The Hollow Hour #5 Shadow Puppet Theater

Milo Vey has spent eleven years perfecting the art of taking up exactly the right amount of space. Not too much. Not too little. Invisible enough to survive. Then he finds the screen. In the basement of the old Alderman Theater - closed for renovation, full of things nobody can explain - there is a shadow-puppet stage with a cloth screen that absorbs light instead of reflecting it. And a shadow that stays behind after Milo leaves. The shadow knows what Milo wants. It knows what he resents. It performs his darkest thoughts like plays, and then it makes them happen. At first, this feels like justice. Then it starts to feel like relief. Then Milo's heartbeat gets quieter. His handwriting loses its slant. His favorite foods taste like nothing. The birds outside his window sing shorter songs. And the people around him say he's finally so easy to be around. The Flat-Folk don't want Milo's body. They want something harder to get back: the difficult, embarrassing, resentful, contradictory, specific person he actually is. And they've chosen him because he was already doing most of the work for them. A Hollow Hour novel. For readers of Coraline and Small Spaces.

Pages: 110, Paperback, Independently published