With a kid on the way, Boyd needed the job bad. But the idea of going underground at the Hobart Mine, down into the dark labyrinth of tunnels to get at the raw ore, left him with a brooding sense of unease. Maybe it was the fact that his father had died down in the mines or maybe it was something much worse. Digging a new drift down in Level #8, the lowest level of the mine, an immense shaft opens up. Boyd and a few others volunteer to explore it. Some 400 feet down, they find a passage that leads to an immense cavern from prehistory. A petrified world. A prehistoric graveyard. Then a cave-in traps them down there. In the darkness and dank shadows of a fossilized world, they realize they are not alone. Something has woken in the stone. Something ancient and terrible and coldly intelligent. And it is lonely.

On Pine Street, the houses begin to shake. The earth begins to move. The streets crack open and yards split asunder…and rising from subterranean depths far below, a viscid black muck bubbles up and floods the neighborhood. In it are a ravenous army of gigantic worms seeking human flesh. They wash into houses, they come up through the sewers, through plumbing, filling toilets and tubs, seeking human prey. Cut off from the rest of the town, the people of Pine Street must wage a war of survival or they'll never see morning. As bad as the worms are, there's something worse—and far larger—waiting to emerge.

Holly is not herself. She was once a pretty young woman, healthy and strong, completely devoted to her husband Richard. When she became pregnant, he was ecstatic. They would finally have a child to complete their love. But then Holly began to change. She began reading strange, old books and consorting with a mysterious midwife named Mrs. Crouch. Day by day, she becomes less like the woman Richard married, slowly degenerating into something evil and monstrous. The child she carries is not his. In fact, it's not even human. Holly is about to unleash hell into the world.

Christina is young, pretty and very alone. Her relationships seem cursed, each one turning to slow poison. Then one perfectly ordinary day, as an act of kindness, she pulls some weeds from an old derelict grave. Now she's no longer alone. For what has laid down in the cold black earth for decades has attached itself to her. For it, she will be the perfect wife and, God help her, the perfect mother.

When Flynn was sixteen, he was a new kid in a new school. At first, he was ignored. Then he was bullied, tormented, and beaten. Chad Reese offered him a way out. He introduced him to Toddy and Bones. They made Flynn's enemies their own. Before long, he was the most popular kid at school. But there was a price. When he wouldn't pay it, they took something he loved. Now, thirty years later, Flynn is rich and successful. Everything he touches seems to turn into gold. Until he comes back home to discover that the payment for living the good life has been long overdue.

The Long Black Coffin is a '67 GTO. A street-eater and a life-taker. Like an open grave, it's hungry for death. Vic Tamberlyn committed suicide in it. His son Kurt asphyxiated in it. Maybe there's no connection, but Kurt's best friend, Johnny Breede, doesn't believe it. He begins seeing dark connections, convinced that beneath the skin of the Coffin there beats a black, terrible heart. But it's even worse than he can imagine. For the Long Black Coffin has a history. And that history will lead Johnny into a web of murder, insanity, and sexual perversion. He'll learn gruesome family secrets that connect a decade-old series of child abductions to a primordial evil that lives on in the car in the form of a sadistic teenage girl. A girl whose mother was human, but whose father was anything but.

FOLLOWING A MAJOR PANDEMIC, THE COUNTRY IS IN RUINS. WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER IS A HELLZONE KNOWN AS THE DEADLANDS. Here, bioengineered Corpse Worms rain from the blood-streaked sky, reanimating the dead. And here, atomic weapons have created legions of mutants, primeval monsters, and wild chaotic weather patterns. Enter: John Slaughter. Hardcore outlaw biker. Blood member of the Devil's Disciples. A very wanted man. Captured by the army, the feds want him to lead a gang of his old bikers across the Mississippi and into the nuclear wastes of the Deadlands. His objective: Snatch a high-level biologist who is being held at an old NORAD fortress by a paramilitary terrorist group. It will mean a raid into territory swarming with the living dead, mutations, and sects of psychotic survivalists... not to mention the Cannibal Corpse motorcycle club, blood enemies of the Devil’s Disciples. His incentive: his brother is being held at a federal prison back east on charges of sedition. If Slaughter does not bring back the biologist, his brother will be executed. The drawback: An ancient, diabolic evil has claimed the Deadlands and is in league with Cannibal Corpse. And unless Slaughter can stop it, it will pick its teeth with the last bones of the human race.