphere, buried trauma, and the terrible weight of childhood memory, this is a chilling journey into the places we bury our secrets — and what those secrets do when we finally dig them up.

Fans of Stephen King’s It, Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life, and Paul Tremblay will find much to love — and much to fear — beneath the floorboards.