Some places don't reform you. They unmake you.

Michigan's Upper Peninsula, June 1987. 

Sixteen-year-old Max Miller is driven north by his own father and handed over to Shepherd's Timber Ranch & Refuge — a "camp" for boys who've been caught loving the wrong person. Here, devotion is enforced with a ruler's edge, sin is tallied in a ledger, and the counselors have their own quiet, clinical ways of making a boy forget who he is.

But the ground at Shepherd's Ranch doesn't behave the way it should. Frost clings to the fence line in the height of summer. The swamp past the tree line has a heartbeat. And somewhere beneath the chapel and the barn and the counselors' cold half-truths, something far older than the camp has been waiting for boys like these to find it.

With three other boys who refuse to break — and a small-town librarian willing to teach them what the church never wanted them to know — Max starts learning the old ways his captors would call witchcraft. As the full moon rises and the boundary between worlds wears thin, the boys of Shepherd's Ranch will discover that the only thing more dangerous than what's buried under that ridge is what they're capable of once they stop asking permission.

Spellwork for Incorrigible Boys, a novel by Jason M Buss — coming soon.