Adventure Stories for Girls: Whisper in the Dark by Joseph Bruchac

Joseph Bruchac, author of the Native American-rooted thriller Skeleton Man has written another story in which a frightening Indian legend appears in a terrorizing modern manifestation.

Maddy always loved the spooky stories her Gramma Delia told, tales from their Narragansett ancestors of ghosts and monsters. When she gets a scary phone call which ends in a whispered "I'm coming for you," her thoughts first turn to the Whisperer, the twisted shaman whose hands turn to iron claws, whose victims hear him whispering until at last he speaks their names and takes them to their deaths in his dark cave.

Maddy finds it possible to dismiss this call as a prank as she tells her friend Roger about it, but when the message "I am here," is scratched on the door and her Aunt Lyssa's dog is found with four claw-like slashes on her back, Maddy and Roger begin to take her fears seriously. When Lyssa disappears and Maddy's search for her leads them through a locked door in the cellar, the old story of the Narragansett Whisperer seems all too real.

Bruchac has a wonderful of way of letting the supernatural break through into the real world that keeps the reader flying through these short, taut novels. Frightened but never victims, his resilient characters resolutely manage their fears and overcome the evil doers which, in their minds at least, assume the shape of primeval Indian demons.