When Step Fletcher moves his family to Steuben, North Carolina he hopes that starting a new job with a software company will turn around the fortunes of the family. Of course, his children will have to start new schools as well but hopefully everything will turn out well. Far from it - his son Stevie's new school is the stuff of nightmares. Usually children would turn to a teacher for support when being bullied but at Stevie's school his teacher is one of the main tormentors. Soon Step and his wife DeAnne become aware that Stevie is spending more time playing with his imaginary friends on a strange new computer game.

To make matters worse, Step's own job is no picnic. A talented programmer he finds his hands tied when he is prevented from assisting with writing the code and told only to work on the support manuals for the various products.

When, one day, DeAnne realises that Stevie's invisible friends have the same names as some children who have vanished from the small town she begins to suspect that things may not be all they seem. Can she and her husband discover the truth before Stevie joins the increasing numbers of Lost Boys?

Lost Boys is a compelling horror story from the pen of Orson Scott Card. Setting the story in a small American town the author contrasts the difficulties experienced by the father at work with the torment being experienced by his son at school. For some reason even the teacher seems unwilling to make the new boy feel welcome in her class. Step, the father, fully supports his son and takes actions to prevent his son going through any more difficulties.

This is book is no ordinary horror story it is much more intricate. It would have been easy to make this a simple story of child abduction or murder but in the case of Lost Boys the author adds a number of twists, not only the strange correlation between the invisible friends and the missing children but also the identity of the person responsible for their abduction. The secondary storyline set around the software company where the father is employed is a useful addition to the tale giving additional texture to the relationship within the family unit.

Orson Scott Card is a superb author - you don't need me to tell you that. I have read other works by him but this is the first of his horror works that I have tried and I look forward to trying the others. Unlike many other horror writers his style is much more subtle and unpretentious and leaves much of the detail to the reader's own imagination. This has to go down as one of the best horror novels I have ever read.

Step Fletcher is a computer programmer who's fallen on hard times. But as he's a gifted programmer with a high reputation he manages to find himself a new job. The only downer is that he has to move himself and his whole family to Steuben, North Carolina.

Following this move he quickly finds out that the new job is not what he was lead to believe and in fact is everything he hates. It is also a job he needs to support his family until he can find a way of using his reputation as a master games designer to restore his fortunes.

On arriving at their new home the Fletcher soon immerse themselves in their other lives and fast become an integral part of the Mormon church in Steuben.

Their oldest son Stevie does not adapt well to his new school, feeling victimised by his new teacher he quickly withdraws into his own little world complete with imaginary friends, with whom he plays a new computer game. But Steuben is a town where boys of Stevie's age have been disappearing and Stevie might know something about them.

This is another example of Orson Scott Card's wonderful gift at writing novels. His stories have a flow to them that feels real and complete. His characters are human, flawed as that makes them.

At the software company Step meets Gallowglass, a boy-genius programmer who is seriously creepy, and his boss Dicky Northanger who has the largest ever chip on his shoulder I've seen in a while, and as a result of this decides Step is the guy he is going to dump on.

One or two of the members of the Mormon Church also leave a thing or two to be desired. There is the local bitchy busybody Sister LeSueur, a woman who claims divine connection through dreams sent to her by God which she uses to give her the right to interfere in the lives of everyone else. Added to this is nineteen year old bipolar Lee Weeks who seems to exhibit Messianic tendencies.

When things occur that seem to suggest someone is out to get the Fletchers, the problem is not trying to think of who might hold a grudge, but who might not.

It's another quick read, and a very rewarding one. There is an element of the supernatural in this although it is very much secondary in what is essentially a whodunnit.