Every fifteen years, Bucephalus, Ohio, buries its children. Every fifteen years, it forgets.

In 1861, eleven soldiers drowned in eighteen inches of water. In 1966, the town painted the faces of 172 dead children on an elementary school wall. Then everyone went back to not looking.

Bucephalus is a small town in Knox County, Ohio, where the lights over Respite Bay go straight up and a reliable kind of quiet keeps people from asking why. Every fifteen years, something wakes beneath the hills, and the town pays for it in drownings, disappearances, and animals that are not animals. It isn't evil and it isn't angry. It doesn't know Buck exists. It finds the loudest thing in you and makes it real, and it feeds without ever noticing who it consumes.

The summer of 2026 is a wave year. Five teenagers are each failed, in their own way, by every adult meant to protect them: a football star, a track runner with a notebook full of patterns, a girl who has catalogued every ghost in her family's hotel, a kid surviving a father's silence, and a quiet girl who has seen the dead since she was four. They are the only ones willing to do what Bucephalus never has. They will look.

Over a year of buried newspapers, a map pinned up in a barn, and a circle paced out in 1794, they trace the horror back to its source. To end it, they will have to face something that cannot be fought or bargained with. It was never interested in them at all.

Indifference is a sprawling, King-style coming-of-age horror novel about small towns and the monsters they make room for. Its most frightening question is what happens when no one is watching.