Summer of the Cicadas

"In the opening passages of Summer of the Cicada, Joseph Pullman describes, with chillingly passive detachment, a brutal and protracted beating at his father's hands. It's 1987 and Joseph and his parents have just moved into the white colonial house on Westchester Drive in Maritime, Maryland. This is white-picket-fence America, but for fifteen-year-old Joseph the threat of violence at home is as unrelenting as the punishment he receives at school, and his mother is slowing slipping away from reality. Somehow Joseph remains calm; watching his neighbours, deliberately recording in his diary." "Joseph forms an uneasy friendship with the awkward Dean Gillespie and the boys occupy themselves burying animal corpses at the Killing Tree. This is the summer the cicadas are due to come out of their seventeen-year hibernation - clouding the sky and filling the air with the chittering cacophony of their terrible music. Joseph becomes convinced that their arrival will bring his salvation. Meanwhile, Mother is gone and Joseph's father has retreated to his basement workshop." "When a local boy goes missing and is finally found unconscious in the woods Maritime is shaken. Joseph, terrified by the noises coming from the basement but with nowhere to run, sleeps with a knife under his pillow. Then a second boy disappears and the residents of the town are forced to confront the secrets of the Pullman's house."--BOOK JACKET.