Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Barker has written some good books in collaboration with James Patterson (see, for example, The Noise, 2021, or The Writer, 2025), but his best work continues to be the stories he tells solo: the brilliant 4MK trilogy, for example, or A Caller’s Game (2021). His new novel is a horror story: teenager David Spivey’s grandmother dies, and he inherits her house, which is located on a small island accessible only by boat. He and his friends decide to spend the summer there; it could be the last time they’re all together before college and grown-up lives. It’s a lot of fun, at first, a bunch of kids all by themselves on an island—until they discover that the island is full of secrets, and not all of them pleasant. Atmospheric and genuinely frightening, the novel takes readers into dark places they might prefer not to visit, but which are impossible to look away from. Barker is a top-flight storyteller, a craftsman whose carefully constructed stories are well worth exploring.