The Candyman Cometh

In the dying Maine town of Havenwood, something sweet and sinister begins calling to the desperate and the broken. Sarah Delacroix, a twenty-eight-year-old waitress trapped in a life of endless night shifts and fading dreams, hears whispers promising escape from her suffocating existence. When she follows a path of candy-colored stones into Morrison Woods, she encounters the Candy Man-a button-eyed, tap-dancing figure in caramel shoes who sees into the hollow places of every human heart. He rules over Candy Land, an impossible kingdom where suffering is transformed into sweetness, where the lonely and desperate are preserved forever in candy-coated perfection, and where pain is promised purpose in a recipe that’s been perfecting itself for two hundred years.

As Sarah is given a tour of this twisted kingdom-from the Fudge Pits where souls are rendered into molten chocolate to the Licorice Labyrinth where truth-tellers are trapped in living walls-she begins to understand the terrible price of the Candy Man’s promises. Sarah encounters other Havenwood residents who’ve been lured to this place: teenage grocery clerk Billy Thornton, lonely widow Mrs. Abernathy, and Dr. Henderson searching for his missing daughter. Each has been promised their deepest desires, only to find themselves crystallized, stretched, and dissolved into the sweet architecture of an eternal prison. Faced with her own transformation and a trial before the court of Candy Land, Sarah must choose between accepting eternal preservation in sweetness or finding another path entirely. But the longer she remains in this place, the more she realizes that the hunger driving the Candy Man’s kingdom is older and more dangerous than she imagined, and that some appetites, once awakened, can never be satisfied.