Search Worlds Without End

Nebula- and World Fantasy-nominated Novella

Harrison is the Monster Detective, a storybook hero. Now he's in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time not sleeping. Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. And for some reason, Martin never takes off his sunglasses.

Unsurprisingly, no one believes their horrific tales until they are sought out by psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer. What happens when these questionably-sane outcasts join a support group? Together they must discover which monsters they face are within, and which are lurking in plain sight.

One of Lovecraft's longest works, this novella was turned into a graphic novel by British artist I. N. J. Culbard in 2010 (more on his work later). At the Mountains of Madness owes much of its creeping melancholy to not only Lovecraft's fascination with polar exploration, but also to the legacy of polar exploration in fiction, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Told in the first-person by Miskatonic geologist Dr. William Dyer, At the Mountains of Madness details a scientific expedition to Antarctica that unearths the ancient and ruined city of the Elder Things of the Necronomicon.

This Novel was originally serialized in 1936 February, March and April issues of Astounding Stories. It has been anthologized many times, including the anthology Foundations of Fear: An Exploration of Horror, edited by David G. Hartwell, and has also been included in a myriad of collections, including the collections Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror and The The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories.

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft is available free on the Internet.

From award winning author Daryl Gregory, a thrilling and colorful Lovecraftian adventure of a teenage boy searching for his mother, and the macabre creatures he encounters.

Harrison Harrison--H2 to his mom--is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school. On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea.

Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources--and an unusual host of allies--to defeat the danger and find his mother.

Padlocked doors. Strange light fixtures. Mutant cockroaches.

There are some odd things about Nate's new apartment.

Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn't perfect, it's livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and th eodd little mysteries don't nag at him too much.

At least not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela's apartment. And Tim's, And Veek's.

Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends.

Or the end of everything...

Originally written for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, H. P. Lovecraft's astonishing tales blend elements of horror, science fiction, and cosmic terror that are as powerful today as they were when they were first published. This tome brings together all of Lovecraft's harrowing stories, including the complete Cthulhu Mythos cycle, just the way they were first released. It will introduce a whole new generation of readers to Lovecraft's fiction, as well as attract those fans who want all his work in a single, definitive volume.

Table of Contents:

• Map of Arkham, circa 1930 - (1970) - interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
• Night-Gaunts - [Fungi from Yuggoth] - (1930) - poem
• Dagon - (1919) - short story
• The Statement of Randolph Carter - [Randolph Carter] - (1920) - short story
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath - [Dream Cycle] - (1920) - short story
• The Cats of Ulthar - [Dream Cycle] - (1920) - short story
• The Nameless City - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1921) - short story
• Herbert West--Reanimator - [Herbert West: Reanimator Universe] - (1922) - novelette
• The Music of Erich Zann - [Erich Zann] - (1922) - short story
• The Lurking Fear - (1928) - novelette
• The Hound - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1924) - short story
• The Rats in the Walls - (1924) - novelette
• Under the Pyramids - (1924) - novelette
• The Unnamable - [Randolph Carter] - (1925) - short story
• In the Vault - (1925) - short story
• The Outsider - [Dream Cycle] - (1926) - short story
• The Horror at Red Hook - (1927) - novelette
• The Colour Out of Space - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1927) - novelette
• Pickman's Model - (1927) - short story
• The Call of Cthulhu - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1928) - novelette
• Cool Air - (1928) - short story
• The Shunned House - (1928) - novelette
• The Silver Key - [Randolph Carter] - (1929) - short story
• The Dunwich Horror - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1929) - novelette
• The Whisperer in Darkness - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1931) - novella
• The Strange High House in the Mist - [Dream Cycle] - (1931) - short story
• The Dreams in the Witch-House - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1933) - novelette
• From Beyond - [Dream Cycle] - (1934) - short story by
• Through the Gates of the Silver Key - [Randolph Carter] - (1934) - novelette
• At the Mountains of Madness - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1936) - novel
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1936) - novelette
• The Shadow Out of Time - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1936) - novella
• The Haunter of the Dark - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1936) - novelette
• The Thing on the Doorstep - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1937) - novelette
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - [Dream Cycle] - (1943) - novel
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath - [Randolph Carter] - (1943) - novella
• To a Dreamer - (1921) - poem
• Afterword A Gentleman of Providence - essay by Stephen Jones
• Primary Collaborations and Revisions - essay by uncredited

A definitive collection of stories from the unrivaled master of twentieth-century horror in a Penguin Classics Deluxe edition with cover art by Travis Louie.

