Sanitarium, Sanatorium

After his family’s move to a dying small town in the hills of southern Ohio, fifteen-year-old Eddie has been wasting his summer wondering how he’ll make any friends while living on a dead-end street, which his family shares with only one other mysterious house—one standing at the center of a what appears to be a junkyard.

But when the girl named Sandy who lives in that house introduces herself to him and proceeds to sneak him into it through her bedroom window for a day spent listening to records, he thinks his loneliness might be over, even if his mother doesn’t like the girl, and even if Sandy wants to take him back into the nearby woods to show him something hidden there, something she claims to love.

It’s only after they rescue a cat from being tortured by a local boy Sandy calls the “Kitty-killer” the next morning when Eddie begins to discover a series of shocking truths about his new home town and the long abandoned hospital located in the woods nearby that used to give the town its purpose. And as his home life begins to unravel in the wake of these events and discoveries, he also learns painful truths not only about his parents, but about the strange girl he has come to know as his friend—things that make him question his own sanity as he struggles to maintain a sense of normalcy in a world suddenly gone mad.