The Hidden Children

Westchester County, 1776. The war has bled into every farmhouse and tavern, and Lieutenant Boyd and Ensign Loskiel ride through a landscape scorched by violence and fear, tasked with recruiting men for a regiment that is already dying faster than it can be filled. At Hays's Tavern they find what war always leaves behind: hollow-eyed survivors, grief rendered mute, and the grim arithmetic of bodies. But the title whispers of something more mysterious than soldiers who have lost their nerve, more elusive than the Iroquois families retreating into the forests, more dangerous than the British patrols threading through the hills. Chambers, better known for the fever-dream weirdness of The King in Yellow, here turns his gaze toward history not as pageantry but as flesh and terror, and the result is a novel that understands how war unmakes the people left to remember it. The relationships that unfold across this ruined countryside carry the weight of a young nation's growing pains, but also the quiet, devastating humanity of those caught between empires.