"I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." -Stephen King

Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisioning mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's preeminent interpreter, presents a selection of the master's fiction, from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as "The Outsider" to the overpowering cosmic terror of "The Call of Cthulhu." More than just a collection of terrifying tales, this volume reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a canonical- and visionary-American writer.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1999) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• Suggestions for Further Reading - (1999) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• A Note on the Text - (1999) - essay by S. T. Joshi
• Dagon - (1919)
• The Statement of Randolph Carter - (1920)
• Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family - (1987) - (variant of The White Ape 1920)
• Celephaïs - (1922)
• Nyarlathotep - (1920)
• The Picture in the House - (1919)
• The Outsider - (1926)
• Herbert West--Reanimator - (1922)
• The Hound - (1924)
• The Rats in the Walls - (1924)
• The Festival - (1925)
• He - (1926)
• Cool Air - (1928)
• The Call of Cthulhu - (1928)
• The Colour Out of Space - (1927)
• The Whisperer in Darkness - (1931)
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth - (1936)
• The Haunter of the Dark - (1936)
• Explanatory Notes - (1999) - essay by S. T. Joshi

Bob Howard may be humanity's last hope.

Start praying...

For outstanding heroism in the field (despite himself), computational demonologist Bob Howard is on the fast-track for promotion to management within The Laundry, the super-secret British government agency tasked with defending the realm from occult threats. Assigned to "External Assets," Bob discovers the company-unofficially-employs freelance agents to deal with sensitive situations that may embarrass Queen and Country.

So when Ray Schiller-an American televangelist with the uncanny ability to miraculously heal the ill-becomes uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister, External Assets dispatches the brilliant, beautiful, and entirely unpredictable Persephone Hazard to infiltrate the Golden Promise Ministry and discover why the preacher is so interested in British politics. And it's Bob's job to make sure Persephone doesn't cause an international incident.

But it's a supernatural incident that Bob needs to worry about-a global threat even The Laundry may be unable to clean up...

Computational demonologist Bob Howard is taking a much-needed break from the field to catch up on his filing in The Laundry's archives when a top secret dossier known as The Fuller Memorandum vanishes - along with his boss, who the agency's executives believe stole the file.

Determined to discover exactly what the memorandum contained (and perhaps clear his boss), Bob runs afoul of Russian agents, ancient demons, and the apostles of a hideous faith, who have plans to raise a very unpleasant undead entity known as the Eater of Souls.

Now Bob must use all of his skills to learn the secret of the Fuller Memorandum in order to save the world - and avoid becoming an item on the Eater of Souls' dinner menu...

No more than a dark pencil line on a blank page. A horizon line, maybe. But also a slot for blackness to pour through...

A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn't survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a "geographic cure," a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else.

"Edgar, does anything make you happy?"

"I used to sketch."

"Take it up again. You need hedges... hedges against the night."

Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth's past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating. The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural -- Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.

Bob Howard - a T-shirt wearing computer geek and field agent for the super-secret British government agency The Laundry - must save the world from eldritch horrors, codenamed Jennifer Morgue, in this fast-paced spy thriller. Bob's current mission is to stop the evil Ellis Billington from achieving world domination, but he must overcome obstacles including the Gravedust device, which permits communication with the dead; destiny-entanglement protocol; banishment weapons; and Ramona Random, a lethal but beautiful agent for the U.S. counterpart to The Laundry. Billington plans to raise the eldritch horror Jennifer Morgue from the vasty deeps, and communicate with a dead warrior for the purpose of ruling the world.

Blending physics and applied mathematics with the practice of summoning and demonology, this spy-meets-horror novel will keep sci-fi fans on the edge of their seats.

This volume also includes a bonus story, "Pimpf," featuring The Laundry agent Bob Howard in the world of virtual gaming, as well as an afterword entitled "The Golden Age of Spying."

Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.

In the title piece, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, completes his theorem on 'Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning'. Turing's work paves the way for esoteric mathematical computations that, when carried out, have side effects that leak through a channel underlying the structure of the Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse are 'listeners' who can sometimes be coerced into opening gates.

In 1945, Nazi Germany's Ahnenerbe-SS, in an attempt to escape the Allied onslaught, performs just such a summoning on the souls of more than six million. A gate opens to an alternate universe through which the SS move people and material - to live to fight another day. But their summoning brings forth more than the SS have bargained for - an evil, patiently waiting all this time while learning the ways of humans, now poises to lunch on Earth. Secret intelligence agencies, esoteric theorems, Lovecraftian horrors, Middle East terrorist connections, a damsel in distress, and a final battle on the surface of a dying planet round out this story.

