He did it–he knows it was him, just like he knows he isn’t crazy. Grimmond Scylent is haunted by the single act of what he did when he was just a little boy.

But try as the now 16-year-old Grimmond may to escape his past, his bloody Boston secret still follows him a decade later with lucid manifestations of nightmares. Tormenting him whether he’s asleep or awake, when Grimmond witnesses one of them take form beneath a bridge and rip his oldest bully limb from limb, he’s warned that he is next. With the help of something he had forced himself to believe was only his insanity, Grimmond escapes from city jail and is ushered to a place he didn’t know existed: Stanchions Hollow in the mountains of New England.

There, Grimmond must struggle to fight against the otherworldly horrors that only they–the Nightmarists–can see. But he doesn’t at first guess why he’s unable to wield the weapons of the Nightmarists-in-training, or why his memories of that unspeakable childhood night in the graveyard are no longer adding up. Grimmond never suspects that his own actions were subject to a greater conspiracy, and that he may have the very thing his nightmares require to release the oldest fear upon the world. By the time Grimmond comes to grips with his eldritch reality and uncovers the truth, it might be too late–for him, Stanchions Hollow, and the rest of humanity.