His name's Sam Cooper, and he's always been such a good little boy—gifted and talented, content and compliant. And somehow everything always seems to go just right for him and his parents—they've got lots of money, a beautiful home, and when the time comes, Sam breezes his way into the most exclusive and desirable prep school in New York.

But what is it that Sam is always sketching in the notebook he carries with him everywhere? And why is it that when his mother learns the answer, it unleashes a series of bizarre and terrifying events that shatters the Coopers' perfect world forever?

He wields a strange and terrible power he cannot understand, and there is somebody—something—after him that will stop at nothing to gain control of it.