Spellwork For Incorrigible Boys

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 1987.

At Shepherd’s Timber Ranch & Refuge, boys sent there to be fixed learn to confess, to kneel, and to forget who they were.

Seventeen-year-old Max Miller arrives with a duffel bag and a mixtape of forty-three songs.

By morning, there is ice on the swamp.

In May.

It isn’t weather. It is something the land remembers.

Max finds three allies.
Clay Ashworth counts everything to keep himself steady.
Keegan Doyle, the group’s muscle, is built like a barn door and gentler than he lets anyone see. His eighteenth birthday is approaching, which means the truck will come for him, just as it has come for the boys before him, and the truck never brings them back.
And then there is Jonah Beck. Small, quiet, watchful.
He can hum a terrified calf into stillness, and he seems to understand things about the Ranch that nobody else will say aloud.

As Max and Jonah grow closer, something neither boy
has been allowed to name begins to take shape between them. In a place where even wanting the wrong thing can be dangerous, their growing love becomes both refuge and risk.

Beyond the north fence lives a starving escapee with a faded pink paperback full of spells and no reason to trust anyone. He needs bread. They need to know what he knows.

So they make a bargain.

But magic has rules. Every spell has a cost. And beneath Shepherd’s, something has been waiting a very long time for someone to listen.

Spellwork for Incorrigible Boys is a gothic horror novel about survival, first love, the power of a name, and what happens when the people a place was built to break finally stop playing along.