The Shadow Year

Long Island, during the 1960s, provides the backdrop for this story, a decade whose moods could swing without warning. Much of the action unfolds in the basement of a modest family house, where a young boy and his brother Jim have built Botch Town, a detailed cardboard model of their neighborhood filled with clay figures modeled on the people they know.

Their little sister, Mary, is a smoker who slips into different voices and personas. Without her brothers realizing it, she also moves the clay townspeople around the model.

As the year goes on, people vanish, some die, ghostly figures are glimpsed, and a menacing man arrives in a long white car. The most puzzling detail is that each of these events lines up with the changes Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.