The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

As in the stories in the author's acclaimed collection "Punktown", humans living in a huge sprawling colony city on a distant planet. Oasis, share the urban landscape with a culturally diverse set of alien races: Punktown makes L.A. look like Mayberry.

As a joke, Christopher Ruby helps his girlfriend conduct a ritual from Abdul Alhazred's dreaded tome the Necronomicon, but its apparent failure later proves to have been a tragic success. Christopher discovers that many of the alien races in Punktown have their own versions of Alhazred's mythology, one of which tells of a sleeping god who can take the form of a great temple in order to lure sacrifices inside. He realizes that Punktown is in fact a living, organic being, an avatar of this dark god who feeds on our fear and pain.

Thomas wisely leaves the question open as to whether his narrator is sane or a serial killer with a particularly morbid fantasy life. The mythos here serves as a metaphor to explore human suffering, to ask if it's the result of outside manipulation or of our own nature.