The sudden voice might have, itself, knocked Mrs. Prattle off the porch. But May had been in her ear since they were both in pigtails, even when May herself was home asleep halfway across the island. Both of them—May and her disembodied voice—could argue the shape of a circle or whether a toad is bumpy.
“Leb held the empty mason jar out like it was full of hornets. He stepped in the dark, ankles popping, bare feet toeing the least creaky floorboards, his daddy inches away in the other dinky bed. Both beds were old as Methuselah and twice as gripey. That’s what Leb’s momma used to say, not griping herself but easy and good-natured as always, like the beds were old family members she tended to. Leb’s getting out of his gripey bed with both hands clutching that jar, without waking his daddy, had been something to see, if anybody could see anything in that pitch black room. Getting to the end of the bed without stubbing his toe, toppling over into the other bed, or dropping the jar outright was not his usual luck either. Maybe the fool thing works, he thought. But the fool thing wasn't supposed to work. Not yet.”
After eleven-year-old Leb buries a mason jar of “pure evil” in a graveyard for good luck, he gets a deadly dose of just what he wanted. His whole island does—adults, kids, and animals flung together with half the state of Florida at the forgotten island’s graveyard gate. It’s up to the graveyard caretaker’s son (Leb), the island ratcatcher’s son, and the mysterious new girl at school to keep this embarrassment of riches from sinking the island … and getting more people killed.
But even an island of outcasts has its outcasts. Leb’s “friends” barely know each other. They barely know their own island, turns out. And they don’t know enough to run the other direction. If they can get past the press, police, pent-up crowd, graveyard ghosts, cutthroat treasure hunters, and black-cloaked witches, something far worse still awaits them. That much they know for sure, now.