The Silenced

A dramatic, plot-driven horror novel. The Farm, a defunct reform school outside Philadelphia, is a haunted place; it’s also a choice piece of real estate that owner Robert Mercer would like to unload. His daughter Becca, former best friend of Hazel Perez, peer pressures shy Hazel into a midnight ramble at the Farm with fellow students in their local history group project —a task that manipulative Becca intends to twist into a real estate ad for her dad. Neither teen knows that the property is in limbo because of a decades-old secret that split the families apart. That night, Hazel falls through a decaying roof into an abyss of memory compounded by tragedy and ghosts—especially one female teenager whose lizard legs and firm grip turn Hazel into someone whose sudden violent outbursts confound and upset her parents, but not her younger sister Maddie. As Hazel’s irrepressible foil and grounded ally, she knows something’s amiss. Together they investigate the Farm’s history, uncovering suspicious disappearances and deaths of teenaged girls. Maddie thinks her sister could have been visited–and perhaps inhabited–by one of these. They confide in Haydee, the girls’ Puerto Rican grandmother, whose faith in Espiritismo, a spiritual practice of her people, helps Hazel recognize her inner light and its power to confront the dark past.