Parents' Guide to The Dark We Know

THE DARK WE KNOW is set in Slater, a mining town that's the "kind of place where you're born to start dying." Two years ago, then 16-year-old Isa Chang left Slater without a backup plan. She's now in art school and has a job sweeping floors at a tattoo parlor. It's only the prospect of a small inheritance from her emotionally abusive father that brings her back. But the sadness she feels on her return isn't for the loss of her father, it's that she and Mason Kane are the sole survivors of what was once a tight group of four friends. Zach Tai shot himself, and three weeks later, Wren Craver was found floating in a pond. Mason confides in Isa that he's certain their deaths were not suicides but murders committed by something evil that's still around in the town. Something that may be involved in the disappearance of Paige Vandersteen, the daughter of the most powerful family in Slater. Mason and Isa discover that Paige was investigating a secret bastard ancestor named Sarai, a search that Mason and Isa continue with the help of Paige's twin, Otto. That leads the three of them to the long abandoned "plague house," where they try to summon the ghosts of the sick children that the Vandersteen family had quarantined in the house when a plague struck the town. It was a "biblical exchange for the town's survival" made with a spirit called Angel. The story is filled with seances, meetings with ghosts, shocking news about Sarai, and revelations about the mysterious and unsettling drawings in Isa's sketch book—before a final violent confrontation with Angel.