Witchbone: The Goblins Winter

Themes found in these stories include friendship, found family, defying negative expectations, trying to figure out how to be a force for good in your corner of the world, doing heroic things even if you don't look or feel like a hero, and that being different isn't necessarily fatal.

Summary:

A spell of arctic weather. A mysterious death. The reading of a will. Strange tracks in the snow.

Eleven-year-old Danny Hallow accepts his life, such as it is. His father is dead, his mother left years ago. His three Keepers are the only people aware of Danny's erratic and not-very-impressive psychic abilities. He has no friends, he's been suspended from school, and he's responsible for the life of a small brown bat that's ended up in his care.

When Danny's estranged Uncle Enoch dies under mysterious circumstances, he and his Keepers are called to the town of Eddystone, New Hampshire for the reading of the man's will. Traveling four hundred miles from his dreaded hometown to attend, Danny is happy to get away, possibly inherit something interesting- and maybe find out more about his family while he's there.

Arriving at the crumbling family estate of Gnomewood Home, he finds it to be hauntingly familiar, a bit creepy, oddly comforting, and possibly alive. When his uncle's will reveals that he's inherited Gnomewood and everything in it, he's determined to stay and make a happier life for himself in Eddystone, somehow.

But at Gnomewood, he finds more questions than answers to his family's secrets. Disturbing old memories come to him in dreams. His psychic abilities begin to grow stronger, and as a result he becomes aware that a horde of cryptic creatures are plaguing the town of Eddystone, seemingly drawn out by the spell of an unusually frigid February. Toothy little goblins that are sneaky, vicious, and hungry. Goblins that take a particular interest in Danny.

Will the emergence of the alien, and potentially dangerous, power he's inherited from his peculiar family tree help Danny survive the goblin infested winter, inadvisable attempts to befriend a terrifying boy with silver eyes, and a new school?

Only if he learns to control them before they put him and everyone around him in danger. Before they convince some people that he should never have been allowed to exist at all. Before he becomes just another twisted tale in his family's bizarre history, kept hidden for centuries within the ivy-covered walls of Gnomewood Home.