Jack Sawyer/Jason DeLoessian

The main character of the novel, Jack Sawyer starts the narrative as a twelve-year-old boy trying to come to terms with the illness that is slowly killing his mother Lilly Sawyer. An only child with only one parent left (his father having died many years before in a freak car accident), Jack Sawyer has become fiercely independent and self-reliant for one of his age. Owing in part to his upbringing (where his mother was a successful Hollywood actress and his father was a partner in agency firm), Jack Sawyer displays a tough spirit and a sarcastic sense of humor to cover his own feelings of loss.

Jack Sawyer is thrust on a perilous quest when he starts to notice a conflagration of weird events around himself and his mother, as they escape on holiday to an abandoned New England Hotel. The youth realises that in...