The kingdom of the vampires is a place within the underworld with the latter being a destination within the afterlife.

While the underworld is the backdrop in all of Penn Fawn’s dark fantasy/horror novels, the kingdom’s blood-sucking residents and this nightmarish story about the men who have to contend with what life is like among them make this particular setting unique.

Enter Gib. The novel’s aging protagonist, a man near the end of his life who doesn’t believe in life after death. Any coming day now and he assumed he would close his eyes for the last time. One day he awoke to discover he was no longer within the confines of the room he remembered going to bed in. Nor did he recognize the bed onto which he’d awoken. Nor could he say why his arms, which he remembered being covered with aged, wrinkled skin, looked taut, like they belonged to a much younger version of himself. Every attempt to find the answer to whatever question that came to mind only led to more, plus even more worry.

Slowly but surely, he began to acknowledge that the life after death prospect might not be an old wives’ tale after all. The more disturbing part of his newfound reality was its continuation is in a world populated by creatures he had an even more difficult time accepting were real.