Robert Londrigan leaves to cool off after him and his pregnant wife, Denise, get in an argument. While he out strange things start to happen to him and he wonders if he is hallucinating. When he returns home he finds her in very bad health, she dies at hospital. She had been pregnant with a daughter. While viewing their bodies, Robert is attacked and the body of his daughter is stolen. The doctor patches him up and the police promise to look for his attacker and find out what has become of his daughter's corpse. After he returns home things get weird again. Is he hallucinating or is what he is seeing really there? I would love to get into more detail about his hallucinations but I can't without giving things away.

This is not the first book I have read by this author, but it is by far the most complex and imaginative. This is a unique dark fantasy/horror book that I can compare to nothing I have ever read. You know the famous quote from the movie Shrek 'Ogres are like onions.'? Well this book is like an onion, it has layers. This is a book about grief, crime, true love, mythology, faith, consequence, and I could go on and on. The story dips in and out of our world entering alternate dimensions.

This is not a book you read to pass time. If you decide to read this make sure you can do so with undivided attention. This isn't something you can pick up, then set it down and come back to it later, it's too complex for leisure reading. (Side Note: Don't read it at home alone while your husband and kids are camping either...FREAKY!)

My reaction after finishing this book: At first I just sat in my chair trying to process all that I had read. THAT WAS EFFING AWESOME! I want to run up and down my street shouting praise for this book. I want to buy a copy of for everybody I know and give it to them as a birthday gift and forcefully make them read it (no way in hell am I loaning anybody my copy of it...MINE! MINE! MINE! DON'T TOUCH!).

A five star book that only gets four stars, but more about that later.

Braunbeck tries to do Harlan Ellison and almost gets there, but not quite. I totally disagree with his film criticism so that section of the book was somewhat tedious for me, but I respect his opinion, he's a better writer than I'll ever be. His take on horror fiction pretty much aligns with mine, although I would disagree with some of his literary criticism. He sneaks a couple of short stories in which is nice.

It is also a grim insight to Braunbeck's psyche, and he lays it out there raw for you. You will squirm at the all too true pedophile gang rape "reminiscence." He still bares not only the emotional scars but the physical ones as well, in excruciating detail. And there's a lot more than this. If you want a glimpse of a mind that is on the edge and captures that in fiction, here you are. I think it was Thomas Ligotti who said you had to be insane to write good horror fiction. Gary has spent some time in the Bin, literally.

Here's why it drops a star. This is a print on demand book (first edition?) that has a hard cover slapped on it. No problem so far. However, it is the worst example of reliance on digital methods of proofreading and typesetting, without a human proofreader, I have ever seen, and I've seen some pretty bad e-books. Let me list the type of errors I mean: misspelled words, missing words, reversed words in sentences ("us to" instead of "to us"), words with numbers instead of letters in them, paragraphs that begin and end in the middle of sentences, missing punctuation, stray punctuation marks, incorrect words (them for there). I would estimate that there are at least two errors per page: 520 errors. It reads like an uncorrected handwritten manuscript. It's a disgrace to the modern printed book.

I could forgive some self-published remedial hack, come to think of it no I couldn't, but Braunbeck is a respected multi-published literary horror writer. That he could let his name be associated with this is simply incredible, and that Betancourt & Company would let a book like this be sold with their name on it is a disgrace, seriously.

I turn randomly, no lie, to page 64 and we have at least four errors:

1.  (physically, morally,- psychologically.
2. ...and it is a testament to Harris's ability as an actor that he manages to convey all this not in stops and starts but an a hard, prismlike (sic) beam,...
3. ...inescapable tragedy that manages to be not only affecting but highly paragraph break; new line; indent symbolic without heavy-handedness.

Four errors on one page! If you can't see them, well I feel sorry for you.

If I submitted this in college it wouldn't get three stars, it would get a Fail.

I hate this book, I love it, it's ok, what's he think he's doing?  oh now that's good.  What?  He doesn't know crap.  It's not too bad.  It's really bad, except for that, which is good.

This is the worst Cedar Hill and the worst Braunbeck book I have read so far, and I've been a big cheerleader in the past. There is virtually no plot in the 300+ pages and reams of paper are wasted on backstory that anyone who has read the previous Braunbeck books would already know. On top of that there are just chapters of useless weirdness that don't point anywhere. There isn't even any payoff at the end, just some teasers about what's to come next. What is the next book going to be, the backstory of the previous book's backstory?

I wanted to like this book so much after all the other Cedar Hill books but this one just didn't do it.

If Braunbeck writes another Cedar Hill novel maybe the muse can put him back on track. Otherwise just write out a decent ending and let it go.