The Watcher

Martin Gregory, a junior executive, leads an orderly, conventional like, has an orderly, conventional marriage, and returns home at the usual time one evening to celebrate, in an orderly quiet way, his wife's birthday -- only to commit an atrocity so gruesome and extraordinary that it baffles everyone, including Gregory himself. Gradually, under the influence of a psychiatrist brought in to find some explanation for his behavior, Gregory is drawn into the deepest recesses of his own mind, where a tangled, epic, and deadly conflict is taking place between the ordinary present and a mythic past. It is a dark world of battles and legends and ghostly drama that is as compelling as anything in Tolkien, and far more frightening; a world more real to Gregory than the present, reaching out across unimaginable gulfs of time and memory. As the layers of his personality are peeled back, the reader follows Gregory on an extraordinary search for the truth about his past -- a search that draws him through an intricate web of terror, guilt, and exotic intrigue into a desperate struggle for his own survival, even to the brink of madness.