The Child Thief by Brom

From Barnes & Noble

The first adult novel by award-winning illustrator Brom is perhaps best described by author Christopher Golden: "Brom has always been an artist who gave us nightmares fully realized, but with The Child Thief, he paints in words…a wonderfully nasty Peter Pan reboot that stands on its own as a dark twisted adventure." This haunting retelling of James Barrie's fairyland story is rendered through the eyes of Nick, a 14-year-old orphan lured into Peter's adolescent brigade. A wickedly poetic retake on a classical magical tale.

From the Publisher

The acclaimed artist Brom brilliantly displays his multiple extraordinary talents in The Child Thief—a spellbinding re-imagining of the beloved Peter Pan story that carries readers through the perilous mist separating our world from the realm of Faerie. As Gregory Maguire did with his New York Times bestselling Wicked novels, Brom takes a classic children’s tale and turns it inside-out, painting a Neverland that, like Maguire’s Oz, is darker, richer, more complex than innocent world J.M. Barrie originally conceived. An ingeniously executed literary feat, illustrated with Brom’s sumptuous artwork, The Child Thief is contemporary fantasy at its finest—casting Peter Pan, the Lost Boys, even Captain Hook and his crew in a breathtaking new light.

Peter is quick, daring, and full of mischief—and like all boys, he loves to play, though his games often end in blood. His eyes are sparkling gold, and when he graces you with his smile you are his friend for life. He appears to lonely, lost children—the broken, hopeless, and sexually abused—promising to take them to a secret place of great adventure, where magic is alive, and you never grow old. But his promised land is not Neverland. . . .

With this haunting, provocative, relentlessly thrilling reconsideration of a timeless children's classic, the acclaimed artist Brom dramatically displays another side of his extraordinary talent. Exploring the stygian blackness that gathers at the root of the beloved Peter Pan legend, he carries readers into a faerieland at once magically wondrous and deeply disturbing.

Fourteen-year-old Nick would be lying dead in a Brooklyn park—murdered by drug dealers­—had Peter not sprung out of the trees to save him. Now the irresistibly charismatic wild boy wants Nick to follow him into a strange and unsettling mist swirling around the bay. Even though he is wary of Peter's crazy talk of faeries and monsters, Nick agrees. After all, nowhere in New York City is safe for him now. And what more can he possibly lose?

There is always more to lose.

Accompanying Peter to a gray and ravished island that was once a lush, enchanted paradise, Nick finds himself unwittingly recruited for a war that has raged for centuries. He must learn to fight or die as he struggles to fit in with the "Devils"—Peter's savage tribe of lost and stolen children.

Here, Peter's dark past is revealed: left to wolves as an infant, despised, tormented, and hunted, Peter moves between the worlds of faerie and man, struggling to understand what he is and where he belongs. The Child Thief is a leader of bloodthirsty children, a brave friend, and a creature driven to do whatever he must to kill the dreaded Captain and stop his murderous crew of "Flesh-eaters" before they blight every trace of magic left in this dying land.

Beautifully illustrated by the author with haunting portraits and indelible images, Brom's The Child Thief is a daring novel of darkest contemporary fantasy that will, at once, haunt and exhilarate any reader who agrees to follow Peter on his desperate crusade.

Publishers Weekly

Chesley-winning illustrator Brom (The Plucker) weaves together gloomy prose and horrifying adventures in this macabre fairy tale inspired by J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Born of faerie blood, Peter hunts abandoned children, runaways and the hopeless, recruiting for his Devils in Avalon and promising them a place where you never have to grow up. He conveniently fails to mention that Avalon's monsters are very real, and the Devils must practice their war games or risk being tortured to death, eaten or worse. While early chapters are promising, this gothic fantasy stumbles on its own darkness. The devilishly amusing flashbacks to Peter's origins don't make up for the heavy-handed bloodshed, rampant violence and two-dimensional characters. It's all fiendish monsters and desperate battles in this twisted, dark Neverland; the Disney Peter's mirth and good humor are nowhere to be found. (Sept.)

Product Details

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Read an Excerpt

The Child Thief
A Novel

Chapter One

Child Thief

In a small corner of Prospect Park, in the borough of Brooklyn, New York, a thief lay hidden in the trees. This thief wasn't searching for an unattended purse, cell phone, or camera. This thief was looking for a child.

