Fifteen-year-old runner Ash Tyler will be the stag boy in the annual stag chase, a mountain race with ancient origins where one boy plays the stag and the remaining boys play the hounds. The chase, once brutal and deadly, is now just local tradition, a chance for teenage boys to compete.

Ash’s soldier Dad is away at war, and when he returns, Ash plans to do him proud by winning the stag chase. On a training run weeks before the race, Ash witnesses a spectral event, a ghostly stag chase through the mountains, savage hound boys hunting down a terrified stag boy as he runs for his life. 

But when his dad comes home days late in a drunken haze, Ash struggles to understand his father’s behaviour. To make matters worse, Mark, Ash’s former best friend, is acting weird, and wants to speak to him. Ash meets Mark to find him living alone in the woods, surviving on berries and roadkill. He claims the land is dying, ravished by disease and drought, and that the only way to fix it is to kill the stag boy, as they did centuries ago. 

As the past merges with the present and ancient forces clamour for a sacrifice, Ash encounters Bone Jack, a figure of legend, and guardian of the border between this world and the next. Will Ash heed Mark’s warnings and drop out of the race? Or will he defy the savagery of beings long dead?

Full of dark folklore, mysterious apparitions and menacing rooks, this novel tackles friendship, grief and mental health with a poignancy that befits adolescence. Sara Crowe brings the English fells to life with vivid descriptions of erratic weather and rugged landscape that simultaneously ground the story in reality and provide a fitting backdrop for a region steeped in myth and legend. Bone Jack is an eerie ghost story with engaging characters.