The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path: Or, the Mystery of the Haunted Quarry

It's autumn 1919 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and five friends from Scranton High are off on a nutting expedition, their pockets filling with walnuts and chestnuts as they banter about the looming athletic tournament. Hugh Morgan leads the pack, but beneath the cheerful rivalry and training for the fifteen-mile Marathon lies a tension that deepens when the boys venture too close to the old haunted quarry. Strange noises echo from the abandoned stone walls. Locals speak of shadows that move wrong. And Nick Lang and his surly crew seem to be watching from the tree line, their motives as murky as the quarry's black water. What begins as a wholesome tale of friendship and athletic competition curdles into something stranger. The cinder path that winds through the woods becomes a threshold between the innocent world of schoolboy adventures and something ancient and watchful waiting below. This is juvenile fiction from another era, when authors understood that the things children feared most often lived in the spaces between what was real and what was imagined. For readers who grew up on Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton but always wanted the darkness turned up a few notches.