When twelve-year-old Will Byers disappears on a quiet autumn night, Hawkins becomes a town held together by fear, rumors, and half-truths. But no one feels the loss more sharply than Miranda Byers, Will's seventeen-year-old sister-a girl already battling her own demons.
Miranda was supposed to pick her brother up from a friend's house. Instead, she chose a party, a bottle, and a few hours of escape from the pressure of keeping her family afloat. By the time she returned home, Will was gone. Now, as her mother, Joyce, becomes consumed by strange lights and whispers in the walls, Miranda is convinced that Will's disappearance is her fault-and she drowns that guilt in whatever she can find to drink.
But the more Miranda tries to numb the pain, the more she notices things that don't make sense: flickers in the woods, echoes in empty rooms, and a feeling that something unseen is moving through town-something predatory. As Hawkins shifts from eerie to deadly, Miranda must claw her way out of her self-destruction and confront the night she can't stop replaying.
Driven by guilt, love, and a growing suspicion that Will's fate is tied to something far beyond the ordinary, Miranda begins her own desperate search. What she uncovers forces her to face not only the darkness threatening her family, but the darkness she's been carrying inside herself.
To save Will, Miranda must become someone she's never believed she could be-and survive forces she never believed existed.