You are about to experience what may be the publishing event of the year. The author - one of the most prolific writers of our time, the creator of such classic New York Times bestsellers as Dragon Tears, Midnight, The Bad Place, Watchers, and Hideaway. The book - an extraordinary first-ever collection of two complete novels, plus a compilation of twelve novelettes and short stories, as only the man universally hailed as a master of imaginative fiction can create them. You are about to travel along the strange highways of human experience: the adventures and terrors and failures and triumphs that we know as we make our way from birth to death, along the routes that we choose for ourselves and along others onto which we are detoured by fate. It is a journey down wrong roads that can lead to unexpectedly and stunningly right destinations ... into subterranean depths where the darkness of the human soul breeds in every conceivable form ... over unfamiliar terrain populated by the denizens of hell. It is a world of unlikely heroes, haunted thieves, fearsome predators, vengeful children, and suspiciously humanlike robots.