Ghouls

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For this edition, I’d like to acknowledge the following for their invaluable input which led to this book being published and for essentially beginning my career as a novelist: Amy Stout, Wendy McCurdy, Pesha Finkelstein, Adele Leone (RIP) and Roberta Grossman (RIP). I am unendingly grateful to you all.

E.L.

Dedication:

For (my) Betsey

-hypnagogically

and

f o r e v e r.

— | — | —

PROLOGUE

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 1978

The colonel measured time with cigarettes.

He smoked one every fifteen minutes, so by the accumulation of butts on the step panel, an hour and a half had passed.

An hour and a half?

His mouth opened slowly and he blinked, touched by the faceless reality. It seemed he’d been sitting here in the Jeep for days, waiting for them to come back. Dementatus proximus, he thought. Only an hour and a half. He felt caught on the grapnel of a convulsive, tilting nightmare, where time ticked backward and the world revolved in reverse.

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