SCIENCE WRITER EDWARD MACDOWELL HAS NEVER HAD ANY INTEREST IN THE SUPERNATURAL.
As an open-minded skeptic, he assumes that all extraordinary events, no matter how baffling, can be explained rationally, given enough information. When a strange, hallucinatory encounter prompts him to investigate a haunting, he does so convinced the alleged ghost is at most nothing more than a rare optical phenomenon. But what he discovers will shatter that conviction, overturn all his assumptions about reality, and ultimately send him off on a desperate journey to- and beyond- the furthest reaches of our...

In 1976 graduate student Adam Reardon's fiancee Lis and her children vanished. Officially, they died in a tragic house fire. In reality they escaped the fire- and worse- through an impossible portal to another world. The portal closed before Adam could follow: he was nearly killed, and survived only to have his incredible memories of that night dismissed as shock-induced delusion. For half his life Adam has suffered from nightmares and depression; knowing the truth, but gradually coming to accept that nothing can possibly be done about it. Then, twenty years after the fire, extraordinary,...