Includes the Hugo-award-winning novella "The Concrete Jungle", which can be read for free here.

As a newly appointed junior manager within the Laundry-the clandestine organization responsible for protecting Britain against supernatural threats-Bob Howard is expected to show some initiative to help the agency battle the forces of darkness. But shining a light on things best left in the shadows is the last thing Bob wants to do-especially when those shadows hide an occult parasite spreading a deadly virus.

Traders employed by a merchant bank in London are showing signs of infection-an array of unusual symptoms such as superstrength and -speed, an uncanny talent for mind control, an extreme allergic reaction to sunlight, and an unquenchable thirst for blood. While his department is tangled up in bureaucratic red tape (and Buffy reruns), debating how to stop the rash of vampirism, Bob digs deeper into the bank's history-only to uncover a bloodcurdling conspiracy between men and monsters...

The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.

Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George--publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide--and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite--heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus's ancestors--they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.

At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn--led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb--which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his--and the whole Turner clan's--destruction.

A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism--the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER...

Dr Mo O'Brien is an intelligence agent at the top secret government agency known as 'the Laundry'. When occult powers threaten the realm, they'll be there to clean up the mess and deal with the witnesses.

But the Laundry is recovering from a devastating attack and when average citizens all over the country start to develop supernatural powers, the police are called in to help. Mo is appointed as official police liaison, but in between dealing with police bureaucracy, superpowered members of the public and disgruntled politicians, Mo discovers to her horror that she can no longer rely on her marriage, nor on the weapon that has been at her side for eight years of undercover work, the possessed violin known as 'Lecter'.

If this wasn't bad enough, a mysterious figure known as Dr Freudstein is committing heists and sending increasingly threatening messages to the police. Who is Freudstein and what is he planning?

In the wake of a summer storm, terror descends...

David Drayton, his son Billy, and their neighbor Brent Norton join dozens of others and head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies following a freak storm. Once there, they become trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town. As the confinement takes its toll on their nerves, a religious zealot, Mrs. Carmody, begins to play on their fears to convince them that this is God's vengeance for their sins. She insists a sacrifice must be made and two groups--those for and those against--are aligned.

Clearly, staying in the store may prove fatal, and the Draytons, along with store employee Ollie Weeks, Amanda Dumfries, Irene Reppler, and Dan Miller, attempt to make their escape. But what's out there may be worse than what they left behind.

The first collection of stories Stephen King has published since Nightmares & Dreamscapes nine years ago, Everything's Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker, and "Riding the Bullet," King's original e-book, which attracted over half a million online readers and became the most famous short story of the decade.

"Riding the Bullet," published here on paper for the first time, is the story of Alan Parker, who's hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In "Lunch at the Gotham Café," a sparring couple's contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maître d' gets out of sorts. "1408," the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards" or "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn't kill him, he won't be writing about ghosts anymore. And in "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French," terror is déjà vu at 16,000 feet.

Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, from quitting smoking to yard sales, Stephen King is at the top of his form in the fourteen dark tales assembled in Everything's Eventual. Intense, eerie, and instantly com-pelling, they announce the stunningly fertile imagination of perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time.

Table of Contents:

• "Autopsy Room Four"
• "The Man in the Black Suit"
• "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away"
• "The Death of Jack Hamilton"
• "In the Deathroom"
• "The Little Sisters of Eluria"
• "Everything's Eventual"
• "L. T.'s Theory of Pets"
• "The Road Virus Heads North"
• "Lunch at the Gotham Café"
• "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French"
• "1408"
• "Riding the Bullet"
• "Luckey Quarter

Short story originally published in Dagon #16, 1987. Full title of the story is: I, Cthulhu, or, What's A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W)?

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

From the acclaimed author of The Troop--which Stephen King raved "scared the hell out of me and I couldn't put it down.... old-school horror at its best"--comes this utterly terrifying novel where The Abyss meets The Shining.

A strange plague called the 'Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget--small things at first, like where they left their keys, then the not-so-small things, like how to drive or the letters of the alphabet. Their bodies forget how to function involuntarily. There is no cure.

