The Replacement

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In the story, Emma’s four years old. She gets out of bed and pads across the floor in her footie pajamas. When she reaches her hand between the bars, the thing in the crib moves closer. It tries to bite her and she takes her hand out again but doesn’t back away. They spend all night looking at each other in the dark. In the morning, the thing is still crouched on the lamb-and-duckling mattress pad, staring at her. It isn’t her brother. It’s me.

Mackie is not one of us.

Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement—left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is slowly dying in the human world.

Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with an oddly intriguing girl named Tate. But when Tate’s baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs.

The Replacement is a Young Adult Dark Fantasy/Horror novel written by Brenna Yovanoff and originally published by Razorbill (US) in September 2010, then by Simon & Schuster Children's (UK) in January 2011.

Tropes used in The Replacement include:

• Adult Fear
• Big Sister Instinct: Emma is the reason Mackie made it this far.
• Changeling Tale: This is the story of the thing that replaced Malcolm "Mackie" Doyle.
• Dark Is Not Evil / Light Is Not Good: Zig Zagged. Ends up somewhere near Blue and Orange Morality.
• Equivalent Exchange
• Emo Teen: Mackie actually has legitimate reasons for being sickly and depressed, but being an Emo Teen makes a good cover story for why he acts weird, skips class and avoids people.
• Human Sacrifice: The town's prosperity is Powered by a Forsaken Child. Literally. Many times over.
• Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: They take children as Human Sacrifices for the Lady.
• Masquerade: A very small one. Mackie is actually the only one of Them who tries to live with Muggles; the rest live in their burrow.
• Not Using the Z Word: The Fair Folk are not called such.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child
• Stepford Suburbia: Nearly everyone has had a child go missing or die in their family, but no one ever talks about it. They all just bury quartz in their gardens, hang scissors over the cribs and enjoy their financial prosperity.
• The Fair Folk
• The Magic Goes Away: The Lady mourns the good old days, when her sacrifices were great warriors, and willing. The Morrigan was once a goddess of war. Of course, times change, and they have since gone underground.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The town of Gentry is a quiet, insular place. Isolated from the woes that seem to befall other small towns, such as recessions, droughts or floods, Gentry thrives. But prosperity comes at a price, and those in the town all abide by the same unspoken rules; every few years, children disappear and are replaced. Most times, these replacements are weak and strange, and die quickly. Those that remain are singled out because of their otherness, and are the types of changelings that attract mobs, puritanical anger, and are burned.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Malcolm has The Fair Folk's traditional sensitivity to iron, particularly "blood iron." Fortunately for his one-man Masquerade, his peers assume his illness and fainting are because he just can't stand the sight of blood.