Camp Lullaby Reunion

About

Fifteen summers after the fire in Cabin Seven, Dana Pruitt takes a free weekend at the rebuilt Camp Lullaby, because a prepaid number every one of the six remembers has started answering texts from the dead. Dana is thirty-one, an ER nurse at Sandhill Regional, and the only survivor awake long enough to see the killer's face. She is also the only one who ran. The reunion is free: cabins, food, one working flashlight per person. At 12:02 on the Saturday the front gate is chained from the outside and the phone bars are gone. The other five are adults and each of them is ruined by a specific fact about that week. Tori Lang left the pool unwatched at 11:20 and has been paid, once, to say she saw a man in a raincoat. Marcus Bell owes seventy-one thousand dollars on a production van and lied about the direction of the fire in 2011. Gus Okafor is the caretaker now and keeps the old cabin keys in a coffee tin. Rae Whitlock is a county patrol officer who has carried Dana's open case file for fifteen years without ever filing it. Priya Nair is finishing a book about the massacre and marrying into the family of the man convicted for it. The campfire song carries a count, and that count is the one thing none of the six of them has ever said out loud in the same room. Six of the names in it are in the county file. Six are not. Two of them are not dead. Camp Lullaby Reunion is an adult horror tragedy about the story a survivor is made to carry and what happens when the six people carrying it discover they have been carrying different parts of it on purpose. Sex between adults is written in full on the page, consent is spoken out loud, and it is never a reward. Five endings, five tracked variables, and no ending that undoes the weekend.

Cast

• Dana Pruitt protagonist; ER nurse at Sandhill Regional; the only survivor awake when the fire started
• Rae Whitlock Sutter County patrol officer, badge 4471; Dana's former partner
• Gus Okafor caretaker at four Chabot camps; holds the old cabin keys
• Tori Lang assistant lifeguard who left the pool unwatched at 11:20
• Marcus Bell true-crime channel, 1.4 million subscribers; owes $71,000
• Priya Nair author of The Last Counselor; engaged to Dean Caplan's cousin
• Dean Caplan convicted of two counts in 2012; nine years served; released 2021
• Marguerite Sowerby founder of Camp Lullaby; pleaded in 2014; died in custody in 2016