RAGMAN
As a young boy in Japan, Kenji is left home alone and plays Hitori Kakurenbo, a game of hide-and-seek with a demon, an Oni. His family comes home and the demon kills them all. A traumatized Kenji ends up in the foster system, with no memory of what happened that night. The doctors convince him he witnessed a human murder his family. Several years later he’s adopted by a US family. His adoptive father, Rob, also witnessed the demon when he was young, and still has nightmares about El Cuco, the boogeyman of Puerto Rico.
When local kids start going missing or turning up dead, their bodies violently torn apart and half-eaten, Rob begins investigating the cases. His nightmares return, and Ken begins having them, too. After seeing a psychiatrist about their nightmares, Rob’s premonitions start coming true and he fears he may be the murderer.
Is Rob the boogeyman or is Ken right and the Oni has returned?
The minute I read about the Japanse game of Hitori Kakurenbo -- hide and seek with a demon! -- I knew I wanted to write a book about that. I struggled for months trying to come up with something, and in the end I had 3 very different, yet similar, stories. Someone plays the game, the demon is unleashed, mayhem follows. But there were distinct differences. One idea involved a child. Another a cop. In a third, a family was victimized by the demon. In the course of my research, I came across two facts: one, the demon is often considered the Japanese version of the boogeyman. And two, every culture has their own boogeyman legends.
At some point, I had the brilliant (ha!) idea to combine all three stories and incorporate multiple boogeymen: the cuco (Puerto Rican), the oni (Japanese), and the American version.
Then I put the whole thing on the back burner while I worked on other projects. But now and then I'd go back to those notes and read them. And, as so often happens, one day, probably 2 years after I first had the idea, something clicked and I knew how to piece all 3 stories together. But I also thought it would be fun to do them as a trilogy of novellas instead of a single novel, something I'd never done before. And thankfully, LVP Publications liked it enough to publish it.
