Camp Pleasant

Book excerpt: This tale of summer camp horror and mystery by the author of I Am Legend is “a deeply engaging story with a clear writing style that is a pleasure to read” (Publishers Weekly). Camp Pleasant is a place of natural beauty and campfire singalongs. But when Matt Harper arrives there to work as a counselor, he discovers it is also a place of unrelenting abuse and brutality. The new camp director “Big Ed” Nolan is such a bully that the bucolic paradise feels more like a miniature Third Reich . . . until someone finally has enough and kills Big Ed. The suspects include a troubled young camper, a counselor who quit in the face of homophobic humiliation, and Big Ed’s own wife, Ellen. “[This] minimalist plot would be inadequate in other hands, but Matheson—author of Somewhere in Time and Hell House as well as classic Twilight Zone teleplays—has such a command of his craft that this book is a pure pleasure . . .The simple style recalls Hemingway” (Publishers Weekly).