The Splintering Boy
Geppetto only wanted to make something that remembered his son.
One year after fever takes Jamie, the old carver lives alone in a workshop full of dust, unfinished toys, and the silence left behind by a child's death. Then grief leads him into the forbidden clearing where the Gallows Pine once stood, a cursed tree that learned death from rope, blood, and generations of public hangings. From its surviving branch, Geppetto cuts the wood he should have left buried.
He brings it home.
He carves a boy.
At first, the puppet is only wrong in small ways. A toy horse moves. A missing sliver of flesh appears between painted teeth. The new wooden child listens too closely, learns too quickly, and speaks in voices it should not know. Then it names itself Pinocchio, and the lie begins to walk.
As Geppetto tries to contain what he has made, the puppet spreads through the workshop, the attic, and the village of Collodi itself. Children hear voices from wells. Toys remember fear. Adults find wood grain under their skin. Grief becomes architecture. The dead are copied badly enough to wound the living. And the false boy learns that every human heart carries a door if the right voice knocks.
To stop Pinocchio, Geppetto must face the truth he avoided from the first cut: he did not bring his son back. He gave sorrow a mouth, and now that mouth wants the world.
The Splintering Boy is a dark fairy-tale horror novel about cursed wood, false resurrection, grief, lies, and the terrible cost of mistaking hunger for love.
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