Straub, Peter

Twenty years ago two friends spent a vacation in a remote compound in northern Vermont. One had come to work with a master magician. One had come to protect the other.

A mysterious, supernatural connection manifests itself between seemingly unrelated people and events in different parts of the United States.

Nora Chancel, haunted by nightmares of her stint in Vietnam as a nurse and by the murders of four neighborhood women, is accused of kidnapping and torturing her husband's mistress; but while at the police station for questioning, she is taken hostage by charming madman Dick Dart, a local attorney who is responsible for the killings.

Ned Dunstan follows a premonition to the deathbed of his mother in Edgerton, Illinois, and learns the name of his father, but when he searches for the paternal side of his family, he must confront the visions he experiences every year on his birthday, in which a horrible figure he calls Mr. X. commits heinous crimes.

Four aging men, having accidently killed a young woman in their youth and disposed of her body, learn to their horror that it is impossible to get away with murder.

Novelist Tim Underhill, investigating the suicide of his sister-in-law and the disappearance a week later of her fifteen-year-old son, Mark, follows the path of a pedophilic serial killer which leads him to an empty house that holds echoes of horror.

Contains forty-four classics of fantasy fiction, including selections from Washington Irving, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, H.P. Lovecraft, and others.