“Strange Seed” is the first of a series of books published between 1978 and 2003 about “the children of the earth” – creatures who look like human children but have been generated by the earth itself. They grow and mature very quickly, are exquisitely beautiful and, as children, have no greater need than to satisfy their hunger, which they do with wild and swift delight.

The children live almost unseen in rural fields and forests. They have amazing powers of mimicry (they can mimic, perfectly, human voices, birdsong, the calls of various animals, the howl of the wind…) and can camouflage themselves against nearly any background. (At one point, a child caught in a farmhouse camouflages himself well enough against flowered wallpaper that he isn’t seen by the owners of the house.)

Their vision is remarkable; they’re able to focus completely on objects that concern them – people, animals, et cetera – while the background all but fades away.

Winter cold almost always brings death to these creatures. However, now and again, one will grow beyond his first winter, then will survive another, until, in just a few years, he becomes a “human adult” and can pass among humans as if he is one of them.

Strange Seed (1978)
A new husband and a new home – what more could a bride want? Unfortunately, home is an isolated, ramshackle farmhouse near an encroaching forest. And each day her husband grows quieter and more introspective. Worse, Rachel cannot ignore the awesome forest nearby. The woods have become a hiding place for abandoned children. But are they really abandoned? And most terrible of all – are they really children?

Nursery Tale (1981)
Fifteen years after the events of Strange Seed, a development of homes stands where the farm once was. For Janice McIntyre and her husband, this new community by the quiet, lovely woods is a perfect place to raise their expected child.

But pregnant women have been known to see and do things that aren’t quite normal. Though Janice discounts such silly superstitions, she cannot understand why she’s begun to see ghosts. When neighborhood children start disappearing, Janice will discover there is a ghost – but only one. The other things are quite substantial. And quite hungry.

The Children of the Island (1983)
Manhattan Island. The place which, before the buildings had been put up to cut the sky apart and before the subways sliced through the earth, had been the place of their birth. The place where they had first sprung up. The place that had nourished them, and given them pleasure, before men had found them and driven them away.

But they had survived. Survived to this moment. And now they had returned to reclaim the island that had given them the strength of life and the power of death… and soon every man, woman, and child on the island would know it.

The People of the Dark (1985)
It’s a nice house on a country road. Jack and Erika Harris expect to be happy there.

It doesn’t matter that they’re living near a deserted suburb where, years ago, murders and mutilations destroyed the residents. It doesn’t matter – until those that caused the deaths come back – those that sprang from the earth, those that need, those that are not human.

The Harris’ nice house stands between them and what they must have. Nothing has ever mattered more.

Erthmun (1996)
Laughing Man (2003)
Erthmun and Laughing Man tell essentially the same story, the latter book being an expansion and reworking of the first.

Jack Erthmun does not believe that the dead actually speak to him. But in their own way they tell him so much. Jack is a New York City police detective with his own very peculiar ways of solving homicides, and those ways are beginning to frighten his colleagues. He gets results, but at what cost? What’s happening to Jack Erthmun?

This may be Jack’s last case. He’s assigned to a series of unspeakable killings, gruesome murders with details that make even seasoned detectives queasy. But as he goes deeper into the facts of the case, facts that make it seem no human killer can be involved, Jack begins to get more and more erratic. Is it the case that’s affecting Jack? Or is it something else, something no one even dares to consider?