Something evil is hidden in the woods outside of the beautiful town of Sparkle, PA, the kind of something Alyssa and Peter Huffy, newly arrived in town, do not believe in. But after Peter discovers a child hidden and shivering under a bridge on the edge of the woods - pale, terrified and bloody - he starts to wonder what could possibly be so terrible that it could frighten a child nearly to death.

That boy is twelve-year-old Derek Windward. He is the sole keeper of Sparkle’s oldest secret. He is the only one who has seen the thing hiding in the darkest part of the forest, and how terrifying the power it wields truly is. It is the Bunyine - a giant, tormented creature born eight-thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden. One morning, Derek receives a cryptic message carved into a tree. A message from the beast itself. Something has brought the Bunyine to Sparkle, something that hasn’t occurred on Earth since the destruction of Camelot a millennium and a half before, and the forces of good and evil are going to collide. Though what the Bunyine wants is unclear, what it would do to get it is unthinkable.