What a small town does when the sky finally answers back — and what kids do when the adults can't save them.
It fell in the deep dark, with Byron's "Darkness" still ringing through it. A meteor with a core of pink crystal, carving the great crater outside what would one day become the river town of StarFell.
It did not die. It slept. It converted. It waited. It was patient in the way only very old, very wrong things can be patient.
For generations the town grew up around the wound in the earth: a postcard-pretty main street, a concrete bridge over the Coosa-like river, eggs at Franks' Grocery, sermons on Sunday. Bikes on the bridge. BB guns in basements. Grocery deliveries to the strange family up the hill.
October 20, 1962 is "the most perfect of Saturday mornings." Levi Levins eats breakfast with his grandma. Johnny Gale breaks a boy's jaw over an insult to his dead mother. A fisherman pulls a stringer of bream from a backwater and starts to sing "In the Pines."
Out at the astrobleme — one of the rarest above-ground impact craters in the world — a well-meaning scientist named Dr. Maitland runs current through the crater's crystals. His twelve-year-old son Miles cranks the amplifier. Gamma waves convert into something else.
The crater erupts in a pink shockwave. The town's natural history turns against it.
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant
and fill him with a terrible resolve."
Fishermen mutate mid-song into clawed things croaking "In the Pines." The river's legendary giant catfish — Fat Lance — grows tentacles and frog-legs and walks on land. The endangered local snail swells into a monster. Pale ghosts drift down Main Street at noon.
And above it all, in a transplanted French chateau called Fleur Du Ciel, sits the Voltaire family — the town's ancient, moneyed landowners, whose lineage is not of this world and whose patriarch has waited a very long time for the meteor to wake up.
Homemade weapons. Nothing left to lose. An orphan with his father's courage and a meteor-infused BB gun. A greaser the town wrote off as trash. A twelve-year-old prodigy who blames himself for all of it. A little girl whose scrapbook now makes pictures come true.
StarFell is a story about human resilience and youthful camaraderie in the dark — about a Saturday morning, a small town, and the sky finally answering back.
"In the pines, in the pines,— A folk song. A warning. A name.
where the sun never shines..."