Freeman Mills is a twelve-year-old boy with an awful past. His mother was supposedly murdered
by his father, who is in a mental institution. Freeman exhibits a variety of psychological
problems and is sent to Wendover Home - a treatment facility in the Southern Appalachian
Mountains of North Carolina. But Freeman quickly discovers that something is horribly
wrong at Wendover.
After being subjected to bizarre medical experiments by his father, Dr. Kenneth Mills,
Freeman finds that beyond his ability to read minds, his psyche has been hot-wired into a
dark and frightening place called the "deadscape." The deadscape throbs with unearthly
power from the basement of his new home. Its previous tenants, mental patients subjected
to inhumane and abusive treatment, are still trapped inside their former prison - even though
they're dead. Shock treatments, administered by Dr. Richard Kracowski to the children of
Wendover, cause them to be able to see into the troubled world that surrounds them. But
the spirits they encounter are not related to the forever friendly "Casper." There are no
happy ghosts here - only the tortured souls of the insane. The children cannot ask for
help from the outside because a group, calling themselves "The Trust," has plans for Dr.
Kracowski's "Synaptic Synergy Therapy." The youngsters are little more than guinea pigs
offered up as sacrifices for The Trust's corrupt designs.
Scott Nicholson steps once more into the darkest regions of our own fears and pulls us
in with him. The Home is horror at its best...or worst. Nicholson pulls back the
covers of our nightmares with writing that keeps the reader invested in his plot - and
characters who are achingly human in the middle of mind-numbing terror. Even if we want
to pull the bedclothes back over our heads, we can't. We care.
Beginning with his first novel, The Red Church, a horror classic, Nicholson proves
once again that he has rightfully claimed a spot as one of the best writers of his particular
genre.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED