An unfortunate private eye washes up in a town off the map. Palace Porad is locked in a bygone era of heavy industry. Arriving to investigate the disappearance of a company father, Samuel Dickinson finds himself drawn into and under a self-contained world of hellish upswellings and mysterious human archives - souls that are books and books that are souls. He writes to his own Scheherazade, as slowly he sinks, spied upon by crows and coming to grips with the idea of a truly mechanical universe. There are stories and there are living stories. And there are the dead.