The acclaimed author of the World Fantasy Award-winning New York Times Notable novel, The Physiognomy, returns us now to a shadow purgatory of strange dreams and striking moral ambiguities.

Once Cley held a position of respect and fear in Master Drachton Below'scruel autocracy. As physiognomist, Cley practiced a sanctioned, twisted science that condemned men and women to death for the size of their foreheads or thrust of their chins. Yet Cley emerged from the ruins of the Well-Built City a better man, dedicated to healing the physical ills of the simpler agrarian society he has chosen to join. Below's great evil, however, has never abated'and he was not destroyed when his dark social experiment exploded. For his own senseless reasons, he has unleashed a plague of sleep upon Cley's friends and neighbors'a disease that, ironically, has felled the Master as well. And the only antidote lies in a terrible place the former physiognomist fears to enter but knows he must: in the surreal house of a madman's dreams, imagination, and remembrances; in the intricate palace of memories Drachton Below has scrupulously constructed in the stygian depths of his mind. </P>