But now, far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, deep in the Mariana Trench, a heretofore-unknown substance hailed as "ambrosia"--a universal healer, from initial reports--has been discovered. It may just be the key to eradicating the 'Gets.

In order to study this phenomenon, a special research lab, the Trieste, has been built eight miles under the sea's surface. But when the station goes incommunicado, a brave few descend through the lightless fathoms in hopes of unraveling the mysteries lurking at those crushing depths...and perhaps to encounter an evil blacker than anything one could possibly imagine.

Set in the rural wilderness of western Massachusetts, "The Dunwich Horror" follows one Wilbur Whateley, the bastard offspring of a family devoted to worshipping to "Great Old Ones" and to studying the Necronomicon, Lovecraft's fictional grimoire full of forsaken lore and magic. Whateley is ultimately defeated by Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan, two representatives of Lovecraft's many scholarly protagonists. "The Dunwich Horror" is notable not only for its use of anachronistic Yankee dialects, but also its numerous references to the fictional Miskatonic University and the superstition surrounding whip-poor-wills.

This short story originally appeared in Weird Tales in 1929. It has been anthologized many times, including the anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Phyllis Fraser and Herbert A. Wise, and has also been included in a myriad of collections, including the collections Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft and The Dunwich Horror and Others.

The Dunwich Horror is the basis for several films of the same name.

The April 1929 issue of Weird Tales containing "The Dunwich Horror" is available free on Internet Archives.

STOP. You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands. NO, don't put it down. It's too late. They're watching you. My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye. The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.

The important thing is this: The drug is called Soy Sauce and it gives users a window into another dimension. John and I never had the chance to say no. You still do. I'm sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind: None of this was my fault.

A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation, but which haunts the Signalman.

In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible -- the Children of the Next Level -- and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming and they will help to usher it in.

A day after the events at the ranch house which disturbed the Signalman so deeply that he and his government sought out help from 'other' sources, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly loses contact with NASA's interplanetary probe New Horizons. Something out beyond the orbit of Pluto has made contact.

And a woman floating outside of time looks to the future and the past for answers to what can save humanity.

From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves...no matter where we live.

"Hypnotic and darkly funny.... Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in."--The Guardian

Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.

Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked "KING CITY" by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can't seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels.

Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton's son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane's started to see her son's father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers. Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it.

Diane's search to reconnect with her son and Jackie's search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: "KING CITY". It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures...if they can ever find it.

John Persons is a private investigator with a distasteful job from an unlikely client. He's been hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid's stepdad, McKinsey. The man in question is abusive, abrasive, and abominable.

He's also a monster, which makes Persons the perfect thing to hunt him. Over the course of his ancient, arcane existence, he's hunted gods and demons, and broken them in his teeth.

As Persons investigates the horrible McKinsey, he realizes that he carries something far darker. He's infected with an alien presence, and he's spreading that monstrosity far and wide. Luckily Persons is no stranger to the occult, being an ancient and magical intelligence himself. The question is whether the private dick can take down the abusive stepdad without releasing the holds on his own horrifying potential.

A rundown apartment in Koreatown. A Los Angeles winter. A strung out, worn out, wrecked and used government agent is scraped up off the pavement, cleaned up, and reluctantly sent out into battle one last time.

Ellison Nicodemo has seen and done terrible things. She thought her only remaining quest was for oblivion. Then the Signalman comes calling. He wants to learn if she can stop the latest apocalypse. Ellison, once a unique and valuable asset, can barely remember why she ever fought the good fight.

Still, you don't say no to the Signalman, and the time has come to face her fears and the nightmare forces that almost destroyed her. Only Ellison can unleash the hound of Tindalos.

Deacon James is a rambling bluesman straight from Georgia, a black man with troubles that he can't escape, and music that won't let him go. On a train to Arkham, he meets trouble -- visions of nightmares, gaping mouths and grasping tendrils, and a madman who calls himself John Persons. According to the stranger, Deacon is carrying a seed in his head, a thing that will destroy the world if he lets it hatch.

The mad ravings chase Deacon to his next gig. His saxophone doesn't call up his audience from their seats, it calls up monstrosities from across dimensions. As Deacon flees, chased by horrors and cultists, he stumbles upon a runaway girl, who is trying to escape her father, and the destiny he has waiting for her. Like Deacon, she carries something deep inside her, something twisted and dangerous. Together, they seek to leave Arkham, only to find the Thousand Young lurking in the woods.

The song in Deacon's head is growing stronger, and soon he won't be able to ignore it any more.