This is a harrowing and intense psychological horror novel for fans of Peter Straub, Jac Jemc, and Ania Ahlborn.
I doubt I will read many better horror novels in 2020. Boy in the Box was a complete triumph and deserves to be very widely read, even beyond the horror genre.
Reminiscent of Neville's The Ritual (2011), Fitch's journey into the dark unknowns of ancient forests builds at a measured pace, pushing you forward in slow-building horror that exhibits all the stamina of a hike out into the woods.
This is one of those books the reader should never start if night is coming on and he's alone in the house.
This is an outstanding horror story where the sense of deep dread slowly tightens around the reader like slow strangulation. Unmissable. -- Horror DNA
A creepy, mesmerizing tale of hunters becoming the hunted, Box In The Box is a haunting journey into the evils that lurk in the wilderness, as well as those buried in the human heart. Fitch definitely has a knack for mixing the paranormal with both brutal reality and the emotional heaviness of grief and sorrow. -- Morgan Sylvia, author of Abode.
Boy in the Box is both tragedy and ghost story, a theater ticket to watch actors on stage deliberately pushed inch by inch toward madness. Fitch menaces the reader by reminding us that our most valued possessions - our marriages, our children, our families - are frail and impermanent. -- Jackson Kuhl, author of A Season of Whispers.
This is what true horror is meant to be, quiet and thoughtful, an eerie sense of something lurking just ahead in your path with no way of escape; BOY IN THE BOX by Marc E. Fitch is the haunting guilt that reminds us mistakes from the past can return at any time, and in the worst of ways. -- Eric J. Guignard, award-winning author and editor, including That Which Grows Wild and A World of Horror
Boy in the Box is a heart-stopping tale that will keep you up at night because every turn of the page is heavy with anticipation and suspense. Marc Fitch drops the reader into a world in which past sins echo into the present and the search for inner calm involves a treacherous climb through mountains that have a long memory. This is a story you won't forget. -- J.J. Hensley - award-winning author of Resolve, Record Scratch, and Forgiveness Dies
Marc E. Fitch's excellent novel, Boy in the Box, is like taking a sideways glance at the normal world and seeing the nightmares that sneak in from the periphery. A tale of ordinary lives sent spiraling out of control-in this case as the result of an incident involving friends on a hunting trip-Fitch creates a moody, muscular read that holds on with white knuckles until the last page. A book to be read and read again. -- Gregory L. Norris, author of The Day After Tomorrow: Into Infinity and The Day After Tomorrow: Planetfall
Late in Marc Fitch's book Boy in the Box, the protagonist says, I don't think we know what we're dealing with here, and so we head fearfully into the final 100 pages or so of a skillful exercise in horror one can't help but compare to a masterpiece of the genre, Algernon Blackwood's The Willows. Fitch's guilt-ridden trio marches into a wilderness possessing danger they don't properly fear until, of course, it's well too late. The novel begins with a tip-toeing dread and builds at a measured pace to a jog and then a run as the protagonists' attempts to right a wrong from the past open the floodgates to mind-wrenching horror. Fitch's prose is concise and glues the reader's attention in a manner making it difficult to put the book down until it's dismal conclusion. This is solid reading for fans of the genre and would certainly make for a nice introduction for those wandering into this particular forest for the very first time. -- Alec Cizak, editor, and author of Lake County Incidents, Breaking Glass and Manifesto Destination
