A few scenes with Joey's old best friend, who is now too cool to talk to him, and his now bigger, younger brother add the right pangs of adolescent angst. The action and resolution of the story are fairly compressed and taut, and as for the believabilityAwho's to say?Awe're talking alien abduction here, but the details are convincingly written. By chance, he gets an e-mail through one of the electronic bulletin boards for missing children that his mother has been on, and he tracks down a couple of college students who have a theory about what may have happened to himAone that his returning memories supportAthat he was abducted by aliens. Then the seizures start and Joey begins to remember what happened to him on that summer night.

Joey can't tell them where he might have been or why he hasn't grown at all. The next thing he knows he's in the hospital after collapsing in a convenience store, being told by everyone how glad they are to have him back and that he's been gone for over two years. Grade 4-7AThe last thing 12-year-old Joey remembers is that he got up in the middle of the night and headed to the restrooms just down the path from where his tent was pitched. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. He doesn't want to accept their explanation, but as his physical condition deteriorates there seems to be no choice but to return to the lakeside camp where he disappeared and confront what happened to him.Ī cross between The Twilight Zone and The X-files, this ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant YA Readers examines that area of the human psyche where the body and mind meet - or don't - and where identity resides.

Then Joey turns to two college students who contact him via the Internet to suggest that he was kidnapped by aliens. Joey battles strange physical conditions: a persistent runny nose that the doctor says is leaking brain fluid, a ringing in his ears that turns into a voice telling him to come to the door in the lake, and periodic seizures during which he seems to remember being sucked into a vortex of light at the campground where he disappeared. Chronologically fourteen, he looks and sounds and feels like a twelve-year-old boy. He can't remember what happened to him but even more disturbing is that he doesn't look a day older than when he left.

Joseph Finney disappeared from a tent in a national forest and mysteriously reappeared two years later.

The Door in the Lake by Nancy Butts