Kiss me quick and squeeze me slow, there’s something amiss in the crumbling seaside resort of Gravestown: Children are vanishing and nobody can understand how.
Gregory Ashe watches them go, sees them hanging from their tatty ‘wanted’ pictures and the wilting bouquets of flowers left by well wishers. Like most thirteen year olds he feels it’s nothing to do with him, he’s far too busy with his face in a book and a head full of dreams.
Then, amongst the seaweed and shingle, a solitary foot is washed up and the violence begins.
Gravestown is infected. People are beginning to lose their minds, changing, becoming other. Blood is spilt, over and over and over…
Through it all the waves roll and, in the dark building on the cliff tops, the lunatics howl by the light of their moon.
Slowly the safe walls of reality are crumbling and it seems nobody can stop it.
Nobody that is except The Magician, a man who takes young Gregory under his wing and shows him how hollow those dreams of his really are, a man with more than just spare decks of cards hidden up his sleeve.
Gregory’s never been in so much danger…