Get your hands on this compelling new YA fantasy novel by J. Fischer. The Occupied follows Charlie Gates, a shy and awkward eighteen-year-old, who wakes up on an island with his high school crush Cameron Garcey. The two boys have no memory of how they got there, claiming that they merely went to bed the night before and woke up suddenly in the middle of the ocean. They thought being lost was the worst of their problems - but it was only the beginning.Before long, they're attacked by a crazy shaman who does some kind of magic ritual on Cameron, branding him with a strange mark. After barely escaping with their lives, they soon find that the island has way worse in store for them. Desperate for shelter, they hunker down in a smelly old shack in the middle of a dense forest. Tired and hungry, they're forced to hunt innocent animals just to feed their insatiable appetites. And finally, when a way home is just beyond the horizon, whatever brief glimmer of hope they had is strangled out of them by a ruthless cult hell-bent on world domination.The cult plans to call upon something dark - something beyond anyone's imagination - and it falls on Charlie and Cameron to muster up the courage to fight it, or else they won't be the only ones destroyed by “the beast within.”