Welcome to Shady Hills, Florida, where death is the beginning and pain is the only true Art… Harold Stoe was a proud Marine until an insurgent's bullet relegated him to a wheelchair. Now the only things he's proud of are quitting alcohol and raising his sixteen-year-old son, Dale. But there is an infernal rhythm, beating like a diseased heart from the hollow behind his home. An aberration known as The Architect has finished his masterpiece: A god which slumbers beneath the hollow, hell-bent on changing the world into its own image. As the body count rises and the neighborhood residents change into mindless, shambling horrors, Harold and his former lover, Mary, begin their harrowing journey into the world within the hollow. If they fail, the hollow will expand to infinity. Every living being will be stripped of flesh and muscle, their nerves wrapped tightly around ribcages, so The Architect can play his sick music through them loud enough to swallow what gives them life: The last vestiges of a dying star.