The perfect nightmare takes reality and shifts it only slightly, so that on the surface it is as if nothing has changed…like a perfect fruit which conceals a crawling maggot. To create the perfect nightmare, to blur the dividing line between what is real, and what might be real is the sign of a craftsman…and the Imp is a master craftsman.
For ten years Robert Hunter has been a world bestselling horror writer. Katherine Norton, the editor of his latest novel, senses that the work holds something more ominous than horror fiction within it, and her nightmaresgive voice to her suspicions.

But are her fears generated from harmless reading, or are they an enactment of terrifyingly sadistic, occult killings? A series of brutal murders across the city are horrifyingly similar to those in the manuscript…but which comes first: the imagining or the experience?