New Castle, Pennsylvania, during the tail end of the Great Depression.

Robert Brennan has never completely forgotten those days, even though he has tried to forget them. But when the nursing home he lives in receives a patient he remembers from those dark days, it takes his mind back to a period marked by terrible, blood-soaked violence...the very kind marked by the twisted perversity of the stories he used to write for the weird-menace pulps...and the kind marked by the real-life fiend that stalked the hobo jungles in search of fresh blood!