The Eternal Hon

Three twelve-year-olds find each other in a dead industrial lot on the edge of Riverside, California, in the worst summer of their lives. Ara burns too bright and feels too much and has spent her whole life apologizing for it. Serenity holds the world together with color-coded spreadsheets and a terror of everything she can't control. Denny stands between them - between everyone - steady and reasonable and so tired of being the center that he's starting to forget he's allowed to want things for himself.
They call themselves the Grey Codex. They claim a ruined building, a charred book in a lost language, and the particular solidarity of kids who don't fit anywhere else. That night, each of them dreams. The Pied Piper of the Inland Empire doesn't appear to children as something to fear. It arrives as the voice that finally understands you - that tells Ara she doesn't have to be small, tells Serenity she can let it all fall apart, tells Denny he can stop holding everyone up and just choose himself.
It plays a song that sounds almost like something you've heard on the radio, almost like a song you love, except the words are wrong in a way you can't stop wanting to fix. And one by one, it takes something from each of them that they didn't realize they couldn't afford to lose. Twenty years later, the three of them come back to Riverside. The adult versions of Ara, Denny, and Serenity have carried the Grey Codex summer inside them the way survivors carry things - badly, silently, in all the wrong places.
When something pulls them back to the city and back to each other, they discover that the Pied Piper has been patient in a way only ancient things can afford to be. It has been watching. It has been learning. The wounds it opened at twelve have had twenty years to deepen. And it has a new offer. The Eternal Hon is a literary supernatural novel about three children who once held the line against something old and hungry - and the adults they became who have to do it again, with everything they gained in twenty years and everything they lost.
It is a love letter to Stephen King's It, written in the bones of the Inland Empire, and it is ultimately a story about the particular cruelty of monsters that don't hunt your fear - but your longing. For readers of Stephen King's It, V. E. Schwab, and Paul Tremblay - a story about the thing that knows exactly what you most want to hear, and why that is the most dangerous thing in the world.