It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there. Because in that town there is an orchard with seven most unusual trees. From those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black. Take a bite, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger and more vital. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing --- and become darker. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples. However, something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town. Now it’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father --- and has never told his family what happened there. Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t have --- and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures. Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania. Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver. And now what happened long ago is happening again…and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic.

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking and is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. Soon Shana and her sister are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America. Like Shana, there are other “shepherds” who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead. For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them --- and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them --- the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic.

Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats. She’s in an airport when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. “I’ve got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies,” he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn’t say. What Hannah finds is a horrifying murder that points to the impossible --- someone weaponizing the natural world in a most unnatural way. Discovering who --- and why --- will take her on a terrifying chase from the Arizona deserts to the secret island laboratory of a billionaire inventor/philanthropist. Hannah knows there are a million ways the world can end, but she just might be facing one she could never have predicted --- a new threat both ancient and cutting-edge that could wipe humanity off the earth.