John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, which rings at night with calls from the dead.

Imogene is young, beautiful . . . and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945.

Francis was human once, but now he’s an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing.

Nolan knows but can never tell what really happened in the summer of ’77, when his younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds.