These are stories about monsters, stories about the search for other dimensions, shocking and unusual, strange and downright creepy. This is the complete collection of short stories by Nathan Ballingrud, whose work has been compared to both Clive Barker and Raymond Carver. Here, polar explorers find a crevice leading to a world worthy of Lovecraft’s imagination, a bartender finds a phone forgotten by a client at work and thereby turns his life into a real nightmare, a passage to hell opens in an ordinary town, and vampires, the dead and demons hold a fair with the most unpleasant consequences for mere mortals. Here, builders encounter a werewolf, a boy wants to make a contract with a vampire, and any contact with the unknown and terrible leads to the most unexpected consequences. Paradoxical and unpredictable, ominous and stunning in their psychologism - all these are the stories of Nathan Ballingrud, one of the most talented and unusual writers currently working in the horror genre.