Halcyon
CBC Books | | Posted: July 3, 2018 9:31 PM | Last Updated: December 11, 2018
Rio Youers
Halcyon is the answer for all Americans who want to escape, but paradise isn't what it seems. A beautiful island in the middle of Lake Ontario — a self-sustaining community made up of people who want to live without fear, crime or greed. Halcyon is run by Valerie Kemp, aka Mother Moon, benevolent and altruistic on the outside, but hiding an unimaginable darkness inside. She has dedicated her life to the pursuit of Glam Moon, a place of eternal beauty and healing. And she believes the pathway there can only be found at the end of pleasure.
On the heels of tragedy, Martin Lovegrove moves his family to Halcyon. A couple of months, he tells himself, to retreat from the chaos and grind. He soon begins to suspect there is something beneath Halcyon's perfect veneer and sets out to discover the truth — however terrible it might be — behind the island and its mysterious founder, Mother Moon. (From St. Martin's Press)
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From the book
She saw the man with no hands first. He lay screaming in the road, caught in the shimmer of something burning. His skin was blackened and smoke corkscrewed from his hair. It was his wrists, though—the raw stumps of his wrists—that made Edith close her eyes. Not that she could unsee, of course, or even turn away.
His shirt had been burned from his body.
Edith Lovegrove, ten years old, clapped a hand across her mouth and managed, with colossal effort, not to scream. Her throat ballooned, dark with pressure. Her ears rang and popped. As if in response, the window expanded. It showed more terrible things. The worst she'd ever seen.
Here was a dead woman slumped across a trashcan.
Here was a parking lot — no, it was a street — jammed with burning cars.
From Halycon by Rio Youers ©2018. Published by St. Martin's Press.