Everything you wanted to know about those intriguing, intrepid kids called the “Cliffsiders”!
Only their names have been changed to barely conceal the real kids they’re based on.
Check back soon for more pics and profiles! Along with visualizations of the monsters and cryptids they have to reckon with.
SAM BENNETT
“I have a HUGE crush on Janet Weiss, but I’m too scared to even talk to her.“
As the leader of The Cliffsiders, Sam’s the main character in all six CHRONICLES. He’s a little bit Bill Denbrough (the leader of The Losers Club in STEPHEN KING’S IT), Chris Chambers of STAND BY ME, Rudy Halloran of MONSTER SQUAD, and a whole lot of Mark Petrie (SALEM’S LOT), with the wherewithal of little Samuel of THE BABADOOK.
JUDY HANLEY
“I have a HUGE crush on Sam Bennett, but he’s too stupid to realize it.“
Judy’s introduced in THE ISLAND and appears in all six CHRONICLES. On the horror heroine meter, she’s somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ellen Ripley. Favorite saying: “Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but it takes a real man to handle a redhead.”
RICHIE KILLIAN
“I’m gonna crush Sam Bennett! I’m gonna kick his ass every day of the week and twice on Saturday and Sunday!”
The character of Richie Killian was inspired by the resident torturer of 7th and 8th Graders in my junior high. Richie is Sam’s nemesis in THE ISLAND. He puts the Kill in Killian. He doesn’t appear in the other novels. You’ll have to read THE ISLAND to find out why. But, there are no shortage of bullies in the CHRONICLES, and Ricky Carnicki is all to willing to take Killian’s place.
RANDY BADOOK
“I used to have a crush on Sam Bennett. Now I have a love-hate relationship with him. Check that. A hate-hate relationship.”
Sam actually knows Randy from Walden Falls (he appears in THE DYNAMO). Randy wanted to join the Believers, Sam’s group of upstart 6th Grade paranormal investigators, but Sam didn’t let him. And now that Randy’s family has moved to the Landing, he’s vowed to make Sam’s life miserable. He appears in all six CHRONICLES.
THE SKINNYMALINK
Lest anyone think that the Skinnymalink, the monster in THE DYNAMO (the prequel to THE CLIFFSIDE CHRONICLES), who also has the distinction of being the first supernatural creature Sam Bennett encounters, is based on the Internet-generated urban legend of The Slender Man, it’s not.
For one thing, the Malink has a face and doesn’t wear a suit and tie. And, as monsters go, he’s a bigger A-hole.
Moreover, fictional or not, the Malink pre-dates not only the Net, but also the software used to generate images of The Slender Man, and the social media apps and web site employed to spread word of his utterly fabricated existence, inspiring both cosplayers and copycats, pranksters and – unfortunately – actual predators. In one case, he inspired an attempted homicide. Such inventions have had devastating effects on real people in the age of QAnon, “alternative facts,” and conspiracy theories.
In THE DYNAMO, 6th Grader Sam Bennett first hears about the Malink when the Bennetts move to Walden, a town in upstate New York, where it had been whispered about on school playgrounds for generations. Since adults neither believe in such things, nor listen to children’s panicked tales of what lurks under their beds and inside their closets, nor believe in a thing that can enter a house through a keyhole or a drain, whatever accident that befalls a local child that a kid chalks up to the Skinnymalink, Walden’s adults and local police ascribe to more common causes, like bad luck or carelessness. Kids had been falling off of High Bridge or drowning beneath the Falls for a hundred years.
According to Sam’s diary, the first time he saw the alleged lair of the Malink was when he and the other members of the Valley Avenue Believers biked across the aforementioned High Bridge – a disused railroad trestle – for the best view of the ruins of the old power house, a massive hydroelectric plant blasted into a rocky cliff overlooking the Wallkill River. Everyone called the place “The Dynamo.” That was in the late Summer of 1968.
The Believers rode their Stingrays and junkyard reclamation projects – Schwinns, Huffys, and Murrays – with baseball and pinochle cards in their spokes – across the maintenance catwalk to the halfway point of the bridge. The river flowed peacefully a few hundred feet below. Hulking about a football field away was the dynamo, separated from another abandoned structure, a knife factory, by a roiling rush of white water created by what the locals called Horseshoe Dam, but looked more like an arrowhead to Sam. So it was Arrowhead Falls to Sam, who liked giving things names.
From that vantage point, the side of the crumbling edifice facing the bridge resembled a tall, gaunt face with a massive open mouth and two empty eye sockets. It reminded Sam of the decaying face of a corpse. Some said it was the face of the Skinnymalink, who had didn’t merely haunt the building, but physically inhabited it. It was also rumored that one of its two towering smokestacks went far deeper underground than it did into the sky, and led into a massive spider-web of ancient tunnels beneath the town, like the spokes of a giant wheel. Those, in turn, led into the sewers. Dickie Munger said he’d heard one could travel, if one took the right tunnels, all the way from the power house to Tin Brook, completely underground.
The Malink was historically described as a being that traveled the town sewers (even before Pennywise the Clown was a deadly twinkle in STEPHEN KING’S eye), marking Walden children for “redemption” later, a price rooted in a curse put on the town centuries earlier. The Malink’s job, simply put: the collection of innocent souls. In payment for an ancient debt that it falls to the Believers to uncover.
The Skinnymalink is also reminiscent of serial killer Eugene Victor Tooms, a human mutant with a taste for human livers encountered by FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder in “Squeeze,” Episode 3 of Season 1 of THE X-FILES. Tooms was able to squeeze through small spaces, e.g., mail slots, air ducts, chimneys, drain pipes, and commit “locked-room” liver removals that had law enforcement stumped. Chris Carter’s malevolent creation came well after the real Sam Bennett described the Malink in his diary.
Unlike Tooms, however, the Skinnymalink is and never was a human being. It is decidedly an absence of anything human. A thing not born, but conjured. A humanity-negating manifestation of pure evil.
And, unlike Pennywise the Clown in STEPHEN KING’S IT, it’s not a shape-shifter. It doesn’t shift shapes, but rather can compress itself, down to individual parts.
It’s hard to imagine anything worse than The Slender Man, Pennywise, and Tooms.
But in on an October night 1968, Sam Bennett and the Valley Avenue Believers encounter the worst of all three when they meet the Malink inside THE DYNAMO.