When a couple gets lost on a hike through New Hampshire's White Mountains as a brutal nor' easter blows in, they take shelter in the exposed stone ruins of a crumbling 1800s schoolhouse. In that rotting structure, an old leather-bound textbook titled Ether's Wood: An Elementary Primer has somehow withstood the dueling forces of time and nature-- and it's filled with horrifying short stories spanning a length of time that defies the book's age, all centering on characters purposely and accidentally making contact with a world beyond our own; a nightmare interdimensional waystation from which the centuries-dead students were being taught they' d originated.
ETHER' S WOOD: AN ELEMENTARY PRIMER is a themed collection of fourteen weird sci-horror stories connected by an interweaving narrative, illustrations, and epistolary elements centered around an inhospitable ethereal plane that connects all possible whens and wheres.
A Jury Beneath recounts the ordeal of a man set adrift from his island home to face the judgement of three god-entities for the crimes he's been accused of. Lord of Doors tells the story of a man on mushrooms, confronted by an ever-shifting painting of three fisherman happening across an old tome that grants them access to Ether's Wood. In It's Yours if You Don't Want It, a grieving man from post-apocalyptic New Hampshire seeks out a fabled living sculpture that has long been rumored to know the secret behind killing angels.
The more our hikers read, the more the world outside the schoolhouse changes; the more their relationship shifts from amicable to... something else entirely. The dire reality of their situation becomes clear-- either close the book and attempt returning to their previous lives, or continue reading and discover the harrowing path to Ether's Wood that, once set upon, cannot be undiscovered or untread.