Set in the affluent neighbourhood of Hemlock Circle, New Jersey, a group of families surround each other in a cul-de-sac, closely bound together like a ribcage. Every Friday for the summer, best friends Ethan and Billy camp out in Ethan’s backyard. There should have been nothing different this time. But in the morning, Ethan awakes to find Billy gone, taken in the middle of the night, no trace of foul play, except for a tear in the tent. For 30 years, Ethan has been haunted by the single, screeching sound of a knife cutting through the tent, and the guilt he’s carried his whole life of not seeing who took Billy. How had they taken him so quietly? Why hadn’t Ethan woken up?

But when the remains of a 10-year-old boy are found in the woods by Hemlock Circle, Ethan and all the children of the neighbourhood, now grown adults, must finally confront what happened that dreadful night 30 years ago, and unleash all the secrets kept long buried. What they all got up to in the woods the day Billy went missing; the strange man seen scouring the neighbourhood just one day before Billy’s abduction; the mysterious Hawthorne Institute secluded in the woods, and the experiments they performed there; and Billy’s interest in all things supernatural and occult, particularly communicating with ghosts.

In this bone-chilling and harrowing mystery, our deepest fears come true. There are the questions that inevitably come afterwards, and the answers and closure we sometimes never get at all. The Last House on Needless Street meets Stranger Things, Middle of the Night will keep you long awake, have you double-checking you locked your doors, and looking out the window for fear that something, or someone, may be watching you back.