Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories

THE LOST CAUSES OF BLEAK CREEK

Link Neal Rhett McLaughlin

For fans of novels and TV shows with strange, unexplainable, supernatural things happening in small towns, The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek is a thrilling and darkly funny novel - about two best friends fighting the darkness at the heart of their Southern town.
It's 1992 in Bleak Creek, North Carolina, a sleepy little place with all the trappings of an ordinary small town: churches, friendly smiles coupled with silent judgments, and an unquenchable appetite for pork products. Beneath the town's cheerful façade, however, Bleak Creek teens live in constant fear of being sent to The Whitewood School, a local reformatory with a record of putting unruly teens back on the straight and narrow - a record so impeccable that almost everyone is willing to ignore the mysterious deaths that have occurred there over the past decade.

At first, high school freshmen Rex McClendon and Leif Nelson believe what they've been told: that the students' strange demises were all just tragic accidents, the unfortunate consequence of bad attitudes and grunge music. But when the shoot for their low-budget horror masterpiece, PolterDog, goes horribly awry - and their best friend, Alicia Boykins, is sent to Whitewood as punishment - Rex and Leif are forced to piece together the unsettling truth of the school and its mysterious founder, Wayne Whitewood.

What the boys find - with recent NYU film school student Janine Blitstein and her cousin, Donna (a former Whitewood student with secrets of her own) at their side - will leave them battling an evil beyond their wildest teenage imaginations. One that will shake Bleak Creek to its core.

Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, raised in North Carolina and best friends since the first grade, are an LA-based comedy duo known for hosting the most-watched daily talk show on the Internet, Good Mythical Morning, their narrative series Rhett & Link's Buddy System, the award-winning weekly podcast Ear Biscuits, and their instant #1 New York Times bestseller, Rhett & Link's Book of Mythicality. They have been featured on and in The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Live with Kelly & Ryan, The Conan O'Brien Show, Variety, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-10-28 by Crown

Comments

I cannot think of a more exciting novel to read - and share with my sons - than The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek! Thank you, Rhett and Link, for this gem about friendship, courage, and adventure, which is touched by your humor, wit, and intelligence with each twist and turn!

I tore through all 324 pages of this book in one sitting - and I still didn't want it to end! I would have been willing to read as many as 325 pages, or possibly even 326. Though if I'm being totally honest, they probably could have stopped at 323. Either way, I loved this creative book.

The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek reminded me, lovingly and longingly, of films like The Goonies or The Lost Boys - those kind of throwback narratives that make you recall what it was like to be a kid: the close friendships, that strange and needful breed of fear you only feel at that age, and the looming threat of adulthood lurking at the periphery. If, like me, you believe there's a power vested in books that can take you back in time, then this book is its own little power plant.

An entertaining narrative... the story is funny, spooky, and at times terrifying.

Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal conjure up a heady brew of hilarity, friendship, and dark forces in the small-town South, where being the funny, smart kids might just end up as the fight of your life. Fans of John Green and Stranger Things take note.

THE LOST CAUSES OF BLEAK CREEK, debuts at number 9 on the hardcover fiction and number 13 on the combined print/e-book New York Times best-seller lists for the week of November 17. The book went on sale last Tuesday, October 28, and is still in the top 50 on Amazon.com.