Publishers Weekly
★ 01/22/2024
Carson (Where They Wait) evokes the best of Stephen King in this exceptional coming-of-age tale about a young man confronting the supernatural menace that’s taken root in his hometown. In 1999 Bloomington, Ind., 16-year-old Marshall Miller gets pulled over by a cop on the same day he gets his driver’s license. While he’s waiting for a ticket, he notices a frightened teenage girl in the backseat of the officer’s car. Weeks later, Marshall spots the girl’s face on a missing person poster: her name is Meredith Sullivan, and she disappeared on the same day that Marshall was pulled over. He reports his encounter to law enforcement and discovers that the man who ticketed him was only impersonating a police officer. Determined to help find her, Marshall seeks out Noah Storm, the PI attached to Meredith’s case, who’s so impressed with the boy’s attention to detail that he offers Marshall an informal internship as his assistant. During their search, Marshall experiences strange recurring dreams, frequent snake sightings, and other seemingly unexplainable phenomena. The episodes gradually lead him to believe something ghostly has come to Bloomington, and it may be his job to stop it. Carson masterfully weaves threads about Marshall’s home and school life into the tantalizing central mystery, and populates the narrative’s margins with fully realized characters who help bring the setting to vivid life. This unique and intelligent crowd-pleaser is not to be missed. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management. (Mar.)
Christopher Golden
"The best Scott Carson novel yet! Horror writers are always being compared to Stephen King, quite often without the quality to back up the comparison, but here we have the real deal! In this beautifully executed coming-of-age horror, Carson weaves a tale all his own, replete with unsettling evil and the questions of love and loss, of trust and family, that plague us all. LOST MAN'S LANE creeped me out, and I loved every shiver!"
John Connolly
"A creepy, compelling coming-of-age story, as touching as it is terrifying."
Justin Cronin
LOST MAN’S LANE is masterful story-telling — a heartfelt, deeply creepy tale of lost innocence and the evil that lurks beneath even the most placid American surfaces.”
Dean Koontz
"LOST MAN'S LANE is Scott Carson's finest achievement. It's such an engaging read that is virtually turns its own pages for the reader."
Robert Dugoni
Nobody makes you believe the unbelievable better than Scott Carson. LOST MAN'S LANE channels Stephen King’s very best.
Richard Chizmar
Scott Carson has done it again. LOST MAN’S LANE is a richly imagined, terrifying trip down memory lane. High school keggers and small town legends, first loves and heartbreaks, serpents and secrets — it’s all here in one action-packed story. Poignant, nostalgic, and profoundly unsettling, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Carson is a spellbinding storyteller and LOST MAN’S LANE is his best yet.
Jason Rekulak
"I've spent the last few nights completely enthralled by teenage private investigator Marshall Miller and his creepy coming-of-age horror story. LOST MAN'S LANE made me feel like I was 17 all over again. It's sweet, scary, nostalgic, and deeply unsettling — and I couldn't turn the pages fast enough!"
Megan Abbott
"With LOST MAN'S LANE, Scott Carson fuses a gothic spellbinder steeped in old-American lore with the piercing ache of a coming-of-age story, bittersweet and filled with longing. With echoes of Ray Bradbury and Peter Straub, it’s a dazzling, genuinely terrifying novel that hovers darkly in your head long after you finish."
Joe Hill
"I fell deep into this book and never wanted to come out. It'll make you a Scott Carson fan for life."
Stephen King
"Scary, and perfect reading pleasure."
Neal Thompson
"I loved this book. It had the sweep and sweetness of John Irving and the spooky-ghostly grit of Stephen King. But wholly original, too, with vivd and loveable and heartbreaking characters."
Library Journal
03/01/2024
Marshall Miller got his driver's license on an unseasonably warm February day in 1999 and got a speeding ticket less than an hour later. The stop alone would have been memorable, but it becomes more so when he discovers that the woman in the back of the cruiser that pulled him over has been declared missing and no one at the Bloomington, IN, police force has ever heard of Corporal Maddox, the cop who issued the ticket. When a private investigator looking for the woman hires him as a summer intern, Marshall is thrown into the center of the action. As time wears on, he finds more questions than answers, though. Where has the fake officer disappeared to? What do his recurring dreams of a doorless barn mean? And why do rattlesnakes seem to be everywhere he turns? VERDICT Carson (Where They Wait), pen name of Michael Koryta, delivers a captivating and eerie tale that weaves together family curses, the Y2K panic, and the very real horrors of adolescence. Xennial readers will especially enjoy revisiting cultural touchpoints of their own coming-of-age. Give this one to fans of Michael Koryta and Chuck Wendig's Black River Orchard.—Portia Kapraun
