Dublin in the 1700s and the years before 1830. A city of expanding size and prosperity in a time of elegance. But there is another, very different panel to this imposing picture: a shadow-web of desperate lives, darkly lived, woven out in a torment-mesh of grim misdeeds. Delve into a nether world of eerie enchantment, where cruelty stalks hand in hand with beauty and sinister blasphemies beget unseen spawn - the world of "Snaggle-thread", in which a roving Dublin merchant unearths an ancient apocalyptic worship, which is transmitted across centuries through a fretwork of shocked commentary, rollicking execution rhymes, a condemned felon's confession, the correspondence of two priests and the reminiscences of a lovely Circassian refugee; the ghost-world of a death-threatened infant which sows the seed of dreadful obsession for a middle- aged, bored doctor from Carlow who scours Dublin's theatres in "Die, the Child"; the twin thralldom of "The Obsession Stone", where a dormitory yarn about a professor of mathematics and the life-like wax models he is fixated to produce serves but as a prelude to the far more ghastly narrative in which obsession, fleshly desire, and the flaying impulse of the trapper are not least among the hidden truths that cloud the reputation of a royally endowed school; culminating in a winter night's tussle between two writers, in "Burnous Realm", which is enacted over the sleep- surrendered mind of a beautiful girl who *may* or *may no*t be alive - but unequivocally can spin-dream horrors.