A Retraction

The Crooked Door is a middle grade horror novel by Brad McLellan, although Louis Sylvester (originally McLelland’s co-author) has been removed entirely from the publisher’s page

Louis Sylvester is one of the teachers discussed in the documentary Keep This Between Us, released back in August 2022 on Freeform, Hulu, and other streaming services. In it, Cheryl Nichols comes to terms with her experiences being groomed by a teacher while in high school and dives deeply into the stories of many others who experienced the same abuse she did from a trusted adult. Thanks to the commenter below, I was able to find out about this documentary’s release and learn that Louis Sylvester has been not only removed from the publisher’s page but from many other public-facing places as well. It still is not clear to me if he has been fired from his teaching position at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho yet, but any mention of him seems to have been scrubbed from their site. Additionally, the school’s Twitter replies are extremely limited despite discussion by well-known authors under their tweets.

Obviously this is extremely disappointing! I’m very grateful to the commenter who let me know about this, and I’m glad I have the ability to edit this and to let others know. Please be sure to avoid anything involving Louis Sylvester from this point forward. Keep This Between Us can be found on Hulu here. An article by the Daily Beast further discusses the situation here. Tiktoks from other book reviewers and folks aware of the situation can be found here.

Please be sure to take care of yourselves, friends. There is no piece of media that is ever worth excusing this kind of wretched behavior.