Of course many thanks go to my agent, Stacia Decker, for having such a fine sense of the saleable. And fashion. But the saleable pays the bills. The fashionable is just easy on the eyes.

When we were shopping this book around, Stacia informed me that Andrew Karre, head of Carolrhoda Lab and this book's editor, wanted to have a telephone conversation with me regarding The Twelve-Fingered Boy. After chatting with Andrew, I hung up the telephone with huge a sense of excitement for the possibilities of this book. And I knew this was the best home for it. I'm truly blessed to get to work with so many incredible people in my career and very glad that Andrew was there to help me take Shreve and Jack to where they needed to go. This book wouldn't have been the same without him and the rest of the great team of folks at Carolrhoda Lab and Lerner Publishing Group.

I'd like to thank all my buddies who did so many wonderfully stupid things at Pulaski Heights Junior High, especially Craig Hodges and Stephen Reasoner.

I'd like to thank all of those pre-readers who gave me encouragement upon reading this, my first young adult novel, especially Erik Smetana and C. Michael Cook, who've both been staunch supporters ever since we were stomping the boards at Zoetrope together. I also want to thank Kate Horsley and Julie Summerell for being wonderful ladies and fantastic pre-readers.

The Casimir Pulaski Juvenile Detention Center in this book (and all its staff and wards) is purely a figment of my imagination. When researching this novel, I realized very early that I wanted my juvie to resemble something more like a penitentiary than anything else, and, so, verisimilitude and the story soon parted company. Don't take this at a literal representation of how the juvenile rehabilitation system works here in Arkansas. In many ways it's better, though in some ways, it's worse.

And thanks, Mom and Dad, for always being there for me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

John Hornor Jacobs is the author of two adult novels: Southern Gods, which was short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, and This Dark Earth, which award-winning author Brian Keene called "quite simply, the best zombie novel I've read in years." Jacobs lives with his family in Arkansas. Visit him at www.johnhornorjacobs.com.

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