The Button Box Series

There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road, and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974, 12-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong (if time-rusted) iron bolts and zigzag up the cliffside. At the top of the stairs, Gwendy catches her breath and listens to the shouts of the kids on the playground. One day a stranger calls to Gwendy: "Hey, girl. Come on over here for a bit. We ought to palaver, you and me."

Something evil has swept into the small Western Maine town of Castle Rock on the heels of the latest winter storm. Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and his team are desperately searching for two missing girls, but time is running out to bring them home alive. In Washington, DC, 37-year-old Gwendy Peterson couldn’t be more different from the self-conscious teenage girl who once spent a summer running up Castle Rock’s Suicide Stairs. That same summer, she was entrusted - or some might say cursed - with the extraordinary button box by Richard Farris, the mysterious stranger in the black suit.

When Gwendy Peterson was twelve, a mysterious stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its eight colored buttons promised death and destruction. Years later, the button box reentered Gwendy’s life. A successful novelist and a rising political star, she was once again forced to deal with the temptation the box represented. Now, malignant forces seek to possess the button box, and it is up to Senator Gwendy Peterson to keep it from them at all costs.