A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A man with catalepsy becomes consumed by the fear that one of his trances will be mistaken for death.
A vain young heir falls for a woman he can barely see and rushes toward marriage before he understands who she is.
A curious traveler visits a private asylum and joins an elegant dinner where every guest seems slightly out of place.
Scheherazade tells one more Sinbad voyage, but the king finds modern science and technology less believable than magic.
A town's most trusted man leads the hunt for a missing neighbor while every clue points to the victim's disgraced nephew.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
In court, a wife's plea for divorce reveals a husband whose worship of ideal beauty has become a fevered obsession.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
Two lovers exchange letters over whether physical desire corrupts love or completes it.
A naval officer recalls an Indian expedition where a prince’s troubling gift binds him to a child trapped by courtly power.
A learned provincial doctor finds a manuscript that seems to settle the mystery of the soul—and lets one doctrine consume his reason and household.
In an asylum, a beautiful woman hides imaginary scars while a doctor explains the guilt behind her delusion.
At a crowded riverside resort, a young man’s absolute devotion collides with a lover whose desires he cannot control or understand.
A novice lawyer asks a jury to see murder not as a mystery of evidence, but as the final consequence of one man’s blind reverence.
An ardent love letter receives a meticulous reply from a man who finds romantic language more dangerous to desire than silence.
A shy novice becomes a theater critic and finds the stage’s poses and speeches steadily replacing his own personality.
A young asylum doctor tests a homemade telepathic device on a violent sleepwalker whose dreams describe worlds far beyond Earth.
Escaping a wartime prison ship, a sailor wakes stranded on a newly risen ocean floor marked by signs of an ancient marine civilization.
A homesick poet follows an eighteenth-century stranger through hidden New York streets to a house erased from modern maps.
A sculptor and a brilliant stranger use drugs to cross the boundaries of sleep until one reaches a place neither can safely revisit.
A famous escape artist accepts a midnight invitation at Giza and wakes bound in a chamber far beneath the pyramids.
A traveling showman arrives with electrical marvels and visions that draw a restless city toward a night of collective terror.
A solitary count faces a family curse as his thirty-second birthday nears and hidden rooms in his ruined château reveal an old revenge.
A scholar links a dead professor's papers, a global cult, and a sailor's account to the same ancient being beneath the Pacific.
