"I believe that man, with his imagination, with his love of story-telling, with his fear of time and space, of death and dark has created another world of creatures which share the earth with him. Some day they may come out from their concealment and enter upon their heritage." As he read his dead friend's notes, Horton Smith was not quite ready to accept such a bizarre notion — but that was before he hooked a sea monster while fishing in the creek, before the werewolf pack closed in on him in the darkened street, before he was offered a job as—quite literally—the devil's advocate.

Clifford Simak's Out of Their Minds takes its hero and its reader into a nightmare world where goblins and demons hob-nob with Don Quixote — a world which seems whimsical but presents mankind with a real and terrible menace.