Book Review: IT CAME FROM NEVERLAND Delivers Creepy Peter Pan
It Came From Neverland
Written by Cynthia Pelayo
Published by Crooked Lane
June 9, 2026
Hardcover, 288 pgs.
It’s become a familiar trope of late, the character falling into public domain only to wind up the star of a low-budget horror iteration. We’ve seen it several times now: Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Popeye the Slayer Man, etc. It seems you can throw a rock in any direction and find a handful of filmmakers and creators who all have the same subversive idea with regard to our favorite children’s stories.
Only this isn’t how we arrive at this particular idea for this particular story. As author Cynthia Pelayo relates in our interview (see below), the idea came from the original source material itself: certain ways that J.M. Barrie described Peter Pan’s behavior toward the Lost Boys got her thinking about the darker aspects of this story. How does Pan stay eternally young? What happens to the children who decide they want to go home and grow up? How does the magic of Neverland work? And what was James Hook’s role in the overall narrative?
What follows is a tale set in the months prior to England entering World War I. Wendy Darling, the featured lead character in Mr. Barrie’s novel, is now working as a teacher trying to put her past — and the years spent in the asylum — behind her. A normal life is her goal, but as fate would have it, she’s not getting along with her life that easily. Not only has she had to survive the mental hospital, but also the assumptions that her Neverland story was completely made up, a delusion. She’s estranged from her brothers, who want nothing to do with the memory of the event, and just as she’s putting her life back together as an adult, the whispers begin again.
Now working in an orphanage, Wendy has a new set of children to protect after recognizing the signs that the cycle is starting over again. Pan is back, but how? And what is this connection he seems to have with Wendy? Is it because their connection was so strong on the island? Or is it because she got away? Or is it something darker?
As Wendy’s brother Michael prepares to join the Army, and John works as a lawyer with a family to raise, Wendy has to reunited them all in an effort to rid the world of Pan once and for all. And they’re the ones who have the task because it was Wendy who managed to escape, and somehow that has connected her to Peter in some supernatural way. It enables him to come back from Neverland in order to steal his next batch of kids — something he has to do every twelve years in order to maintain his immortality.
It’s an interesting reframing of the Pan story that we all know, and it’s different enough from all of the other “public domain horror twist” efforts that it doesn’t ever feel like it’s chasing a trend. It’s also not a “girlboss” in the lead. Wendy is very much a flawed and broken individual with fears that she might be losing her mind. What’s real? What’s a figment of her imagination? Did they really go to Neverland with this demon? Or did she fabricate the whole thing, as they suspect during her time in the asylum?
The story stays on pace to build tension at the same time rolling out details that give us more answers along with new questions and challenges for the Darling adults, including a number of moments from the original story re-framed from the perspective of adults who suffered severe trauma as children and now see Neverland as the trap it’s always been.
I’m not much of a horror fan, but I enjoyed this tale. It’s more supernatural and psychological than it is a straight-up horror story, and the fact that it twists up a classic story with a new lens adds to that appreciation. It’s not the same lens as Hook, for example, but it does the same kind of work to bring a fresh perspective to Wendy’s experience both as a young girl and as a grown-up having to finally come face-to-face with a demonic monster that stole her childhood.
Very much worth a look.
