Insert coin. Lose child.
Skegwell-on-Sea is dying. The pier is rotting, the season is over, and the only thing still glowing on the boardwalk is Funland Amusements: a neon-soaked arcade that hasn't changed since 1979.
In its back corner squats the Grab-A-Lot 3000, a claw machine nobody has ever won. Its prizes sit heaped behind the glass: a teddy with a red patch, a Spider-Man yo-yo, a single pink jelly sandal. Each one matches, stitch for stitch, something a local child was carrying the day they vanished.
When nine-year-old Tyler Hollis disappears in the ninety seconds his mother looks away, disgraced 1986 pinball champion turned pier-duty copper Sergeant Marcus Pike is forced back to the arcade he has avoided since he was a boy. Three days later, Tyler's dinosaur keyring appears behind the glass.
With a furious chip-shop fryer, a retired librarian armed with forty-seven years of newspaper cuttings, and a teenage livestreamer with twenty-two months of footage nobody believed, Marcus must face the machine that ruined his life and win the game that can't be won.
One man. One machine. One credit.
From Lee Emerick comes a gloriously overwrought horror-comedy of seaside dread, possessed whack-a-moles and the finest sentence ever written about wrists. Everybody's a winner.
Autorentext
Lee Emerick writes horror-comedy for people who like their nightmares served with a side of laughter, and their laughter served with a side of mild dread.
Lee has spent years researching terrifying places, including the DMV, the dentist, the gym, the timeshare, the fertility clinic and the wedding venue. Most of the research was done firsthand, which explains a lot.
Lee's books contain cursed appliances, waitresses who have been dead since 1974, and at least one cul-de-sac that has no business being that friendly. No animals were harmed, but several HOA meetings were.
When not writing, Lee can be found avoiding all-night diners, refusing to renew anything in person, and checking the tooth roots of strangers for signs of ancient entities.
Lee lives somewhere quiet, and it is definitely fine. Please don't ask about the basement.
Find more of Lee's books on Draft2Digital, and remember: if a book seems to be reading you back, that's a plot device. Probably.
info@leeemerick.co.uk