Gary Crews's science fiction story is given chilling visual treatment in this tingling, page-turning picture book. The watertower has stood on Shooter's Hill in Preston for as long as anyone can remember, rusted and egg-shaped, casting its shadow over the town. But there is something ominous about that tower-- something that artist Steven Woolman has turned into a masterpiece of visual imagery as the story of two boys who climb the tower for an afternoon swim unfolds. The tension and suggestion of evil in the narrative is played out deliciously in the art, in which it is clear that something's not quite right about most of the inhabitants in Preston, and that something has to do with the tower. The watertower's insignia, which looks like the partially open aperture of a camera or the pupil of an eye, is repeated over and over again in the illustrations, on hats that people wear, as tattoo-like images on their hands. The shape is repeated or suggested in other ways as well, both in the artwork and in the design and presentation of images and text on the page of a book that at one point literally turns around in the telling. They eyes of all the adults in Preston, with the exception of the two boys, are glazed and hard, almost inhuman, and by the end of the story one more person in Preston will have been transformed in this wonderfully eerie tale. (Ages 10-14)

Nobody in Preston could remember when the watertower was built, or who had built it, but there it stood on Shooter's Hill -- its iron legs rusted, its egg-shaped tank warped and leaking -- casting a long dark shadow across the valley, across Preston itself.