The Painted Man is here. I feel him in the darkness. He says, "If you let me in, I'll make the pain stop." God help me, I want to let him.

After losing his delivery job - the last thing binding him to an empty life - Eddie Luther, veteran and drifter, drives into the snowy woods with a bottle of sleeping pills. But instead of eternal silence, Eddie hears a whisper inside his damaged ear.

Help me.

He follows the call and finds a cryptic journal filled with loneliness and longing, a journal whose words seem written for him alone. Guided by the clues in its pages, he embarks on a journey into a shadowy world beneath the small town of Devil's Fork, Nebraska - a world where girls become cats, televisions whisper prophecies, and only those cast out of society can see and use magic . . .

Or maybe Eddie's sanity is slipping. All he knows for sure is that he's falling in love with someone he's never seen, someone who may be more than human - and who will change everything he thinks he knows about the world and his place in it.