Adrian and Ray Porter have spent their lives battling demons that claw into our world through a thin spot: a hellish and dead place with a black lake at its center, nicknamed "The Gore Point." But as the rifts begin to change and grow for the first time in decades, can they keep the planet from becoming Hell itself?

Adrian and his hotshot brother Ray work for Brigade One, in the walled-off city of Fortune on the outskirts of the Gore Point. Like their father before them, it's the Porters' job to protect citizens from the creatures that emerge from rifts opening inside the dead zone.

Nobody knows what the Gore Point is or where it came from. It cannot be eradicated. It cannot be closed. The Brigades can only offer triage. Demons have always come through ... and the only solution is to slaughter them when they do.

These days, few people die from the spawn that infiltrate Fortune from its rotted middle ... though as children, Ray and Adrian vividly remember watching their father do exactly that. But something has always struck intellectual Adrian as wrong about that day. The thing that killed their father (an enormous red beast called a hellbringer) wasn't supposed to be there. Adrian suspects there's something beneath the simplicity of modern riftfare, but bullheaded, showboating Ray thinks he's crazy.

Until one day, when the rifts suddenly and inexplicably change. It starts to look like Hell has been sandbagging to lull us into complacence ... with help from a saboteur on the inside.