Victor, a young writer who became famous for one novel and was forced to make a living by writing custom books for officials, cannot even imagine how his business trip to the small provincial Chaginsk will turn out. Two local boys disappear without a trace in the forest. Searches yield nothing. And they don’t really look for children: among the swamps, ravines and mosses, there is a living legend about Shushun, who takes human offerings for himself. Victor, in company with his friends, is looking for the real criminal, but is Shushun real? Or is it so dissolved in space that it can be in each of the ordinary townspeople? “Chaginsk” is the first book of the dilogy. About disappearance, searches and victims. “The story, of which I became an involuntary witness and participant, does not let me go even now, after almost twenty years. Moreover, the pictures of that strange and terrible summer are before my eyes, and I cannot get rid of the feeling that they are haunting me. It’s as if there’s a ringing thread stretching behind me, which I inadvertently clung to on the shore of the distant Ingir, presses, haunts me, pursues me through time in an incomprehensible way, and what happened then stands behind me today. It’s impossible to say that those few days completely ruined my life, however, it definitely veered off its own path. In all my failures and mistakes I see the shadow of that June, in every defeat - a trace of that defeat, something good that could have come true, but did not come true and will never come true. That summer was my last summer, since then I have been walking through autumn, and my paths are getting shorter and shorter. New days scare me, in the steps of the passing days I hear hopelessness, and nothing can be fixed, I have come to terms with this a long time ago. However, I want to understand. I want to understand who exactly was behind this. And here it’s not even a matter of justice. Thousands disappear in Russia every year. Some are found, others are found later. The rest are never found. What happens to these people remains a mystery. In June of two thousand and one, I came into contact with a secret, and the secret poisoned me. Then I only felt it, for a brief moment I felt it, but today I am sure that it was the only time in my life that I encountered real evil. And it seems that this evil has put a deep test on me..." The new novel by Eduard Verkin, a famous author of teenage prose, as well as the author of the bestseller "Sakhalin Island" is a magnum opus, a whole world that reflects our present and past. Monsters from children's fairy tales exist. And they are coming for you... “Stephen King visiting the classics of Russian literature. Eduard Verkin deconstructs the literary tradition into Lego chips and assembles them into an absolutely original work. A funny, scary and at the same time sad novel, in which life is almost more frightening than death.” — Natalya Kochetkova, book reviewer Lenta. The book contains obscene language!