In flight from memories of his lost soul-mate Stormy Llewellyn, Odd is one of four guests at a monastery in the High Sierra. It's December. In contrast to the sunbleached desert town of Pico Mundo where Odd was born, icy winds and deep snow besiege the remote abbey. A white dog named Boo befriends Odd. The King of Rock 'n' Roll has followed him there and silently serenades man and dog.
But Elvis isn't the only spooky phenomenon in the place. One of the other guests is John Heineman, world-famous physicist, who years earlier left the secular world to become a monk – but he continues his physics experiments down in the 'corpseless catacombs' of the facility. Heineman had orginally taken to the monastic life because he found the nature of reality, as quantum mechanics reveals it, so very weird, and so are his experiments. Added to this, bodachs are prowling the halls, and Odd knows what that means: an event of terrible violence is pending. He begins to fear that someone intends to kill all the monks in the abbey.
Odd has a knack for finding himself in the path of trouble no matter where he goes – even among the eccentric monks in their sanctuary.
Odd is about to encounter an enemy who eclipses any he has yet encountered.
