It's the summer of 1981. Kevin Murphy and his brother and friends are hanging out at the spot where the train trestle stretches across part of the Framingham reservoir, smoking joints, drinking beer, and challenging each other to jump into the water.  Four older guys show up unexpectedly and they seem to be looking for trouble. This first meeting with Pete Starling and his buddies is a tense confrontation.

Kevin is in love with gorgeous red-haired Nikki French, but she's his best friend and, somehow, he just can't  work up the nerve to tell that he loves her. When she breaks up with her current boyfriend, Kevin promises himself that he will tell her on his fourteenth birthday. But that isn't soon enough, because Pete Starling steps right into the void and claims Nikki as his love. Pete and his rough gang of older boys disappear with Nikki and take her to Neverland, a place that is inhabited by seal-like creatures, huge troll-like monsters and others like Peter Starling and his buddies, who are members of a race just slightly different than humans with some supernatural powers that people do not have.

Vowing to rescue her, Kevin, his brother and two friends follow them Straight On 'Til Morning, to a place they can't even imagine and battle forces that they may not be able to conquer.

Christopher Golden, a master at characterization, starts this story off as a leisurely coming-of-age story that quickly escalates into a fast moving horror/fantasy that will keep you reading Straight On 'Til Morning. While Golden states right at the beginning that this is a fantasy, it's not at all what I expected.  This Award-winning author is at the top of his form in this novel and definitely left me wanting more.