Dinner at an old tavern, a walk in the woods, beach vacation, an invitation to a party from a long lost friend. In a Terry Lamsley story, any harmless diversion can be a catalyst for waking nightmares. Characters are guided through the veil of normality and into mystery where the real and unreal, the seen and unseen are tied to the past and present, to the physical and mental. These components crash into each other, unleashing the supernatural and the bizarre.

Criteria for survival includes the following:

• Do not make friends with the new neighbors
• Avoid mysterious shapes seen in fields
• Stay away from stones with strange markings
• Do not take a ferry to a strange island or pull off the road to visit a small village

The fates of these ordinary people are determined by outside circumstances and by their own personal histories and attitudes. Sometimes they are preoccupied by vanity and personal desire; sometimes they are simply naive. Philanderers, snobs, the close-minded, the reckless, the overly timid, and the mildly curious all face peril. The natural landscape and weather are often unfriendly, placing many of these stories within the realm of folk horror. Land and sea are complicit in constructing the mental and physical mazes of fright found in “Back in the Dunes,” “The Walls” and “The Stunted House.”

The impetus for ancient dark magic to pierce through the screen of reality often begins with an inability to cope with the minor irritations of daily life. Small inconveniences develop into elaborate tableaux of horror. The awkward uneasiness of socializing or conversation might later mirror the shifting uncertainty of sanity. For Lamsley, a lack of communication between humans—from garbled phone connections to petty rudeness—mirrors the broken connections between this dimension and the next.

In an industrialized technocracy where everything is supposed to be explainable, occult mysteries are often ignored until the spirits, monsters, or curses are already present.

Included stories:

• “Made Ready,” “Blade and Bone” and “Lost Boy Found”: Characters encounter horrific outcomes in strange villages and islands.
• “Someone To Dump On” and “An Evening With Harrod”: Social unease mirrors shifting sanity.
• “Under The Crust”: A man is drawn to a garbage dump where refuse and cast-off appliances act as a breeding ground for a tunneled kingdom of garbage creatures.
• “Suburban Blight”: A peculiar type of flower breeds among the abandoned relics of an unused Olympic sports complex, flourishing amidst urban development.
• “Sick House Hospitality”: Biological nightmare logic found at a hospital/prison.
• “Inheritance,” “The Break” and “Running In The Family”: Tales haunted by the prevalence of childhood trauma.
• “Volunteers”: A social worker, Sylvia, is sent to check on a new client.
• “R. I. P.”: Elderly Conrad engages in a last-ditch effort at rescuing a friend and a town from an ominous blanket of fog.

Many of these tales are centered around Buxton, England. Though set in the 1990s to early 2000s, medieval flashbacks creep through the narrative and settings are evocative of the uncanny weirdness found in 1970s British television. The prose contains passages of dry, dark humor, and while tragedy is often inevitable, the narratives occasionally feature rare instances of bravery.