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A malevolent force is at large, infecting people's dreams and claiming victims in their sleep. At the edge of it all lurks a man in a stovepipe hat who has plans of nightmare proportions…
Fair warning: a lot of the book will not make sense if you have not read its predecessor, [[The Divinersby Libba Bray|The Diviners]]. I, not having done so, learned this the hard way when I first opened this book up. Also, it is a monster read, being over 600 pages long, so you'll have to persevere. It's worth it.
The eight teenage protagonists are well written and varied. First of them is Evie, a celebrity diviner with the power to see the past when in contact with certain objects. She's a very extroverted party-girl, who often wakes up in her hotel room hungover and leaning over a toilet bowl. There is a significant amount of romantic tension between her and Jericho Jones, a quieter, more philosophical boy who is kept alive by some sort of blue serum. In order to gain publicity, Evie pretends to be engaged to Sam Lloyd, a womanising con-man with the power to render himself and anything he touches invisible to certain people. Supporting Evie are Mabel, a socialist union activist who has the power to heat her hands when she becomes agitated, and Theta, a Broadway musical actress. Theta lives with her best friend Henry, a closet homosexual musician from Missouri, who seeks both his long-lost lover Louis and that his works get published. He has the power to walk in other people's dreams, much like Ling, a half-Chinese, half-Irish cripple who comes off the page as being a lot like Dr Gregory House, seeing only the logical and realistic. The last, but not least, character is Memphis, a black teenage poet with the power to heal the afflicted, and a dream to have his works recognised and published.