Leisure Books is reissuing Robert Dunbar‘s twenty-year-old horror novel The Pines in time for Halloween. This new edition will be the first unabridged paperback edition, the “definitive version, with all previously censored material restored.”
When it was first published, the novel, “set in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, created a sensation. The Pines was the first novel to explore the lore of the Leeds Devil (one of America’s oldest oral myth traditions). Though heavily expurgated, the book attracted a fiercely partisan following.”
Robert Dunbar has often lectured at schools and libraries and has been a guest on numerous television and radio programs, discussing both The Pines and its sequel, The Shore, which moves the action to a Jersey beach town, and which Leisure will soon be publishing.
Dunbar offers this teaser of The Pines: “Deep within the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, a series of macabre murders draws ever nearer to the isolated farmhouse where a lonely woman struggles to raise her strange, disturbed son. Does some ancient evil prowl these woods? The boy seems to be in league with a presence that makes itself felt in every rustle of wind… in every gleam of moonlight. As a wave of terrifying violence threatens to engulf them, the young mother must join with a group of demon hunters—outcasts all—in a battle for her own survival… and for the life and soul of her son.”