Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twenty-first century, an elusive force as subtle, powerful, and all-pervading as gravity is draining conscious awareness from the human population of Earth. The entity is cunning, insidious, bent on its virulent plot to eat the faculty of free will from the mind of every man, woman, and child of our world. The little girl who cries tears of blood in the mirror is not an illusion. The seance invokes an unhallowed visitant. The old woman who lives alone in the swamp knows the apocryphal secret of the ancient emptiness whose insatiable hunger can never be assuaged. A mediocre fellow ( Dalton T. Broome ) from a Midwest town becomes infected with a consuming obsession to expose the malevolent agency that has the alarming skill of methodically devouring its victims bit by dehumanizing bit while they remain ignorant of its sinister existence. A two-hundred year old remote seaside inn with a shadowed history is the core from which the deceitful abomination butchers the naive who are its prey. W.I.T.C.H. - a cabalistic occult acronym, the meaning of which Broome is destined to learn the hard way - lurks in the rapidly spreading psychological pandemic. Dalton Broome is a man who feels hopelessly lost. The Roofies are out to get him! The course of his life haunts him with failure upon failure. He hears voices inside his head. His awkwardly small feet and his deformed nose rob him of such luxuries as confidence and self esteem. How does bloodstone relate to broomcorn? Mayans, deep space, human teeth, a deck of cards - how can these widely disparate, yet intricately linked, clues guide an urban misfit to a profound revelation which holds the key to restoring his alienated dignity and rescuing our species from annihilation in the oblivion of the gluttonous craving of the vast, unfathomable, abyssal Void?