Bram Stoker Award: Best Novel nominee (2002).
Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer travelled to a parallel
universe called The Territories to save his mother and her Territories
"twinner" from a premature and agonizing death that would have brought
cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles
homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Tamarack,
WI. He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories and was
compelled to leave the police force when an odd, happenstance event
threatened to awaken those memories.
When a series of gruesome
murders occur in western Wisconsin that are reminiscent of those
committed several decades earlier by a real-life madman named Albert
Fish, the killer is dubbed "The Fisherman" and Jack's buddy, the local
chief of police, begs Jack to help his inexperienced force find him.
But is this merely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a
mysterious and malignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What
causes Jack's inexplicable waking dreams, if that is what they are, of
robins' eggs and red feathers? It's almost as if someone is trying to
tell him something.
As that message becomes increasingly impossible to
ignore, Jack is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden
past, where he may find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house
at the end of a deserted track of forest, there to encounter the
obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it.
