This collection, which gathers one novella and seven stories written over an entire career, leaps across genres and millennia - from small-town America to the depths of space - exploring the dark corners of human nature in a style that recalls the nineteenth-century American masters and the moral complexity of Conrad. Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town and threatens the human race, an Egyptologist's obsessive quest for a tomb that holds the secrets of immortality, or the anguish of a son who keeps his father's beating heart in a jar, Holt conjures up mysterious worlds in which life joins death in a danse macabre of brilliantly inventive language, wicked wit, and spectacular imagination. A stunning debut by one of our most promising writers.