Wildwood Road »

Christopher Golden is the award-winning, L.A. Times bestselling author of such novels as The Ferryman, Strangewood, The Gathering Dark, Of Saints and Shadows, Prowlers, and The Body of Evidence series of teen thrillers. Working with actress/writer/director Amber Benson, he co-created and co-wrote Ghosts of Albion, an animated supernatural drama for BBC online.Golden has also written or co-written a great many books and comic books related to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, as well as the scripts for two Buffy video games, which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Tom Sniegoski. His recent comic book work includes the creator-owned Nevermore and DC Comics' Doctor Fate: The Curse. As a pop culture journalist, he was the editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning book of criticism, Cut!: Horror Writers on Horror Film, and co-author of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher's Guide and The Stephen King Universe. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University. There are more than eight million copies of his books in print. At present he is at work on his next novel for Bantam Books.

Michael and Jillian Dansky seemed to have it all–a happy marriage, two successful careers, a bright future. But late one October evening, all that changed. Driving home from a Halloween masquerade, Michael momentarily nods off behind the wheel–and wakes to find nothing is the same.

Standing by his car is the little girl he came within a breath of running down. She leads Michael to her “home,” an empty house haunted by whispers, and sends him away with a haunting whisper of her own: “come find me.” But in the weeks to follow, it’s clear that someone–or some thing–doesn’t want Michael to find her: ominous figures in grey coats with misshapen faces are following him everywhere. And then Jillian wakes one morning replaced by a cold, cruel, vindictive woman Michael hardly recognizes as his wife. Michael must now search not only for the lost girl, but for a way to find the Jillian he's always loved, and to do so he must return to where the nightmare began. Down an isolated lane where he’ll find them, or die trying.

Publishers Weekly

Anxieties over marriage, home and work amplify the eeriness of Golden's engrossing suburban horror novel. Michael and Jillian Dansky are heading home from a Halloween party when they give a young girl on the road a lift to a strange old mansion. She leaves them with the injunction to "come find me," and suddenly their lives are no longer the same. Michael, art director at an advertising firm, begins to incorporate the girl's features into his illustrations. When he tries to locate the house and its road, he can't. Then a coven of grotesque, wraithlike women attack him and Jillian, who's transformed into a brittle and bitchy harridan. Michael realizes his survival depends on retracing his steps on that fateful night and finding the elusive girl. Golden (The Boys Are Back in Town, etc.) knows how to craft suspense, but the bizarre incidents create expectations that the climax only partly satisfies, and the horror, once explained, has a preachy, politically correct edge. Still, this above-average stab at Stephen King-style horror draws the reader irresistibly into its mystery. (Apr. 5) FYI: Cemetery Dance (www.cemeterydance. com) is publishing the cloth edition ($40 ISBN 1-58767-119-0). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.