Ezra Keene is an artistic sixteen-year-old who wants nothing more than to settle in at his new school and put the tragedy of his brother's death behind him. He awakens one night, reeling from a hazy dream, to find his fingers blackened with pencil lead and a new drawing in his sketchbook-a drawing that depicts the grisly murder of someone he knows. The next morning he is shocked to learn the picture has become a reality. Ezra has reason to believe the father of a classmate, an eccentric German scientist, is somehow involved in the slaying, but he needs something tangible to bring to the police. He sets out to discover the truth, but what he finds instead is that something much more sinister than murder lies at the heart of this mystery. Monsters exist, magic is real, and sometimes there are worse things than death.