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If You Go Down to the Woods
SETH C. ADAMS
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
KillerReads
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Adam Contreras 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com
Adam Contreras asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008280246
Version: 2019-05-13
This story is about family, friends, and a good dog (which qualifies as both!), and so it is to these I dedicate the novel.
To Mom and Dad, for allowing—and encouraging—their weird son to read whatever he wanted.
To my own group of Outsiders that enriched my life throughout the school years. We may have never fought off assassins and gangsters, but sometimes just surviving life is a fight all its own, made a bit easier with a good group of pals.
To Sheba, Rusty, Outlaw, and Banjo: great dogs, and even better friends.
Table of Contents
Part Two: The Car and the Collector
1.
This is the night. These are the times.
I heard these words for the first time from a killer the summer I met the Outsiders’ Club. Years passed before I finally understood them and, by then, everyone—my friends, my family, my dog—were long gone: some to the dirt that eventually claims us all,