Normally, when readers seen Brian Lumley's byline on a book--especially one with the amazing jacket art of Bob Eggleton--the names of several colourful fictional characters spring to mind: heroes such as Harry Keogh, the eponymous Necroscope, or perhaps the occult investigator Titus Crow. While these may be the author's best-known heroes; however, they are only two of a large handful, which is why it may come as something of a surprise this time around to discover that the so-called hero of this current trilogy of tales...isn t!

No, for this lesser-known character isn't so much a typical Lumley hero as an innocent bystander who all too often seems to be standing by in the wrong place at the wrong time--a man in collision with various weird horrors who can never state definitely that the things he experiences are real. After all, someone who sees a few too many pink elephants may question almost anything he experiences, right?

So here he is--the neither hero nor anti-hero narrator of these stories--though in The Nonesuch he s at least seen to be brave if not actually heroic. However, when you've done reading this small trilogy, you might like to ask yourself this: pitted against horrors like those in these stories, just how much of a hero would you be?