In the dusk of that early-autumn day, the child thief peered out from the shadows and falling leaves to watch the children play. The children scaled the giant green turtle, slid down the bright yellow slide, laughed, yelled, teased, and chased one another round and round. But the child thief wasn't interested in these happy faces. He wasn't looking to steal just any child. He was particular. He was looking for the sad face, the loner... a lost child. And the older the better, preferably a child of thirteen or fourteen, for older children were stronger, had better stamina, tended to stay alive longer.

The thief knew Mother Luck had smiled on him with the girl. She'd been a good catch, too bad about her father. He smiled, remembering the funny face the man had made as the knife slipped into his chest. But where was Mother Luck now? He'd been hunting for two days. Nothing. He'd come close with a boy last night, but close wasn't good enough. Grimacing, the thief reminded himself that he had to take it slow, had to make friends with them first, gain their trust, because you couldn't steal a child without their trust.

Maybe Mother Luck would be with him tonight. The child thief had found city parks to be good hunting grounds. Strays and runaways often camped among the bushes and used the public restrooms to wash, and they were always looking for friends.

As the sun slid slowly behind the cityscape, the shadows crept in—and so did the thief, biding his time, waiting for the falling darkness to sort the children out.

Nick darted into the warehouse entryway, pressed himself flat against the steel door, his breath coming hard and fast. He leaned his cheek against the cold metal and squeezed his eyes shut. "Fuck," he said. "I'm screwed. So screwed." At fourteen, Nick was slender and a bit small for his age. Dark, choppy bangs spilled across his narrow face, emphasizing his pallid complexion. He needed a haircut, but of late his hair was the last thing on his mind.

Nick dropped his pack to the ground, pushed his bangs from his eyes, and carefully rolled up one sleeve of his black denim jacket. He glanced at the burns running along the inside of his forearm and winced. The angry red marks crisscrossing his flesh crudely formed the letter N.

He tried to put the nightmare out of his mind, but it came back to him in heated flashes: the men pinning him to the floor—the floor of his own kitchen. The sour, rancid taste of the dish sponge being crammed into his mouth. Marko, big, thick-necked Marko, with his beastly grin, smirking while he heated the coat hanger against the burner. The wire smoking then turning red then... the pain... red-hot searing pain. God, the smell, but worse, the sound, he'd never forget the sound of his own flesh sizzling. Trying to scream, only to gag and choke on that gritty, soggy sponge while they laughed. Marko right in his face, Marko with his long, straggly chin hairs and bulging, bloodshot eyes. "Wanna know what the N stands for?" he'd spat. "Huh, do you fuckhole? It's for Narc. You ever say anything to anybody again and I'm gonna burn the whole fucking word into your tongue. You got that you little prick?"

Nick opened his eyes. "Need to keep moving." He snatched up his pack and unzipped the top. Inside the pack were some chips, bread, a jar of peanut butter, a pocket knife, two cans of soda, a blue rabbit's foot on a leather cord, and about thirty thousand dollars' worth of methamphetamines.

He dug through the hundreds of small clear plastic bags until he found the blue rabbit's foot. The rabbit's foot had been a gift from his dad, the only thing Nick had left of him now. He kissed it, then slipped it around his neck. He needed all the luck he could come by today.

He leaned out from the entryway, glancing quickly up and down the busy avenue, keeping an eye out for a beat-up green van. He'd hoped for some congestion to slow the traffic down, help him make it to the subway alive, but currently the traffic chugged steadily along. The day waned and soon the van would be just one more pair of gleaming headlights in the night.

Nick slung the pack over his shoulder and ducked out onto the sidewalk, weaving his way between the thin trail of pedestrians as he jogged rapidly up the block. There was a bite to the wind and -people had their collars up and their eyes down. Nick pulled up his own collar, skirted around a cluster of elderly men and women lined up in front of an Italian restaurant, and tried to lose himself among the thin stream of returning commuters.

You fucked up Nicky boy, he thought. Fucked up big. Yet part of him was glad, would do about anything to see the faces of those sons-of-bitches when they found their stash gone. It would be a long time before Marko was back in business.

A horn blew behind him. Nick jumped and spun—heart in his throat. But there was no green van, just someone double-parked. He caught sight of the trees and felt a flood of relief. Prospect Park was just a block away. He'd be hard to spot in the trees. He could cut across the park and come out at the subway station. Nick took off in a run.