Plaything

Black Voltage #84

When the Toller family moves in to the run-down house next door, Bailey McDaniel immediately notices strange behavior in the clan’s eldest son Glen. The pale-skinned, ginger-haired fifteen-year-old is aloof, prone to unforeseeable mood swings, and carries a morbid interest in the macabre. His bookshelves are lined with an array of well-worn true crime paperbacks depicting the serial and mass murders committed by a multitude of convicted madmen. It is Bailey’s overbearing mother and devoted therapist who insist that a friendship with the boy next door is worth pursuing, seeing that Bailey spent much of the past year in self-imposed isolation.

Reluctantly, Bailey heeds their advice and a friendship between he and Glen quickly materializes. It is, however, a friendship Bailey will grow to regret. As the layers peel away one by one, Bailey comes to find that Glen’s interests and obsessions are far more sinister thanstudying the brutal acts of those less than human and his fantasies are much darker than Bailey could’ve ever imagined. It is these fantasies that lead to the abduction of a pretty high school senior and a series of grisly murders that leave a small middle-American town bathed in blood.

Plaything is a relentlessly brutal story that plows through barriers never meant to be crossed, a nightmare that will leave readers clutching the novel with an incomparable fear, and waiting with baited breath until its savage conclusion.

Limited to 52 signed and numbered copies